Beneath the froth and ferment of daily news, there is often a working through of the relationship between individual freedom and collective humankind. The first response I ever had to the ebb and flow of that sometimes uneasy relationship was the simple adage that one person’s freedom ends where the next begins.Â
I think that may be partly what Saint-ExupĂ©ry is saying in this pithy quotation, taken from the short, working Credo he jotted down at the end of his thoughtful, slim work, Flight to Arras.   Â
Liberty is not the exaltation of the individual against Man.Â
By the same token, liberty is not the exaltation of Man against the individual, which is a key characteristic of totalitarian rĂ©gimes, where the individual is but a dispensable cog in a bigger machine. Vasily Grossman writes particularly trenchantly on this – see our celebration of his magisterial Life and Fate.
Ideally, civilization finds the balance between the individual and humankind, serving both in the same breath, as seen here.Â
Source: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, trans. by Lewis Galantière (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 166
Photo credit: Rob Curran at unsplash
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