| Chapter 4: | Human Dignity |
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general universal notion of dignity. We go back to the two concrete cases of intolerance and repression presented at the beginning of this part: they are specific examples of consciousness of inner dignity, responding to the concrete social reality.
However we may judge the two scholars—heterodox, provocative, stubborn, imprudent—both Zhu Jiyou and Li Zhi cannot but be considered dignified persons, scholars who behaved with dignity. Their conflict with the power or with the majority was a struggle—we would say—for preserving their dignity. Dignity is a common term that can be fitting to them, even if, for instance, their ideas on women’s condition were different from what prevails today in China and abroad, or that their concepts of freedom were different too from the notion accepted by many contemporaries. What is universal in the idea of human dignity and is shared in various and different cultures is the ability to preserve self-respect and ideas, even against the pressures of political power or the majority.
Here we face some questions to further reflect on. Should we ignore this sense of dignity when it withstands hierarchy and established power? If we accept these two concrete cases of Zhu Jiyou and Li Zhi as examples of an idea of dignity—historians may think of many other cases—were the rites sufficient tools to defend and protect it? Or did the defence of dignity implicitly require extreme courage and the risk of life? Zhu Jiyou and Li Zhi are paragons of virtue but also of the extreme difficulty to be virtuous in an intolerant, authoritarian system. Righteousness has a price, but this price should be reasonable. Following Confucius’s warning would require people to be heroes and martyrs in a totalitarian regime, unless one chooses the eremitical life:
The determined scholar and the man of virtue will not seek to live at the expense of injuring their virtue. They will even sacrifice their lives to preserve their virtue complete” (志士仁人，無求生以害仁，有殺身以成仁).26