Final Project Proposal- Honors Colloquium
I’m going to be completely honest here… before this class “dignity” was not something that I thought about. I’ve made it to this point only vaguely aware of the concept and fairly unaffected by it. Did that mean I didn’t have it? No. I was aware of having "something" because other people talked about dignity, so it became something abstract that didn’t have a real, tangible effect on me.
But now that I have been forced to think about it and gather that abstractness into a unified whole, I realize that I wouldn’t have dignity without other people. I would not know the word “dignity” without hearing it or reading about it. We create our reality through language, attaching words to objects and concepts so that we can think about them and share their meaning with other people.
We attached the word “dignity” to this “something” inside of all of us. It is a “something” that we are all aware of at some level. It is an attitude that we connect to other feelings: love, pride, respect, power. We come to know dignity through those feelings, but we also come to know it through their opposites: hate, injustice, disrespect, cruelty. The lists go on.
Now that I have thought about dignity and thought about how it affects me and how I came to be aware of its existence, I realize that the combination of all of those people and feelings that create the overarching concept of “dignity” can be distilled down into relationships and interactions with people. I could not have been aware of dignity without relationships, and dignity cannot be carried on without relating to and interacting with others.
Kateb’s philosophy is that dignity is inherent to us as humans, so when we treat each other like humans, we have dignity. Kant’s Categorical Imperative urges us to treat each other the way we would want to be treated, and to do so consistently. Both of them hold these philosophies as universal. It doesn’t matter who you are or what your position is, if you are human, you have dignity, and should be treated (and of course, treat others) with that attitude in your interpersonal relationships.
We need to spread the word about dignity, starting within relationships. We need to make the concept visible, and make people aware of it, just like I was made aware of it, and now appreciate its effect on people and society.
I propose that we start a mural, each of us adding our personal definitions of dignity, the ways that we act with dignity and treat others with dignity. They could also include people’s promises to act with dignity. These definitions and promises could take any form: a photograph, a painting, song lyrics, a story. Anyone will then be invited to add their own definition, at any time, whenever or however they choose.
I’d like this mural to be somewhere on campus taking up a whole wall, accessible to everyone. The Make-A-Wish Foundation had this idea for a Wish Wall in Massachusetts: http://www.wishwallmural.com/.
I’d really like the project to evolve into something that looks like this:
Juliet’s Wall in Verona, Italy:
St. Brigid’s Well, County Kildare, Ireland:
We can also make this mural electronic, creating a blog or website for it where people can post the same kinds of things. Then we, as the moderators of the wall, can post a physical tribute for those people.
All in all, this project is meant to bring something visible to the concept of dignity. Like dignity itself, the mural will be abstract, involve various and differing definitions, and most of all, involve EVERYONE.
