Author:

Keywords:

Citizenship, Meaningfulness, Arts & Humanities, History & Philosophy Of Science, History & Philosophy of Science, Civic meaningfulness, Restorative justice, 2202 History and Philosophy of Specific Fields, Science Studies, 5002 History and philosophy of specific fields, 5003 Philosophy

Abstract:

When we discuss the topic of meaningfulness, with our beloved, with friends, and sometimes with our therapist, we often refer to what makes our personal lives worth living. Meaningfulness surfaces as a quality of each individual existence, an attribute or standard in light of which we value the course of our lives. This paper aims at locating and testing this biographical view regarding meaningfulness in civic practices of volunteering citizens. Three leading ideas will structure our thoughts. The first idea consists of embracing our biographical notion of meaningfulness, and Wolf’s philosophical version of it. The latter offers an important framework for examining the relation between the engagements of volunteering citizens and experiences of meaningfulness. The second idea comes down to this. Meaningfulness in civic volunteering reveals a variety of uses (or ‘paintings’, to phrase it more metaphorically) that do not completely fit with the biographical model. This papers aims at conceiving an alternative framework of meaningfulness which stresses the existential dimension of meanigfulness. The central claim of this part of the paper is that both the biographical and the existential model of meaningfulness are robust and flexible enough to help us uncover different layers (or different ‘paintings’) of meaningfulness in civic engagements and practices: I will call such layers of meaningfulness civic meaningfulness. The third underlying idea of the paper invites us to further elaborate on this notion of civic meaningfulness. Much of the inspiration will be drawn from the intuition (or assumption) that the way people construe their roles and aspirations as citizens affect their receptivity to, and even the nature of their experience of meaningfulness. In a subordinate way, the paper also explores the intuition that some experiences of meaningfulness have the potential to nurture and deepen our understanding of citizenship.