When an Albanian political philosopher This is Yupi Growing up, her grandmother Leman Ypi told her that during her honeymoon in Italy in 1941, as war raged across Europe and the edges of the Pacific, she was “the happiest person in the world.” Decades later, Ipi wondered how Leman, “not an apologist for fascism,” was able to experience joy amid so much destruction—not only at the height of the war, but also years later when her family was persecuted in Albania during the rule of Stalinist Enver Hoxha. “Humiliation“Ipi's latest book explores the question of how her grandmother survived her tumultuous life – an ability that Ipi learns was deeply connected to a sense of dignity. Not long ago, Ipi sent us some thoughts about several books on dignity that played a role in her exploration of this topic. Her remarks have been lightly edited.
Foundations of the metaphysics of morality
Immanuel Kant
This book is one of my favorites for a combination of personal and philosophical reasons. I was raised in Albania by my grandmother, who was born in Thessaloniki (as Thessaloniki was called when it was part of the Ottoman Empire) into an elite 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 she always insisted that although she had lost so much – wealth, status, connections – she had never lost her dignity. Dignity, she would say, has to do with our ability to do the right thing, with the moral dimension of freedom.
Kant's Groundwork helped me explain this intuition. In the book, Kant reflects on the source of moral duties and suggests that what sets humans apart from other species is our ability to critically distance ourselves from our immediate passions and inclinations. We can think about how these things affect others and how they contribute to a purposeful life in which other people are treated not simply as means to an end, but as beings with intrinsic value. It is a view that links dignity to moral agency and explains how people can find the resources to resist even when they endure extreme hardship.
Letters on the aesthetic education of man
Friedrich Schiller
Today, the idea of human dignity underlies many international legal and political documents, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And yet it has a paradoxical quality that I find fascinating. On the one hand, it is absolutely inviolable. On the other hand, it is based on legal and political documents that are designed to protect it – and often fail.
This apparent tension, at once the inviolability of dignity and its fragility, lies at the heart of the thinking of the German poet Friedrich Schiller, whose Letters contrasts the distance between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. This text was written at the end of the eighteenth century, but it has strong resonances with modern times. One reason for this is that he asks what can provide hope in times of conflict, injustice and political disillusionment. Schiller argues that hope can come in the form of the redemptive power of art—its ability to mediate between sentiment and moral imperatives, and a kind of aesthetic education that reflects our moral calling.
Radetzky March
Joseph Roth
When I first read The Radetzky March, published in 1932, I was immediately struck by how Roth reflected the fragility of the entire social world. The book, which follows one Trotta family over three generations, is set in the Habsburg Empire—a world held together by rituals and assumptions that are very different from those that structure the world we live in today.
