On Human Dignity: Fragments of an Exploration

How should we begin to think about human dignity? Rodney Hall, the Australian writer, wrote a fascinating novel called The Island in the Mind. He wrote, at one level, about the postulated southern land in the mind of 17th-century Europeans (an ‘island in the mind’). Maybe the idea of human dignity is an ‘island in the mind’: it is there, we are aware of it, it is present to us in the substratum of our discourse, it gets into our writings, it is in the background of all sorts of debates, and, as in Rodney Hall’s book, it is a terra incognita. There is an island there, a mysterious island indeed, and I propose to try to explore this notion or terrain as if one were exploring an island which beckons for exploration: images of childhood here!