PETER
L.
BERGER
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relate the historical and social-psychological configurations to the
timeless questions about the nature of man, that is, to the enterprise
of philosophical anthropology .
The social scientist, trying to tackle the second question , thus
operates in territory also claimed by the historian and the philoso–
pher. While he cannot become a historian or a philosopher, he must
do his own work in an ongoing dialogue with history and philosophy
if it is not to become very shallow. From the beginning of such an
undertaking, the social scientist is confronted by a great paradox:
in–
dividual autonomy, at its core, is a liberation from social constraints; at the
same time, individual autonomy is a social construction.
In other words,
the
paradox is that freedom is socially determined.
Needless to say, this
paradox raises some very vexing philosophical problems. But let us
describe the paradox in terms relevant to the individual- any ordi–
nary individual: I experience myself as free, and I aspire to the reali–
zation of this freedom in my life . Yet I know that this experience did
not come to me
ex nihilo
(not unless I am a Socrates). Rather, it was
mediated to me by others, who not only told me about it, but who
lived out the experience before my eyes. I
learned
freedom from others;
I was
socialized into
a set of values and a sense of self built on the ex–
perience of freedom. To that extent, whatever may have been mo–
ments of ecstasy and decision (of "leaping") in my own biography ,
my experience of freedom is also dependent on the accident of my
birth. Let it be assumed that, by their nature, all men are capable of
freedom, perhaps even, in the depths of their being,
are
free. But
they differ in their chances of realizing this freedom in actual living,
and this difference once again depends heavily on the accident of
birth. Leave aside the genetic and biological implications of this de–
pendence-or, if you will, of my wisdom in choosing my parents
(my chances of realizing freedom depend to a considerable degree on
my intelligence, my physical stamina, my having escaped or not es–
caped crippling disease, etc.). The social dimensions of the depen–
dence are formidable in themselves . Thus I can realize my freedom
more readily if I live in one country rather than another , belong to
one class rather than another, and so on . Put differently:
There is a
social map offreedom.
An important social-scientific enterprise is filling
out this map with some empirically useful coordinates (so that I know
where my location is, and perhaps also that I may have hints on how
to change it, if that is what I want).
All the figures that have just paraded before us can, at least in
principle, be located on such a social map. Only at certain locations
