"Being and Time" by Martin Heidegger was suggested to me by my tutor as part of my assignment 2 feedback. He also recommended an accompanying book "Heidegger Re-framed" by Barbara Bolt as a key to unlocking this difficult philosophical read. I must say that I struggled with both texts which appeared to write about "Das Sein" Heidegger's German term for those moments that catch us unaware and make us realise the strangeness of the world we live in - the things we accept as normal about our lives when they are in fact anything but. I had to get to grips with other terms, such as, "Das Nichts" meaning that we are heading towards "the nothing" and also the concept of being "thrown" into the world where we are forced into social and ideological situations from birth that have little to do with who we are as individuals.
The Barbara Bolt book also looks at Heidegger's thoughts on making art. That by handling, using, and becoming familiar with the tools to make art we can perceive the inherent message of a piece that utilises praxical rather than conceptual knowledge. In other words, by thinking of a concept before attempting to make an art piece the inner message will be hidden until we pick up the tools and handle the piece of work. Only then will thoughts and ideas occur to us that will help unlock the ideas within that would never have occurred to us just by thought alone. There is a lot of truth in this statement and the first few assignments of this module are based around creative play, which indirectly adhere to these concepts.
The Heidegger text is known to be a very difficult read and in the end I had to enlist the help of other OCA students. My Facebook post asking for help provided a link to a set of youtube videos explaining the work of Heidegger and broke down his ideas into easy to understand chunks. I was then able to go back to my reading and figure out the more complicated texts.
I think the attempt was worthwhile although I will definitely need to go back and re-read the texts again.
Heidegger - youtube short video
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