What We Talk About When We Talk About Dignity
When the Albanian political philosopher Lea Ypi was growing up, her grandmother, Leman Ypi, would tell her that during her honeymoon—which took place in Italy in 1941, when war raged throughout Europe and at the edges of the Pacific—she was “the happiest person alive.” Decades later, Ypi wondered how Leman, “no fascist apologist,” had managed to experience joy amid so much devastation—not just in the midst of war but also years later, when her family was persecuted in Albania during the reign of the Stalinist Enver Hoxha. “Indignity,” Ypi’s latest book, is devoted to the question of how her grandmother weathered her tumultuous life—a capability that, Ypi learns, was deeply tied to a sense of dignity. Not long ago, Ypi sent us some thoughts on a few books about dignity that have played a part in her exploration of the topic. Her remarks have been lightly edited.
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals
by Immanuel Kant
This book is one of my favorites for a combination of personal and philosophical reasons. I was brought up in Albania by my grandmother, who was born in Salonica (as Thessaloniki was known when it was part of the Ottoman Empire) to an élite Ottoman family, but suffered a lot in Communist Albania as a single mother and the wife of a political prisoner. She lived through the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, fascism, Nazism, communism and the post-communist years, and yet always insisted that even though she lost so much—wealth, status, connections—she never lost her dignity. Dignity, she would say, is connected to our capacity to do the right thing, to a moral dimension of freedom.
Kant’s “Groundwork” helped explain this intuition to me. In the book, Kant reflects on the source of moral duties and suggests that what is distinctive about humans, compared with other species, is our capacity to take a critical distance from our immediate passions and inclinations. We can reflect on how these things affect others, and how they contribute to a purposeful life in which other people are not treated as mere means to an end, but as beings with inner worth. It is a view that connects dignity to moral will, and that explains how people can find resources to resist even when enduring extreme hardship.
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
by Friedrich Schiller
Nowadays, the idea of human dignity serves as the core of many international legal and political documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet it has a paradoxical character that I find fascinating. On the one hand, it’s absolutely inviolable. On the other hand, it’s grounded in legal and political documents that are meant to protect it—and often fail miserably.
This apparent tension, both the inviolability of dignity and its fragility, is at the heart of the thinking of the German poet Friedrich Schiller, whose “Letters” confront the distance between the world as it is and the world as it should be. This text was written in the late eighteenth century, but it resonates strongly with the present. One reason for this is that it asks what can give hope at a time of conflict, injustice, and political disillusionment. Schiller contends that hope can come in the form of the redeeming power of art—in art’s capacity to mediate between feelings and moral imperatives, and in a kind of aesthetic education that reflects our moral vocation.
The Radetzky March
by Joseph Roth
When I first read “The Radetzky March,” which was published in 1932, I was immediately struck by the way that Roth captures the fragility of a whole social world. The book, which follows one family, the Trottas, across three generations, takes place in the Habsburg Empire—a world that is held together by rituals and assumptions that are very different from those that structure the world in which we live today.
