Prompt forApril 5th

For the rest of the semester, my prompts will focus on the connections between textual concepts and your experience in the community. As there are so many interesting and relevant ideas and formulations in this reading, I expect that our discussion will be much broader in class, so use this post as an opportunity to articulate your insights and thoughts about the application of Arendt's formulations to your service.

Please be aware that I am pulling quotes and not providing the full context. When using any quotes in relation to your service, or otherwise, you need to look at the context in which the statement is made in the larger reading in order that your interpretation honors the author’s project (at least to the extent that you understand that to be).

Consider how one or more of these statements/ideas are manifested in your service experience Think about the actions of those you work along side with in your organizations--those who run the organizations and/or the other participants, such as those whose interests are recognized/served etc. (For more ideas/questions that you can be asking yourself to aid your reflective process, please refer to the Tips for Text/Service Responses that I have posted under assignments).

Hannah Arendt writes in the chapter "Collective Responsibility": "we are always responsible for the sins of our fathers as we reap the rewards of their misdeeds, either morally or legally, nor can we ascribe their deeds to our own merits."
She continues in the next paragraph, "We can escape this political and strictly collective responsibility only by leaving the community, and since no man can live without belonging to some community, this would simply mean to exchange one community for another and hence one kind of responsibility for another" (150).

At the conclusion of this chapter, she writes that the "vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price that we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellow men, and the faculty of action, which, after all, is the political faculty par excellence, can be actualized only in one of the many and manifold forms of human community" (157-158).

“I tried to show that our decisions about right and wrong will depend upon our choice of company, of those with whom we wish to spend our lives” (145-146).
And here is an extra interpretive challenge-- from, “Thinking and Moral Considerations”—can you use your service experience to help illuminate what Arendt means?

“Human consciousness suggests that difference and otherness . . . are the very conditions for the existence of man’s ego . . . For this ego, the I-am-I, experiences difference in identity precisely when it is not related to the things that appear but only to itself” (184).