Abstract

Our main goal is to describe the structure of engaged acts and compassion and their constitutive interrelation to explicate the key role of engaged and compassionate acts for group constitution. In the first part of the paper, we formulate our guiding idea: the key to understanding compassion lies in understanding engagement and vice versa. We then consider the problematic nature of engaged acts: On the one hand, they do not meet the conditions to be attributed to the plural subject; on the other hand, they cannot be understood without presupposing the plural subject. To understand this, we rely primarily on Helm’s theory of emotions and the classical phenomenological analyses of the constitution of the plural subject, but we also point out the limitations of the latter. In the last two sections, we build on Nussbaum’s theory of compassion to describe the parallelism in the structure of compassion and engagement and to show their constitutive connection. Finally, we examine the specific way in which engaged acts “place burden” and transform a group into an institution.