Dignity: insubmission to destiny; complete refusal to play a social role; reaction contrary to instincts; freedom, even in privation and pain; ability to choose and take responsibility for one’s own acts; resilience to fortune; effort, even if useless; respect by one’s own conscience.
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Personality is demarcated by choices. And, of course, the lack of personality is the inability to choose. I admit it is cozy to have the medium as an architect of reality: this is no less than exempting oneself from any responsibility. However, it is assuming submission, evidencing a myopic and very limited understanding of existence. Raskolnikov is not the corollary of an unjust and oppressive medium, but the portrait of a conscious action and its consequences. It is good to remember Viktor Frankl: the human being is the reaction to circumstances; the final act vetoes any response, but the rest of the piece will always give way to action.
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Determinism is above all mediocre and cowardly. Although it is, to some extent, severely ironized by fate, an understanding of reality that gives way to free will is infinitely superior to summarizing the human being in a puppet. If merit inexorably ends in defeat, and many, many times falters or is overturned in its own field of action, it does not mean that it does not give dignity to the being who excuses himself from justifications that only evidences his impotence. To understand the world as immune to human action and human action as an uncontrollable phenomenon is to summarize the human being in a dog—which can even be true, as long as not taken as universal.
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I want to believe that there is, in free will, the glory coming from the war of known end. Through it, and only through it, it is possible to beat—even temporarily, even if only one battle…—the sinister fortune. Thinking in this way, I cannot do but summarizing the qualitative character of all complex and ambiguous human nature in a single element: the volition.
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