Autonomy. Beate Roessler

      Such substantive theories of autonomy are more demanding than procedural theories, requiring many more beliefs, capacities, and social conditions before attributing autonomy to someone.³⁵ This is why they also draw an important distinction between autonomy and agency. Nonautonomous persons, they argue, may be capable of rational action without being autonomous; hence rational agency is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for autonomy.

This conceptual distinction is problematic, however. Are we thus meant to distinguish between autonomous actions and persons on the one hand and simple agency on the other? And then only attribute autonomy to persons who are shaped by the right substantive ideals and at the same time unattached from conventions, as Marina Oshana demands? This would mean that certain social conditions make structurally autonomous agency impossible for certain groups of people, that patriarchal power structures, for example, allow most women only rational agency but not autonomous agency. I find this implausible – not least because there are good arguments for tying the possibility of a meaningful life to that of a self-determined life. Were we to follow Oshana, this would mean that most women lead meaningless lives, which seems to me to be a rather unconvincing outcome.

      In any case, the social conditions under which subjects endeavor to live autonomously exhibit the Janus-faced character of facilitating autonomy on the one hand and limiting or restricting it on the other. The question of autonomous agency concerns political and social structures that both enable and inhibit autonomy, and precisely because of this Janus-faced character, as I will argue below, it makes sense to attribute autonomy to persons in different respects and to different degrees, rather than draw a categorical distinction between rational and autonomous agency. Incidentally, this is one of the intersections I alluded to above: with respect to the possibility of autonomous agency, analytic and continental approaches make very similar arguments. There are clear agreements between the continental and analytic traditions when it comes to the question of what role social contexts – morals and customs, the ethical life that Hegel calls Sittlichkeit – must play in the constitution of individual autonomy and how to understand the relation between subjects’ autonomy and the necessity of their being socially embedded in successful intersubjective relationships.³⁶

Autonomy and rational plans

      At the least, autonomy means that we are able to act on the basis of our own, good, thought-out reasons; that we are able to reflect upon the sources of our desires, beliefs, and plans as well as on the meaning of our projects in general; that we follow our own values and ideals; and that we are involved in relationships of recognition. If we tie Mill’s idea of autonomy as individuality back to the ability to reflect upon one’s own volition, then it is above all rational reflection and independence – authenticity – which are the defining elements of autonomy.³⁷

Now one might also raise an objection against this position: Isn’t this a very strong, even too demanding definition of autonomy? For precisely if we are concerned with the problem of autonomy in everyday life, we have to ask ourselves whether this conception does not demand so much that none of us would actually be able to lead any kind of autonomous life because (maybe) we do not reflect enough on our options or sufficiently consider rational arguments for or against our various projects and relationships, because (maybe) on the whole, we do not lead a completely rational and self-driven life in the sense described above but are too easily influenced and not really independent. Does the concept I have sketched out here imply that an autonomous life must follow a clear, thought-out, authentic plan that makes life clear, manageable, and predictable?³⁸

      This objection, however, is based on a misconception, one that I would like to rebut with the aid of a literary figure. The character at the center of Ian McEwan’s novel Solar is Michael Beard, an aging, short, pudgy, and yet – to his own astonishment – still attractive physicist who in his younger days made a great discovery, called the Beard‒Einstein conflation, for which he received a Nobel prize. Since then, he has lurched through life from one successful project proposal to the next, one honorable committee to another, one marriage to the next, never really sympathetic, never really moral. More or less by chance, he adopts as his own an idea for harnessing solar energy discovered by one of his postdocs, who not so coincidentally has died, and develops a project that ultimately ends in a massive, disastrous failure – a failure that leaves him with no alternative but to go to prison or leave the country. From time to time, however, he reflects on his life:

      And now that he had entered upon the final active stages of his life, he was beginning to understand that, barring accidents, life did not change. He had been deluded. He had always assumed that a time would come in adulthood, a kind of plateau, when he would have learned all the tricks of managing, of simply being. All mail and e-mails answered, all papers in order, books alphabetically on the shelves, clothes and shoes in good repair in the wardrobes, and all his stuff where he could find it, with the past, including its letters and photographs, sorted into boxes and files, the private life settled and serene, accommodation and finances likewise. In all these years this settlement, the calm plateau, had never appeared, and yet he had continued to assume, without reflecting on the matter, that it was just around the next turn, when he would exert himself and reach it, that moment when his life became clear and his mind free, when his grown-up existence could properly begin.³⁹

Beard’s misconception or even self-delusion consists in the fact that he expects at once too much and too little from his idea of a grown-up – autonomous – life. Too much, because he thinks – as in his exaggerated idea of an autonomous life plan – that a self-determined life must look like a tidied wardrobe; or dealing with one’s past, like a well-organized photo album, in which every section of one’s biography has a precise place. But the idea of a “calm plateau” is certainly not a necessary condition of an autonomous adult life. Life plans do not need to be completely rational and intricately constructed in order to be deemed autonomous. Beard expects too much from an autonomous life. He identifies autonomy with rational planning and thinks that his life is not autonomous because it isn’t completely planned out and tidy.

      At the same time, Beard expects too little from a self-determined life. As he sits and waits for his grown-up autonomous life to finally begin, he fails to see or does not wish to see that self-determination also involves certain virtues, such as a critical attitude toward oneself, courage and candor, as well as a certain self-discipline in carrying out personal projects. Waiting for his adult life to eventually begin, trying to ignore the fact that he himself is the one who determines his life, Beard sees himself as a plaything of others. This tendency that we see in Michael Beard, to blame other people, external circumstances, or fate for the fact that one’s own life has not been as successful, happy, or well lived as one expected or as one thought one deserved, can sometimes be interpreted as expressing a lack of autonomy. For autonomy is not just a quality based on one’s reason, as in Kant, nor just a capacity, as in contemporary discourse, but also a virtue and an achievement – because sometimes we have to make an effort in order to be autonomous.

      In defining autonomy, then, we need not imagine a completely rational agent transparent to herself but rather should presume socially situated, imperfect, vulnerable persons who at the same time possess the desire and capacities to lead an autonomous life. The concept need not be ideal, nor must we reduce it to non-ideal everyday circumstances. We can and must take such circumstances into account, but we can also critique them and go beyond them. This understanding of autonomy avoids both the danger of simply accepting the chaos or inevitability of events and commitments and any excessive efforts to exert complete control over one’s life. But what does this mean with respect to the social, cultural, and political conditions in which we endeavor to be autonomous? And, most importantly, is this sort of autonomous life also a good life, a life well lived? Is it meaningful? Must it be happy? All these aspects of the concept of autonomy described here will be discussed in greater detail in the coming chapters, including the question of a life well lived. In the end, I hope it will be clear that it is possible to lead a well-lived autonomous life, even if this does not mean that one’s life is always planned out, tidy, and certain.