Autonomy. Beate Roessler

we cannot and do not want to imagine a life lived only in the public sphere. Why would a society where privacy was no longer respected be suffocating and unfree?

      In chapter 8, I discuss more generally the necessary preconditions of individual autonomy, the political and social conditions that are required if one is to be able to live an autonomous life. My focus here is the relation between individual autonomy and the conditions associated with a liberal-democratic social order. I want to show that there is no necessary, direct connection between these liberal-democratic prerequisites and the possibility of an autonomous life. One important question in this context is how to best analyze the dual nature or Janus-faced character of social conditions that are capable of both enabling and structurally impeding autonomy. Here I will therefore also discuss the problems of structural oppression and discrimination as well as the question of whether people with “false consciousness” or “adaptive preferences” can be considered autonomous.

      I said at the outset that in western liberal societies we take it to be self-evident that we can live autonomously. In chapter 9, at the end of our journey through the many tensions of the autonomously lived everyday life and the difficulties of achieving a life well lived, I defend my argument for the idea of autonomy by spelling out the self-understanding of such a notion against those critics who deem neither free will nor personal autonomy – nor moral responsibility – to even be possible. I shall not refute these theories, but I want to show what the price of denying the possibility of autonomy would be. Since throughout this book I take autonomy to be possible at least in principle, it will be useful to conclude with an attempt to defend the reality of autonomy one last time against this fundamental skepticism.

The different topics covered in these chapters each require a different approach. Some must be discussed against the backdrop of recent, at times rather complicated, philosophical debates; this is less the case for other questions, such as how to interpret autonomy in diaries. Writing about the autonomous life means at the same time writing about the possibility of a life well lived. This is my thesis, which I seek to substantiate sometimes explicitly, but for the most part implicitly, in the ensuing chapters. In the process, I define autonomy as a necessary but not sufficient condition of a life well lived. And I shall not begin by outlining a specific theory of autonomy or of the well-lived life that I then apply to everyday situations in order to see whether we are in fact autonomous here. I instead take the opposite path, offering only a general clarification of concepts before looking at different problems and contexts involving autonomy along with the various ways in which autonomy can fail. Along the way, a theory of personal autonomy in fact emerges, but in a sense surreptitiously. I would like to close with a remark on terminology: I speak of a “life well lived” only when it is not merely autonomous but also meaningful and happy.⁹ Philosophical texts tend to speak primarily of the good life – and the pursuit of the good life as a happy life. I opt not to use this terminology because the good life (at least in the literature) can also be one that is not self-determined, and it is important to me to make clear this potential difference between the good life and a life well lived. To complicate the matter a bit further: a life can be meaningful, but not happy, as meaning is more in our own hands than happiness is. And young children, for example, can have a good, happy life that is, however, not self-determined and, because it has not yet been reflected upon, not meaningful (although it certainly is for others). This will all become clear in the course of the chapters that follow.

      I develop this theory, as I have said, little by little – but not with the goal of, having it now in hand, indicating the precise conditions of a life well lived, as in a self-help book. I am rather far more interested in the tension between our understanding of ourselves as autonomous persons and our experience that this autonomy, for a variety of different reasons and in a number of different respects, often fails. And I am also interested in what both – the autonomy and the tension – mean for successfully leading a well-lived life.

Notes

      1  1 I am not referring here, however, to the paradox of autonomy allegedly found in Kant, which argues that the ideal of autonomy itself cannot even be articulated without contradiction. I will return to this below. See Thomas Khurana, “Paradoxes of Autonomy: On the Dialectics of Freedom and Normativity,” Symposium 17(1) (2013): 50‒74. For a critique of this presumed paradox, see also Pauline Kleingeld and Markus Willaschek, “Autonomy without Paradox: Kant, Self-Legislation and the Moral Law,” Philosophers’ Imprint 19(6) (2019): 1‒18.

      2  2 I learned a great deal about Murdoch’s work from A. S. Byatt’s book Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (New York: Vintage, 1994).

      3  3 Iris Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers (New York: Penguin, 2002), 352.

      4  4 Quoted in Cheryl K. Bove, Understanding Iris Murdoch (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 194.

      5  5 Iris Murdoch, A Word Child (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975), 221. Cf. ibid., 126.

      6  6 Jonathan Lear, “The Freudian Sabbath,” in Rachel Zuckert and James Kreines (eds), Hegel on Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 230‒47 (235).

      7  7 Iris Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956), 246f.

      8  8 Samir Frangieh, “The Arab Revolts and the Rise of Personal Autonomy” (interview), Resetdoc, August 20, 2014, http://www.resetdoc.org/story/00000022438

      9  9 For a different view, cf. Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 3. Wolf differentiates between the meaningful, the happy, and the moral life, a distinction to which I will return repeatedly below.

1 What is Autonomy? A Conceptual Approach

      Now it looks as if I am the victim of my own virtuosity. But then what? What would I have done? Become a flautist after all? How will I ever find out? No-one can start at the same point twice over. If an experiment can’t be replicated, it ceases to be an experiment. No-one can experiment with their life. No-one can be blamed for being in the dark.¹

      That fall there had been some discussion of death. Our deaths. Franklin being eighty-three years old and myself seventy-one at the time, we had naturally made plans for our funerals (none) and for the burials (immediate) in a plot already purchased. We had decided against cremation, which was popular with our friends. It was just the actual dying that had been left out or up to chance.²

Autonomy is important to us because we can only take responsibility for our lives and for individual actions when we have determined them – mostly – ourselves, when it is emphatically our own actions that we perform, our own plans that we pursue, our own designs that we strive to implement. If we were manipulated or coerced, then we could not act on the basis of our own reasons. Then it would not be our own values and convictions that form the framework of our actions and intentions. What is more, we could not see ourselves as being responsible for our lives as our own, and we might then feel alienated from ourselves. Before examining all of these aspects more closely, I would first like to ask in a general sense: What is autonomy? The present chapter will briefly (1) situate the concept historically before (2) more precisely clarifying the relationship between autonomy and freedom. Drawing on this, and in light of recent debates around the concept of individual autonomy, I will then explain what “autonomy as a capability” means, thus (3) delineating the framework within which the idea of autonomy as it is discussed in this book can be more precisely located. Finally (4), I will offer a cursory description of the open questions that will have to be answered in the ensuing chapters.

Remarks on the history of the concept

      In