My request for future Philosophers

Philosophy - the study for the elite. That’s what it is traditionally at least. But since I grow up in times of freedom and equality seeking, I rather disagree with this notion.

I am always impressed when I read a text that manages to convey a complicated issue in such simple terms that I can understand it as well. I sometimes don’t understand how philosophers can be worshipped who write texts in which one has to search for the sense in their writing. (Maybe there is just no sense and we are just desperately trying to interpret some coherent argument into them?) My old philosophy teacher once said after so many people in class always said “I know what it is, it’s all in my head, but I cannot explain it”, that that what you cannot express in words and explain, you don’t know. Now I know that he was probably referring to the question, if our thought is determined by our language, but I felt when judging us students so harshly, why not the great philosophers as well?

So my request to the great philosophers of the future: Learn to express yourselves!

Discussions in MUWCI

The frequency of discussions and the participation in MUWCI seems to decline. Less and less people come to or are late for college meetings or leave it early (I include coming late and leaving early, because I think it shows some carelessness). We had only one issue based college meeting since the academic year started and in general they become shorter and shorter since anyone who wants to talk needs to make a notice beforehand what leads to college meetings in which only Triveni announcements are made. Less and less people come to or are late for Global Affairs or leave early. Global Affairs – the only time in the schedule where the whole college is supposed to come together to discuss issues concerning the globe, for which we as UWC students apparently care so much.

Discussions in MUWCI are just rather bad. Always the same people talk, always the same problems, never conclusions or solutions.

So should we stop discuss?

No. We mustn’t stop trying. The issues we are discussing in these forums are not issues that we are going to solve in an hour. I think actually this cannot be the purpose of these discussions, since we are often discussing very ambiguous topics and questions to which there is not one single answer. The purpose of these discussions should be to keep us aware of the outside world and its problems and also the issues of our little community in this bubble, because even these we tend to forget between “the three S”: sleep, social life and studying.

Maybe if we had this approach to all our discussions we would leave them less frustrated as we often do now and maybe also more people could be motivated again to show up for them in the first place.

I haven’t lost all my idealism yet and I am not willing to already give up. I know I am hypocritical. I am one of these persons who never speak up in college meetings or student meetings and there are several Global Affair sessions I missed myself. But I think this doesn’t mean that I don’t have the right to criticize this development. I don’t have to find everything right, what I am doing.

More Human than Human

I watched Blade Runner during Winter Break and it was interesting to see how Ridley Scott, the director, apparently imagined in 1982 the future to be in 2019, with flying cars and replicants, who look like humans but are bioengineered creatures. The movie raises several questions that could be discussed in a Philosophy-blog, but there is one I found particularly interesting: What makes humans human? I am not going to attempt to answer this question, because I feel this is beyond me, since we have been trying to answer this question throughout our first year and as far as I am concerned we didn’t come to an absolute answer, but I would like to share what the movie has to say to this questions. The replicants look like adult humans and are not particularly attractive or so, but they all have superior strength, agility and variable intelligence depending on their model of engineering. But their life span is limited and pre-determined and they lack human emotions. The only way to detect them is to test their emotional responses and empathy by asking them questions. However, their lack of emotions is more and more questioned in the course of the story. The escaped replicants start making their own experiences and added to the memory they got implanted by their creators they develop their own memories and emotions towards them. In the final scene the blade runner, whose job it is to kill the replicants one after the other, fights against one of them and is clearly inferior. The replicant, however, is about to die soon, since his life span is coming to an end and he knows that. Surprisingly, the replicant saves his enemy’s life as he faces his own death. This action seems not to be human, but more human than human. In the end the replicant, the non-human, is the better human being than the “real human”. This interpretation makes it even harder to answer the above stated question. I can only recommend to watch this movie!

(Written: 10th Jan 2010)

How to become a better human being: Be Theatrical!

Theatre was used in ancient Greek as a catharsis. The theory was when you watch theatre and you watched all the pain of life, you would live it through the watching and you would purify your soul. Besides, when you could watch people for example killing in the theatre it was not necessary for you to kill someone yourself. Hence, theatre was thought to help the viewer understand more.

When I played theatre myself, I had to say that I probably learned the lesser from performing at the stage. Certainly it was a good experience to overcome the stage-fright and also to go through this with the whole theatre group, but I think I learned so much more about myself from all the rehearsals before. I had the feeling that for playing theatre the process of developing a play, hence the “way”, is more important than the actual performance, “the aim”. That’s just the final ending, the celebration of the previous work, the reward, but it’s meaningless. Of cause to get applause may be important for your ego and it’s always nice to get rewards, but I think one shouldn’t play theatre for the applause. One should do it for oneself; to get to know yourself better. When you try to be someone else, when you develop a character that is not you, when you invent a new body language, a new voice, a new laugher, a new mimic and gesture, that you can do that only by looking at your own body language, voice, laugher, mimic and gesture. Things you never look at but that define you so much. You get to know yourself and you get to know your limits. When I played theatre I played an old, blind women. I am neither old nor blind, but I am a woman. To find out how my body movement changed when I couldn’t see made me understand what it means to me to be able to see. Suddenly I became so careful and insecure. I was hardly willing to trust anyone when I couldn’t see. Paula blind would be someone else. I would be very different. My ability to see defines me more than I would have thought. I think if I hadn’t played this role I would have never thought about these things and there are many roles I didn’t play and hence there are also many things I am still unaware of. I think it is just true that we sometimes need to lose something to start valuing it. We need to get to know the opposite of what we have to understand what we have. We still define us also by the differentiation of the other. Sometimes it seems that only where the other starts we end. (has a lot to do with identity…). I think to act another character might be an even more effective catharsis. When everyone had the chance to be aggressive on stage maybe there would be less people aggressive in real life. And as I said before, for acting the stage is actually not even needed. To make theatre no audience is necessary. And theatre is a unique possibility, because it’s not dangerous. Whenever I wanted to stop being blind, I stopped. No permanent changes. I think everyone should play theatre at least ones in their life.

(Written: 27th Dec 2009)

Wanne-be Global Citizens

MUWCI makes us to “global citizens”. We think big not limited by the boarders of our nations. When we leave MUWCI we will have friends, who are spread all over the world. When I will hear news I will be more attentive for news from abroad than I was previously because I know the news may concern someone I know from school, a friend. Some of us may continue to travel for the rest of their life and may never go back to their home countries when something like this exists for that person in the first place. I have to say I am happy that I am able to call Germany my home country. I am happy that I have this “home-again” feeling when I am wondering around in Hamburg. I am happy that I am able to be homesick. That there is a place that represents my personal history, where I feel rooted. I know there are people in MUWCI who don’t have that, who lived every two years somewhere else. They don’t have this one place where they feel home every time they come back. I think to have this place that I call home gives me security. I feel - worst case - I can always come back here to Hamburg and I will be save. I am sure this depends to a large extent on the fact that I have family here and the situation would for sure be different when my family would move to another city. Nevertheless there will always be these places like my old school or the lake Alster that will represent a very important period of my life and will always remind me of my childhood and youth, which I spent here without any major interruption. I wonder what it means not to have this. Does it make you more free or do you get lost in the world? I think for me it is very dangerous to think of myself as a global citizen, because in the end I am still very much shaped by the German culture I grew up with. I still perceive myself as a German living in India now. I think I actually never felt my culture so much as I do now when I am abroad. We don’t assimilate in the world. We are not all equal. Global citizen is a concept that is just not possible I think. You cannot embody the world’s cultures and if we would, we would be nothing at all in the end. Also this having friends all over the world I think is meaningless in the end. When we leave MUWCI we will sooner or later lose each other. We are too far away. Even if we would have the means, we cannot jet so much through the world to stay in contact with the friends we make in MUWCI. In the end we will live there were we physically, locally are and that may be in Germany, South Africa, Portugal, Israel, China, Panama … Of cause thanks to the technique it’s not necessary to jet through the world to stay in contact. We can all write mails and exchange picture at facebook and skype with each other. But what kind of friendships are these? Electronic. We cannot be there for each other in times of depressions. We cannot hug each other. And we cannot jump around with each other in times of euphoria. We will do these things with people that are physically around us and one can only have so many close friends. We will lose contact and understanding of each other’s life because our lives will all look so different. I think this is way I am so scared of the end of MUWCI. Because the end is the end.

(Written: 26th Dec 20009)

Change the World

When I say I want to change the world and when my roommate Sibu from South Africa says she wants to change the world we probably mean different things. Sibu told me that in her batch at her old school in South Africa she knows of 6 girls that are pregnant out of 200 in her batch. These girls are 16 or 17 years old. During my high school time in Germany I haven’t heard of anyone in my entire school who fell pregnant before graduation. That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but when it happened, no one talked or knew about it. It’s possible that I am mistaken to generalize from this and to say that early pregnancy is not an issue in Germany at all or even just in my city. That there were no pregnancy-cases in the past years at my school may depend on the fact, that it is a school in a relatively rich area of the city and the students who visit this school have a certain social background that may prevent them from early pregnancy, but I think I can still say that early pregnancy is in any case by no means a problem of the same significance as it seems to be in South Africa. Sibu told me that her school has even a good reputation like my school back home has but there are still 6 girls out of 200 in her batch who are pregnant. And there might be more who had abortions. I cannot imagine this. 21.5% of South Africa’s population of the age 15 to 49 years is HIV positive. AIDS is close to Sibu but so far away from me. This is true for more than just the AIDS-issue. Also our awareness of for example poverty is different. Germany is a country that has the time to have “luxury problems” such as the clash of the climate change problems and its car industry. When people go demonstrating they demonstrate for minimum wages and against atomic waste. I am not saying that climate change is an insignificant issue or that it is a waste of time to demonstrate against atomic waste. I think these are good and important reasons for demonstrating, but I do think that when people have the time to go for such issues on the streets it shows that there is no need anymore to fight for ones basic rights for example.

Sibu’s perception of the world’s problems must be so different from mine. That has for sure also an impact on our perception of the UWC movement. People come here from so many different backgrounds. I sometimes can still not believe it.

Religious Reasons - A Response to Elinor

I think the comfort someone gains by believing in god is indeed enough. There is clearly no rational reason for example to believe that you go to a heaven when you die, but it’s a believe that comforts you when you are the one left behind on earth, missing the dead person or being scared to die yourself. I don’t believe in god, but I have other sources of hope. I believe in myself and think that I am able to achieve things, make a change, I think a can make things better. But I am also “young and healthy”; Life is going well for me. I am in a situation where it is easy to believe in oneself without needing an external power to keep being optimistic towards life. I mean, why do so many old people become more and more religious or start being religious at all? Maybe because they cannot see themselves as their source of “energy and hope” anymore, because they have experiences too many disappointments in life. And why not then taking god as your source of hope? I actually think, if your believing does not make you fell better than you should not do it. The feeling of comfort is maybe the only good reason for being religious.