One Definition Of Dignity [Todorov]

From Facing The Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps by Tzvetan Todorov, 2000 [1991], pp. 61-62.
Trans., Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollack.

The important thing is to act out of the strength of one's will, to exert through one's initiative some influence, however minimal, on one's surroundings. [...] No constraint, not even that of social determinism, is ever total: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing," Viktor Frankl declares, "the last of the human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way". But Améry, who eventually came to agree, was also correct in rejecting a purely subjective and internal definition of dignity. As Améry suggests, it is not enough simply to decide to aquire dignity; that decision must give rise to an act that is visible to others (even if they are not actually there to see it). This can be one definition of dignity.

The Exercise of Will

The preservation of dignity requires transforming a situation of constraint into one of freedom; where the constraint is extreme, such a transformation can amount to choosing to do something one is forced to do. Améry arrived at the same conclusion: minimum dignity, the only dignity possible in situations in which one no longer has any choice, means going of one's own accord to the death that others have prepared for you; it is, for example, the suicide of one who awaits execution--the difference between the two is infinitesimal yet sufficient. In This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Borowski tells of a young woman who, having understood the fate in store for her, decides to jump into the truck ferrying new arrivals to the gas chambers.