Peter
L.
Berger
WESTERN INDIVIDUALITY:
LIBERATION AND LONELINESS
On the threshold of the modern age we come upon a soli–
tary figure embarked on a strange journey. It is Don Quixote, riding
across the bleak and barren landscape of Castile (a monotheistic
landscape, evoking other wildernesses in which strange voices spoke
to other solitary men). Literary scholars may go on arguing whether
Don Quixote was the last medieval man or the first modern one; we
are entitled to see him in this double identity and as a prototype of
Western individuality. In his subjective norms and motives, of course,
Quixote represented a medieval world that was fast becoming im–
plausible. But he also foreshadowed all those other solitary figures
who brought about the world of modernity- most of them "knights
of sad countenance,"
conquistadores
of realms in space and mind, ex–
plorers and inventors - and all of them quite mad in the eyes of their
contemporaries (and few lucky enough to have a Sancho Panza trot–
ting alongside). But to say that Quixote is mad is to look at him from
outside the Quixotic universe. Within that universe, of course, his
projects are not mad at all. Rather, they are necessary acts of obedi–
ence to a voice that speaks to him alone (as the
daimon
spoke to Soc–
rates and as conscience spoke to Luther). To himself, Quixote is not
mad (though he may occasionally wonder whether he may be - did
Socrates ever doubt his
daimon,
as Luther did when he asked himself,
"Little monk, who are you, who questions the word of Pope and Em–
peror?"). Yet we know that Quixote is sad. His sadness is the fruit of
his condition: he is terribly free and terribly lonely. And it is precisely
this indivisible conjunction of liberation and loneliness that makes
Quixote a prototype of Western humanity.
In looking at history, it is as misleading to exaggerate as to
minimize the distinctiveness of specific cultures or ages. At its core,
all humanity is one, and the West has produced but a variant of the
universal phenomenon (an extragalactic observer may see this as a
barely noticeable wrinkle). Freedom, as a quality attributable to men
in one place, must be attributable to all men in all places, at least
potentially, if the attribution is made as a statement about human
nature . Loneliness, curiosity and innovativeness are likewise
to
be
found throughout the whole spectrum of human cultures (we may
