Curt Mills 9

What is private and public in the
community? What is the place of
nation in your personal life?

The lines between private and public, especially in the community, are very much blurred.  And when the teachings and role of nation in one's personal life go away is also uncertain.  I believe these questions are highly personal questions.  For me, I am comfortable having a lot of public scrutiny into my life, something I have had to deal with very much at a pretty young age this year a student president here at W&M.  However, I would say that at times this type of scrutiny has been deeply painful and difficult, and I think there should be definite limits into looking into people's lives and violating space.  Privacy, if it is not a right, should be one.  A common decency should be established between all in a community.  I believe that it is vital and essential for trust, which the most important underpinning of community success.  

Someone whose work I think shine a lot of light on these issues is Richard Rorty, a thinker not talked about much in this class but I think important nonetheless.  

Rorty says: "What Heidegger called the hope for authenticity—the hope to be one’s own person rather than merely the creation of one’s education or one’s environment. As Heidegger emphasized, to achieve authenticity in this sense is not necessarily to reject one’s past. It may instead be a matter of reinterpreting that past so as to make it more suitable for one’s own purposes. What matters is to have seen one or more alternatives to the purposes that most people take for granted, and to have chosen among these alternatives--thereby, in some measure, creating yourself. As Harold Bloom has recently reminded us, the point of reading a great many books is to become aware of a great number of alternative purposes, and the point of that is to become an autonomous self."

Here Rorty talks about this issue raised to make another point I think.   The interaction between public and private and coming to peace with what you position is on that is essential  in the process of becoming fully self actualized.