Freedom as Autonomy (original) (raw)
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"Some Tensions Between Autonomy and Self-Governance"
The notions of autonomy and self-governance each capture something crucial about the moral dimensions of agents and actions. They are central to the ways we conceptualize our selves and others. The concept of autonomy is especially crucial to understanding the distinctive status of moral agents. For its part, self-governance has a significant relation to the evaluation of agents as individuals with these characters, leading these lives, and performing these actions. Neither notion fully assimilates or dominates the other. Moreover, there are some important strains between them. There are certain forms of regard that the autonomy of an agent demands that are at odds with what an agent's exercise of self-governance merits. I would like to show that, and offer a diagnosis of why that is the case.
Recent work in philosophy has addressed the issue of personal autonomy as a phenomenon distinct from free will and moral responsibility. I want to add to the discussion. Specifically, I wish to defend the claim that personal autonomy, understood as self-government, is a socio-relational phenomenon. By this I mean that autonomy is a condition of persons constituted, in large part, by the external, social relations people find themselves in (or the absence of certain social relations).' 1 Intuitions about Autonomy Generally speaking, an autonomous person is one who is self-directed.
Three Paradigms of Modern Freedom
European Journal of Political Theory, 2009
Freedom occupies centre stage among the fields that went through various realignments due to 'the critique of the subject' and the keener perception of contingency in 20 th century thought. In this refiguring of freedom, attention has tended so far to focus on the work of individual thinkers such as the later Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty. But there is little awareness that a whole new scheme of thought has taken shape over time, cohering around a shared nexus of premises and responses to particular stakes.
Autonomy as Non Alienation and Autonomy as Sovereignty
An autonomous life – that is, a life which is shaped, to a considerable extent, by the values and choices of the person whose life it is – is, other things being equal, for this reason better than a life that lacks such self-directedness. But we should distinguish between autonomy understood as a harmony between one’s life and one’s deep commitments – which I call non-alienation – and autonomy understood as having the final word on the relevant issue – which I call sovereignty. Both non-alienation and sovereignty are of value, but what is the relation between them? I argue that non-alienation is the more fundamental value, but that sovereignty nevertheless achieves some independence from the value of non-alienation that ultimately grounds it. I also argue that when it comes to politics, it’s sovereignty rather than non-alienation that usually takes center stage. And I show – in a preliminary way – how the distinction between non-alienation and sovereignty and the relations between them is productive in thinking about nudging and about false consciousness.
The Social Dimension of Autonomy
Axel Honneth: Critical Essays (ed. Danielle Petherbridge, Leiden: Brill), 2011
In this old paper (written in 2005 as a graduate student), I try to systematically explore what kind of social recognition and relationships are necessary for exercising autonomy, understood as reasons-responsive self-governance. Drawing on Axel Honneth's work, I then sketch what a Hegelian liberalism might look like.
The Theory and Practice of Autonomy
In both theoretical and applied contexts, the concept of autonomy has assumed increasing importance in recent normative philosophical discussion. Given various problems to be clarified or resolved, the author characterises the concept by first setting out conditions of adequacy. The author then links the notion of autonomy to the identification and critical reflection of an agent upon his or her first-order motivations. It is only when a person identifies with the influences that motivate him or her, assimilates them to himself or herself, that he or she is autonomous. In addition, this process of identification must itself meet certain procedural constraints.
Modern Intellectual History, 2017
If one is looking for the authoritative work on the history of the modern Western concept of "self," the place to go is Jerrold Seigel's The Idea of the Self. It is a wide-ranging, deeply insightful account of Western thinking about the nature of selfhood in Britain, France, and Germany since Descartes, framed by a powerfully argued thesis about the right way to conceptualize it. But that project was driven by what in the retrospect of Seigel's whole body of work can be seen as an even more comprehensive historical program, one both methodological and substantive. One of Seigel's basic historiographical convictions, more implicit than systematically argued, is that individual subjectivity matters for historical explanation. His broader substantive interest is in the meaning of the Western notion of "modernity," above all in its implications and consequences for our contemporary self-understanding. Methodological conviction and substantive interest are tightly interwoven. As Seigel sees it, the process of European modernization was guided by, and in turn further developed, a historically locatable, complex, and internally conflicted version of universal selfhood-the autonomous bourgeois self. His corpus is an extended and evolving exploration of this process and its result, which he finds most clearly documented in European thought and culture from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth. Seigel's position on the importance of the individual for historical explanation might seem old-fashioned but for the fact that it neither precludes nor comes at the expense of social and cultural explanation. Quite the contrary: Seigel's "self" is unavoidably shaped by social forces, since, as The Idea of the Self explicitly argued, one of its basic characteristics is sociality. But by the same token social forces only operate as historical determinants when internalized by individuals to become personal motives. No individual motive, no social action. Or, as Seigel put it in Modernity and Bourgeois Life, a work devoted not to individuals but to the rise of concrete networks such as railroads and postal services which made possible long-distance communication in commerce, politics and culture, Networks extend, amplify, and invigorate human activity, but they are not in themselves the source of the subjective agency that sets this activity in motion; that source lies in terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
'Freedom and Agency' in The Routledge Companion to Historical Theory Ed. Chiel van den Akker, 2021
The Enlightenment bequeaths to humankind a historical consciousness: that humanity has a history that it has created while nature's history is the product of causal processes of which it cannot be aware. This chapter examines the Enlightenment conception of agency, focusing in particular on the paradoxical way in which it conceived its role in human history: that we are subject to human history and yet human agency sets history in motion. Kant's response is to argue that humans are self-causing, that is, rational agents determine themselves on the basis of norms that they impose on themselves and that constitute reasons for their actions. In Hegel's case agents have to be understood as part of a form of life, the concepts they employ and the reasons they give for their actions are developed in a culture. The norms they impose on themselves are fundamentally historical and not the products of reason. Hegel's concern in this regard with history is twofold: firstly, to understand the norms which govern an agent's actions; and secondly, to examine how those norms come to be transformed, and so develop history, through the actions of agents. This chapter explores this theme in Hegel's thought and examines how it comes to be developed in subsequent reflections on history in the 19 th and 20 th century. It concludes by arguing for the relevance of Hegel's and Adorno's conception of second nature and social practice for understanding the agency responsible for the Anthropocene.