Comics and a Heidegger T-Shirt design
Woe to the philosopher who is captured in comics! But can comics help people get through tough philosophical texts?
How about share this.
OK, you won’t have to wait
Here’s the T-shirt design that I’ve come up with.
The words are most of the final sentence in the English translation of Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology.” (The full sentence reads: “For questioning is the piety of thought.”)
I must admit, it’s not the first philosopher T-shirt I’ve done. As a founding member and former president of both the Immanuel Kant Fan Club and the Vereinigung der Freunde George Hegels (both now sadly defunct), I did T-shirts for them. The Fan Club had non-dues-paying membership internationally. Four, or maybe it was five, members. The Vereinigung T-shirt included a quotation from Ol’ George’s Philosophy of History that raised some eyebrows in Germany in the late 1970s when I was a student there.
This Heidegger design is the first with living technicolor and a comic book style. I’m going to clean it up a bit and print it on a three-quarter sleeved baseball shirt. No fan club for Heidegger, though — too many problems with his biography.
Can comics help?
What challenging philosophical prose sometimes lacks, comic books often have in abundance. I even took the comic-y illustration tactic in the class session we devoted to Heidegger’s essay. I used a “Reality Map” (see below). In large part, the map is an illustration or a collection of illustrations that signify sections of the text. But I think the tool ends up being a great tactic to draw attention to major points in a manner that unifies a class. In a seminar session, a tough work sometimes fails to find a coherence in discussion — people wander around in their confusion or misreadings — but a map can sometimes help provide simple guidance and focus.
There are some comics on philosophical topics.
Comic books focus attentions, too. Each panel moves a narrative with sometimes wacky sensory richness, straining sometimes to cross lines of sense. “BAM!” “WHOOOOSH!” The sounds are almost heard when they’re amplified in graphics using a comic book palette.
I’m toying with the idea of doing a comic book on Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology.” He uses some nice concrete images and illustrations that would lend themselves to comic book treatment — a silver chalice, the Rhein River, a windmill. But I do wonder how I’d render a concept like “challenging forth,” “presencing,” “enframing,” or a Greek concept like physis or poiesis. But such things may reveal themselves, and if I draw the essay with my glosses I’d certainly have a better understanding of it in the end.
I’ve even drafted a first page. Be amazed by the chunky color dithering, which does look better (that is, worse) in a web browser. I tried and failed to simulate the appropriately poor color registration typical of old timey comics, but I need something to strive for anyway.
The back story
Last fall, I assigned Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” a rather dense read for first-year undergraduates but an important work to consider in a course about “our complex relationships with technology.” In the past, I had assigned readings and videos that explicated the essay, but that seemed to me a bit evasive and weak. Better to face the bracing text head on, I thought.
It went well, actually. No one thought the text was easy, of course, but because everyone was warned that the essay was a bear to get through, much less understand entirely, expectations were modest and people were doggedly persistent in their reading. I think that interest was piqued, too, since the essay is a sort of puzzle, occasionally glimmering with clarity but often dimmed because of the philosophical territory. Heidegger’s poetic formulations only occasionally help.
After everyone has gone through the text at least twice, sometimes with fellow students, we met to discuss. I decided it was time to use a trick that my own undergraduate philosophy professor used to poke and prod at difficult texts: the Reality Map. His maps were scrawled on the blackboard, sometimes with colored chalk; I used the seminar room’s whiteboard, and I had three colored markers — all, amazingly, still filled and moist and ready to write. Usually the pens become dried husks or disappear shortly into the semester.
I led by the nose a bit more than I usually do, but in the end the class was successful. I heard from students about the class many times over the semester, and I think it may have been the first time that some students wrestled with a tough philosophical text. Odd, that seemed to me.
Tags: Martin Heidegger, design, comics, comic book, philosophy, study aid, technology
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
A follow-up from the last post on robots: Johnston, Annabelle. “Routine Care.” Real Life, January 31, 2022. https://reallifemag.com/routine-care/. Good article.
Now back on this post — the text: Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1977. If you have access to Hathitrust, the catalogue record provides the online text and, for those of us without a Hathitrust account, a “limited” search option. Alibris has real paper copies. Cheap, too!
And then there’s the philosophy of comics: Meskin, Aaron. “The Philosophy of Comics.” Philosophy Compass 6, no. 12 (2011): 854–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2011.00450.x.
It’s not only T-shirts for Martin. Baby leggings, too! And SOCKS for adults!
Sometimes you get turned into a meme:
