To be a man, precisely, is to be responsible.… It is to feel, when setting one’s stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.… A man is free when he is using a spade. (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
Freedom and responsibility are the bases of man’s essential worth. (Romano Guardini)
Take my yoke upon yourselves, and learn from me… For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11:29–30)
Too long have I lordly kept silence. The last iteration of Lord of Indiscipline boasted of the magnitude of opportunity and multiplicity of objects for writing. Notwithstanding my state of slumber here, that boast was not an entirely empty one. Today marks the beginning of a multi-part essay on responsibility. How many parts, exactly, remains to be seen.
As you might already have gleaned from the trio of epigraphs above, the notion of responsibility is inseparable from a broad host of other notions: freedom; discipline; value; happiness; God. Hence the need for multiple installments to this essay. All of these notions are integral to the identity of Lord of Indiscipline. Which is not to say that Lord of Indiscipline is in any way singular among its kind; on the contrary, these notions are integral—even if they are elided, excommunicated, or exiled—to the identity of any thinking and talking thing. And that is all of us.
By way of introduction to his Brave Companions, David McCullough comments thusly on the nature of history: “What history is chiefly about is life, and while there are indeed great, often unfathomable forces in history before which even the most exceptional of individuals seem insignificant, the wonder is how often events turn on a single personality, or the quality called character.” History is personal: it is the product of persons doing things, making choices, expressing themselves. Yes, there are forces and powers in the natural order beyond the control of these persons—there is im-personality in nature, too, of course. But it is not the impersonal which is creative, or history-making; it is the personal. Logical enough, given that the Creator of history itself is, well, Personal.
Note, however, that McCullough says nothing about the magnitude of importance of these character-inspired events, but only about the frequency with which they occur. Matters of objectively great importance are rare; hence our ability to enumerate them, which in turn begets our ability to remember them. So he must be also including matters of subjectively great importance in order to arrive at that high rate of occurrence. And given what I am about to write, I am inclined to say that he is absolutely and positively correct. Allow me to illustrate. This entire “event” of my writing this essay and you, in turn, reading it, is the result of character. Namely, the character of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
One of the subjects of McCullough’s “Long-Distance Vision,” a study of the “pioneers in a new age of aviation,” Saint-Exupéry is the author of the bestselling and enormously successful children’s novella The Little Prince. Like everyone else, I knew of The Little Prince; but I had no idea whatsoever of the man or the mind behind that beautifully told and lovingly rendered tale. Saint-Exupéry flew as a mail-pilot, crossing both the Sahara and the Andes; as what could be best described as a “competitive” aviator, seeking records in distance and speed; and as a fighter pilot in the Armée de l’air, first in 1940, defending France in 1940 against the onslaught of the Luftwaffe, and then again in 1943, when he flew a P-38 for the Allied effort in the Mediterranean. It was in that latter capacity that the fear of Saint-Exupéry’s friend and fellow-aviator, Anne Lindbergh, was realized. In Anne’s mind, McCullough notes, Saint-Exupéry “was too much the artist to be a proper pilot…he would be killed if he kept flying.” On July 31, 1944, Saint-Exupéry departed on a reconnaissance mission and never returned.
“Too much the artist to be a proper pilot.” Given his dedication to the craft of aviation, Saint-Exupéry would doubtless have taken issue with this judgment of Anne Lindbergh—a false dichotomy, at best, he may have thought. But he would not have denied her sense of his artistry. For an artist he most certainly was—as anyone who has read The Little Prince can readily attest. Like many of his pioneering companions of the age of aviation, Saint-Exupéry was a writer of “exceptional grace and vision,” McCullough describes; nor is it difficult to see why these two capacities existed in such harmony, since “the appeal of aviation as they knew it and the appeal of writing were much akin. There was a corresponding chance for independence and individuality, the exhilaration of risk, the appeal of the inevitable solitude demanded in both lines of work.” The other pilots mentioned in the essay—Charles and Anne Lindbergh, Nevil Shute and John Grierson, Amelia Earhart and Beryl Markham—bear out this assessment, the evidence provided of their writing efforts affirming that exceptionality of authorial grace and vision.
Yet of these, none drew me more readily than Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. And for those of you who have read “Prometheus Shrugged,” the reason will be readily apparent: “Central to all he wrote,” declares McCullough, “was the theme of responsibility.” In support of this declaration, he offers two literary exhibits:
First: “Men have forgotten this truth,” said the fox, “but you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed. You are responsible for your rose…” (The Little Prince)
Second: Moral greatness derives more from a sense of responsibility than from courage or honesty—“To be a man, precisely, is to be responsible.” (Wind, Sand and Stars)
In the matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, I was more interested in finding the basis for belief in responsibility as the sine qua non of meaningful existence. In the matter of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, I am more interested in grasping what makes belief in responsibility as the sine qua non of meaningful existence not only so compelling, but so intuitively compelling, not just to the men of the early twentieth century but also to us, to you and me, right here and right now.
What is responsibility, anyhow? Like so many important words, it means what we think it to mean, what we use it to mean, what we need it to mean, what we want it to mean. Simply—or at least etymologically—considered, it is the capacity to respond. To respond to life, to reality, to the happening of being myself in response to you, to them, to this moment, to this place, and the imposition of duty that those happenings incur upon me. All of which is simply to say that responsibility means exercising agency, not passivity, in response to that duty. Agency necessarily involves choice and choice necessarily presupposes freedom. So, to my mind, responsibility is a consequence of freedom. I only get to be responsible because I am free. Because I am free, I am able, in a meaningful way, to be an agent; hence, because I am free, I can be responsible. If I were not free, I could not be responsible. Because if I were not free, I could not act in such a way that you could—in any meaningful way—call me irresponsible.
Oppenheimer’s and Saint-Exupéry’s philosophies, however, indicate that such is not the only way of looking at responsibility. At the risk of oversimplifying those philosophies, I will say that they appear to view freedom, not as the guarantee but as the fruit of responsibility.
In Oppenheimer’s case, he once stated his life was indescribable without the use of “some word like ‘responsibility’ to characterize it, a word that has to do with choice and action and the tension in which choices can be resolved.” Absent a belief in free human agency, that statement is of course utterly nonsensical. That Oppenheimer believed in free human agency is obvious from his analysis of and response to the ethical, moral, and even spiritual ramifications of the work on the atomic bomb. Yet the word freedom makes only one significant appearance in the entirety of his biography. “I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation…and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces.” Freedom, in this setting, is an end, not a means. It is something we achieve simply by taking responsibility. “For freedom we are set free,” writes St. Paul—which Oppenheimer might well paraphrase as, “By responsibility we are set free for freedom.”
Saint-Exupéry’s view runs along similar lines. In full, the passage of Wind, Sand and Stars from which McCullough takes the “to be a man” line quoted above is inspired:
To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one’s comrades. It is to feel, when setting one’s stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.
There is a tendency to class such men with toreadors and gamblers. People extol their contempt for death. But I would not give a fig for anybody’s contempt for death. If its roots are not sunk deep in an acceptance of responsibility, this contempt for death is the sign either of an impoverished soul or of youthful extravagance.
To illustrate this précis, Saint-Exupéry offers the story of the gardener:
I remembered the death of a man. He was a gardener, and he was speaking on his deathbed: “You know, I used to sweat sometimes when I was digging. My rheumatism would pull at my leg, and I would damn myself for a slave. And now, do you know, I’d like to spade and spade. It’s beautiful work. A man is free when he is using a spade.…”
A man is free when he is using a spade. A man is free when he is assuming responsibility for living and moving and having his being. Not, a man is free therefore he can use a spade—but, a man takes up his spade and sets himself to dig and thusly does he discover his freedom.
Now, lest you think I am simply dead-set on splitting philosophical hairs, I will say that I believe this description of both how we are and how we act has both weight and merit. For the sake of argument, let us say that I have just grown frustrated with the writing of this essay. I get up from my desk and walk outside. My wife is planting her garden and at her side is a shovel. I am obviously free, objectively speaking, to go over, pick up the shovel, and set it into the soil. To distract myself from the frustration that led me outside, I do pick up the shovel and set myself to digging. As I do so, the realization hits me: This is good. This is satisfying. I am happy doing this. I realize my freedom—literally—only when I accept responsibility for my actions.
It is in this sense that I think Saint-Exupéry and Oppenheimer are asserting the primacy of responsibility, plain and simple. It matters little whether we are free if we never act like it and if we never act like it we may never know we have it in the first place. Moreover, it is evidently in this sense that another of Saint-Exupéry’s books, The Wisdom of the Sands, was written. The last and most eloquent of his works, The Wisdom of the Sands (in French, Citadelle) is a desert prince’s narration of man and his aspirations, works, and destiny, and the virtues and values that unite him with the living God.
In one of the most riveting passages, the prince contends with what Oppenheimer called “choice and action and the tension in which choices can be resolved” and offers this stirring meditation: “Man’s estate is a citadel: he may throw down the walls to gain what he calls freedom, but then nothing of him remains save a dismantled fortress, open to the stars. And then begins the anguish of not-being.” This radically individualistic freedom, Saint-Exupéry proceeds to caution, is in fact license. And: “License whittles you down to nothingness, and, as was wont to say my father: Not-being is not freedom.”
If responsibility makes the man, then responsibility must make the way for being and thus for freedom, too. Therefore, in stark contrast with my original viewpoint, freedom is in fact secondary to responsibility, to duty. Does true freedom, then, lie in humble obedience to duty and the forthright acceptance of responsibility? “Take my yoke upon yourselves,” Christ exhorts in the Gospel of Matthew; “for freedom Christ has set us free,” glosses St. Paul. The taking of the yoke, like the taking of the cross, is the first and fundamental step. Is that why throwing down the walls avails us not in our quest for happiness, for freedom, for self-fulfillment? Is that why to be a man, précisément, is to be responsible? We are called into the service of the King. Until we accept that call, we do nothing freely. When we accept it, we do so freely—and are set free.
Such an account, in my view, neither negates nor diminishes individual sovereignty. I and I alone can take that first movement, that first small step, that primary response by which I gain entry into a meaningful existence. Compatible, then, with all that written above are these words of Romano Guardini from Freedom, Grace, Destiny (forthcoming, wouldn’t you know it, from Cluny this summer):
The individual has to create a field of freedom for himself, a task that calls for courage and a readiness to make sacrifices. But for a large number of persons the need to adjust themselves to the community coincides with an inner disinclination towards free habits. Dread of responsibility, an avoidance of understanding and decision, a lethargic refusal to stand on one’s own feet, the whole flight from personal existence…
And with that last sentence, we arrive at the present moment. For Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, free agency went without saying. Hence the primacy of responsibility as the salient feature of manhood, of mankind. For us, free agency is either a myth, a fable exploded by the uninhibited dominance of material forces and social structures, or a highly-placed, scarcely-attainable fruit, forbidden to all but the elite. Hence the futility of responsibility, except as a coping mechanism for those posturing toward manhood.
Although I wrote them myself, I readily admit: These are hard sayings; who can understand them? The difficulty is not that there is no account of things that does not contain all the answers. There is such an account. The difficulty is that its answers are not painlessly understood, nor is their applicability readily grasped or their corresponding questions easily formulated. There is one thing, however, apropos of responsibility and discipline and the good life, that is as clear as crystal. And that is that Sal Paradise was most definitely right: boys and girls—men and women, too—in America are having such a sad time together. When you never act responsible, you never feel free. And when you never feel free, you never get happy. A man is free when he is using a spade…
Credit: Paul Henry, Digging Potatoes (1916–1919), courtesy of Adams Auctioneers.