The virtue of dignity would then be the ability to bear the difficulties of life with poise. Nelson Mandela is often used as an example due to the strength he displayed in adversity. But one could also maintain that dignity is not so much about character and virtues, as rank. But this interpretation of dignity was challenged as early as Roman times by Cicero , who wanted to move the concept away from positions of high rank and hierarchies.
In De Officiis , Cicero makes an eloquent plea for dignity of character — a character free from envy, desire, fear and anger. Virtue, rank and etiquette interpretations of dignity all fall under aspirational dignity. One needs to make an effort to attain them.
Intrinsic dignity, on the other hand, requires no effort on the part of the dignity bearer and it cannot be lost.
The earliest and most famous Western philosopher who argued that dignity is intrinsic to human beings is Immanuel Kant. He argued that dignity is inviolable and cannot be denied even a vicious man. We are all born with dignity and we all die with dignity, if one believes in the Kantian interpretation. Nobody can take it away from us. And so here is the crucial point: it seems unlikely this choice was blind.
But this only means that before there was no such established usage. My present point, then, is that we find these shifts even before , when Kant published his seminal moral work. Some evidence for my suggestion can be gleaned from combing through the dictionaries of the day. Given the range of egalitarian agitation across all elements of mid-eighteenth-century European culture, this is a remarkable definition.
The king is but a man as I am. Or consider this: As early as , Kant himself noted that he was inspired by Rousseau on the question of human worth. To be fair, this debt is nowadays widely appreciated by Kant scholars. But there is also evidence of other pre-Kantian origins of the moralized concept of dignity.
There seems to him to be somewhat of Dignity dignatio in the appellation of Man: so that the last and most efficacious Argument to curb the Arrogance of insulting Men, is usually, I am not a Dog, but a Man as well as your self. It is usually forgotten that Kant had little influence on British thought until at least And what influence he did have both before and after this point was variously circumscribed.
In England, all early discussion of Kant before took place outside the university, in the pages of popular literary journals. And while Kant enjoyed a brief flash of popularity in these journals at the very end of the eighteenth century, what was conveyed in them was greatly simplified, even trivialized.
In this last respect, Kant ended up seeming a radical with dangerous Jacobite leanings. By the close of the century, the English public had become rather suddenly conservative and nationalistic, with a growing suspicion of German Enlightenment thought and culture. His practical philosophy was especially slow to find its way into English.
In particular, the Groundwork , where he made his famous claims about dignity, was not professionally translated into English until , when J. Semple, a Scotsman, offered the first serious edition. OSO version 0. University Press Scholarship Online. Sign in. Not registered? Sign up.
Publications Pages Publications Pages. Recently viewed 0 Save Search. Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content. Find in Worldcat. Go to page:. Your current browser may not support copying via this button.
0コメント