Autonomy, Individuality, and Self-Determination
The quest for autonomy has been a pervasive, though scarcely uncontested, motif in much of twentieth-century moral philosophy. And most of the philosophers who have defended some version of autonomy have acknowledged the affinities between their own inquiries and those of certain Enlightenment thinkers, above all Kant.1 However, as one compares recent work on autonomy to Kant's remarks about it, important differences emerge. Kant had presumed, in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the literal meaning of autonomy: obedience to a self-imposed law. He treated it as a constraint, a rule of moral conduct that is “objective” in the sense that it is what all rational beings would agree ought to be done. A sampling of contemporary studies reveals a shift of attention from the objective content and “constraining” force of the rules chosen by autonomous agents to the character of those agents and the process by which they reach decisions. The autonomous individual has been described recently as having “moral convictions and principles…genuinely his own, rooted in his own character, and not merely inherited,”2 as engaging in a continuing “process of criticism and re-evaluation,”3 or as possessing the “higher order capacity…to choose his or her ends, whatever they are.”4 These remarks suggest that it no longer matters what rules one chooses to follow: the main requirement is that the choices be truly one's own, that one must not have been manipulated, gulled, brainwashed, or conditioned into making them. Given this disparity in what would be considered autonomous agency, one might conclude that contemporary philosophers are in fact writing about issues quite distinct from those that preoccupied Kant.
But, in my view, that would be a mistaken inference. In addition to his rigorous “metaphysical” theory of moral autonomy in the Groundwork, Kant sketched out a different, socially and politically oriented account in his 1784 essay, “What Is Enlightenment?”—one that has close affinities to contemporary conceptions of autonomy. In “What Is Enlightenment?” Kant used the word Mündigkeit (maturity) to characterize a critical, self-determining stance. Kant began the essay by observing that “enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is man's inability to make use of his understanding without the guidance of another.”5 Those who, in Kant's terms, achieve “maturity” by taking responsibility for their own thoughts, decisions, and actions would be good candidates for autonomy in the sense that contemporary philosophers use the word. In short, the filiations between modern autonomy and its Kantian equivalents lead back not only to Kant's formal ethics but also—and even more strikingly—to the Enlightenment project of disarming superstition and tradition, while encouraging the formation of an independent, reflective mentality. Indeed, one of the most influential contemporary defenders of autonomy, Jürgen Habermas, has consciously reappropriated Kant's understanding of maturity, particularly the connection spelled out in “What Is Enlightenment?” between self-guidance and public discussion.
Still, contemporary theories of autonomy cannot be viewed simply as elaborations of Kantian Autonomie or Mündigkeit. Between Kant and the twentieth century, two momentous intellectual events intervened which decisively altered the terms of the debate. First, alongside the rationalist tradition that Kant inherited and in some respects continued, there developed what Charles Taylor has called an “expressivist” movement,6 exemplified in the writings of Goethe, Schiller, Humboldt, Hölderlin, and others. These writers insisted that a truly self-directed life would involve individuality, the noninterchangeable uniqueness of each person ought to pervade and guide all of his or her works and actions. We shall see in detail how individuality, as it were, has been absorbed into the modern notion of autonomy despite the dissimilarity of their respective intellectual origins.
Contemporary ideas about autonomy (especially on the “postmodern” side) have also been shaped by its historicization. In Kant, enlightenment, maturity, and moral autonomy were, to be sure, not entirely ahistorical categories. Kant did hypothesize that his own age might have reached a certain threshold beyond which people would become able to direct their own lives and dispense with blind obedience to authority. But Hegel initiated a transformation that has led to our seeing the autonomous individual as a peculiar kind of historical fiction, one that later became a vehicle of Western cultural imperialism. For , those drawn to the historically mediated concept of autonomy, it is no longer a matter of theorizing from “within” the horizon of autonomy but of explaining why, in rather specific contexts, Europeans were ever misled into imagining that they could direct their own lives, set their own rules, and find a place to stand outside of all power/knowledge complexes. The challenge to defenders of autonomy in our time has therefore sharpened considerably. They cannot assume an audience that will take philosophical concepts on their own terms, as having a nonderivative, independent status. They must try instead to show that the impetus toward autonomy does derive simply from features—and distortions—specific to modern European history.
The ideal of an autonomous, mature, self-directed life, then, has not really been eclipsed. It has instead acquired a multidimensional, “reflected” quality as its exponents have tried to respond and to incorporate aspects of these countermovements into their theories. Liberals, postmodernists, and critical theorists ail end up defending some notion of autonomy; yet those versions differ so profoundly that their affinities often pass unnoticed. I try to make some of those affinities explicit by illuminating their Enlightenment, and especially Kantian, elements and explaining how these became transformed under the pressure of romantic individuality and historicism.
I
Theories of autonomy present variations of a basic pattern. There is first a ruling, law-giving, controlling, or evaluating element (the nomos) situated within the individual (for, if it were outside, autonomy would not even get off the ground). The controlling or evaluating aspect of the self must relate itself to another internal element that, by definition, would vitiate personal autonomy if it were not directed, ruled, or evaluated critically. Finally, one or both of these internal elements must be seen as implicated in a larger transindividual context that may variously promote or thwart the project of being autonomous. Disagreement about the worth of autonomy as well as historical shifts in its definition often hinge on the way these elements are characterized and interlinked.
Enlightenment philosophers did not create the ideal of autonomous agency from scratch. They could draw on both the figure of the Stoic sage and on certain implications of the new natural sciences, especially in their Cartesian form, to arrive at a notion of human self-direction. Indeed, the originality of Enlightenment autonomy only emerges when one contrasts it to the images of self and world that preceded it.
Stoic autonomy, according to one scholar, had “little to do with being controlled by others, and everything to do with the active control one's will asserts over one's own urges and impulses.”7 In other words, it resulted from a successful encounter between a ruling element (will or, more accurately, reason) and an unruly internal factor, such as fear, anger, or grief, defined as beyond the pale of reason and arising spontaneously or naturally. Self-sufficiency, the Stoic precursor of autonomy, meant achieving a distance and detachment from one's impulses or passions, not allowing them to determine one's state of mind and actions.
The external environment of the Stoic sage affected this internal encounter in two ways. First, the sage recognized that other people might try to control or even enslave him and thus at least outwardly negate his autonomy. But the outcome of their endeavor depended solely on his internal decision whether to allow himself to be controlled. If he were indifferent to the external marks of control—for example, pain, humiliation, self-abnegation—he could maintain an inner tranquillity or imperturbability (ataraxia). At least for some Stoic writers, the key to attaining that inner composure lay in a vision of the order of nature. Attuned to the external goodness and necessity of things, the Stoic could overlook the trivial commotions and passions that preoccupied most people.8 Thus the external world as harmonious totality could promote autonomy, counteracting the destabilizing influences of particular events.
Descartes, Locke, Shaftesbury, and other early modern philosophers shared this Stoic sense of a normative order in nature. But, as Taylor has shown, they subtly and gradually altered its significance by conceptualizing nature as a set of mechanical processes rather than as a text to be interpreted.9 Nature could still be considered an artifice of the deity and thus purposive, but only in the sense that the cogs and gears of a machine display their purposes in performing the function for which they were designed. Stoic self-sufficiency would soon slide over into a quite different attitude, one that actually encouraged a person to rearrange the elements of the natural world (and his or her inner life) to make them serve more efficiently the Creator's intentions.10 Self-mastery could yield to mastery of the world by means of scientific knowledge.
This démystification of nature altered the notion of self-mastery that the seventeenth century inherited from antiquity. The element of the self to be subordinated and controlled could no longer simply be encountered as an internal manifestation of chaos or slavery. Although from the point of view of the “ruling” element, these impulses might appear äs nothing but tokens of disorder, they in fact belonged to the totality of a mechanically understood, thoroughly orderly universe. If that universe had purposes, then so, obviously, did passion and desires. Thus reason had less the task of neutralizing, ignoring, or suppressing passions, than of overseeing their correct, efficient operation: “reason rules the passions when it can hold them to their normal instrumental function. The beginning of reason for Descartes was a matter of instrumental control.”11
These transformations in the definitions of the “ruled” element of the soul and the status of nature presaged an even more momentous shift in the definition of the actual self, the “ruling” element that would become the locus of autonomy in Kant. René Descartes's epistemology marked a stage in this shift. What I know of the world are only the representations of it that my mind assembles. But that process of assembling or constructing a picture of reality is influenced, usually for the worse, by “appetites and preceptors,”12 both of which becloud the mind's natural operations by substituting opinion and prejudice for methodical reasoning. Descartes thus implicitly anticipated Kant's definition of enlightenment by challenging individuals to use their own intellects without the guidance of established authorities. The inwardly free self of the Stoic tradition now became an intellectually autonomous self practicing methodical doubt on all received opinion and determined to accept only clear and distinct ideas as true.
Even though John Locke's empiricism would seem to undercut the premise of an autonomous self detached from material processes, he actually developed many of these Cartesian themes in a different idiom. Taylor discovers in Locke's epistemology and psychology an “ideal of independence and self-responsibility” that uncompromisingly rejects all dependence on custom, authority, or the passions.13 Its source is the “punctual self,” that is, a self understood as able to objectify, reflect on, and reform the operations of the mind, but which is itself “extensionless” and no part of the psychological processes of which it takes notice. In Locke more clearly even than in Descartes, intellectual independence and moral responsibility fused with objectification, disengagement, and the potential, at least, for rational control of the inner life.
But Locke and Descartes still reasoned within a theocratic framework. They did not envision the self as legislating its own norms; rather, God as artificer had contrived the human soul to make it a fit instrument for its proper destiny. The Enlightenment would later debate what that destiny is and how exactly humans have been endowed with it (whether through intellect, moral sense, or in some other way). But early modern philosophy did unquestionably predispose succeeding generations to regard autonomy in light of certain Bestimmungen (destinies, vocations, definitions) that would give support and objective validity to the project of living a self-directed life.
II
Contrary to what we might expect, the literature of the Aufklärung (excepting Kant's writings, of course) rarely made autonomy an explicit issue. The notion that human beings should live by standards of moral rectitude that cannot be derived from nature but must be legislated by reason alone simply did not occur to most Aufklärer before Kant.14 They saw no grounds to believe that human dignity would suffer a blow if one did what nature and/or nature's God intended. However, even though most Enlightenment writers rarely invoked autonomy by name as a moral ideal, they often advocated the outlook that Kant called “Mündigkeit”: a zeal to liberate oneself from superstition, discover the truth by one's own efforts, and be guided by one's own light rather than by any authority. In fact, as Kant himself noted, there was a latent tension in the corpus of Enlightenment writings between the many calls to lead a moral, independent life, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rather passive, mechanical, and naturalistic image of human psychology that pervaded many treatises of the day.15
Moses Mendelssohn's 1784 essay “Über die Frage: Was heisst aufklären?” typified the pattern of thought about human agency that had begun to emerge in early modern philosophy.16 Mendelssohn was deeply influenced by Shaftesbury, a self-professed Stoic, and by the rationalist, teleological metaphysics of Christian Wolff, who had attempted to demonstrate by deductive reasoning the essential harmony and order of the universe. Accordingly, he posed the problem of rational inquiry and reflection in terms of wider contexts of nature and human nature.
Enlightenment along with culture and education (Bildung) are aspects of “societal life.” They are efforts to improve our social condition.17 Thus the freedom to investigate, publish, or discuss delicate topics such as religion must finally depend on whether doing so will improve society and its members taken either as human beings tout court or as citizens of a specific state. On the whole, Mendelssohn was inclined to believe that free inquiry benefits society, at least in the long run.18 However, he was careful to point out that unrestricted inquiry and communication could harm societal life under certain circumstances, for example, in a state that depended on the uncritical acceptance of “prejudice” for the maintenance of moral conduct.19
In short, Mendelssohn presumed a consequentialist, vaguely utilitarian ethics. The goal is social improvement, toward which reflection and unlimited free inquiry constitute only important means. No one can claim an absolute right to subject all traditional authority to critical examination, because the social order is grounded on cooperation to achieve the common good, not on the rights or dignity of the individual person.
But Mendelssohn did envision a convergence of social harmony, progress, and individual self-development. He remarked, “I set, at all times, the destiny of man [Bestimmung des Menschen] as the measure and goal of all our strivings and efforts, as a point on which we must set our eyes if we do not wish to lose ourselves.”20 The expression “destiny of man” is evidently borrowed from a book of that title written by Johann Joachim Spalding in 1748.21 For Spalding, the moral impulse in human beings, the urge to bring about universal happiness, derives from their divine nature and can only be finally realized in the Kingdom of God. The Christian trappings of this theory would have appealed less to the Jewish Mendelssohn than the way it connected morality and hence enlightenment to a wider teleological context defined by divine purposes and made manifest in human nature (to wit, moral sentiments). Mendelssohn's whole approach to enlightenment thus presupposed a fairly clear schema: “social life” characterized by varying degrees of Bildung (education or “formation”) but mainly still under the influence of superstition and ignorance; human nature understood ideologically as involving a moral-religious destiny; enlightenment as movement toward that destiny, the chief means for improving our social existence.
Mendelssohn's account of enlightenment seems to be fairly typical of a wide range of quasi-utilitarian theories and arguments advanced in Germany during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, for example, defined “true” enlightenment as acquisition of the “knowledge that is most necessary and useful to edify man's temperament, promote his efficiency and satisfaction, preserve his health, strengthen his bodily powers and improve his state of being.”22 Similarly, Joachim Heinrich Campe observed that the term “enlightenment” encompassed “every increase in useful knowledge as well as every stimulus to thinking for oneself about objects that have some relation to human well-being.”23 Yet another utilitarian definition was proferred by Andreas Riem: “enlightenment [is] nothing else but the effort of the human spirit to illuminate all objects of the world of ideas, all human opinions and their results and everything that influences humanity, according to a doctrine of pure reason, in order to promote the useful.”24 All of these definitions of enlightenment agree with Mendelssohn's in relating it to an understanding of human nature or “destiny” treated as the telos of human action. Enlightenment—and the development of our critical faculties that it stimulates—only has an instrumental value; it is useful in helping to bring about a certain objective state of affairs. It does not, as Horst Stuke points out, “aim at the autonomy of the thinking subject or of the critical-emancipatory function of thinking for oneself, at least in matters of religion.”25
This image of human agency as dominated by natural or divine order was certainly not unique to the German Enlightenment. Even a “radical” philosophe such as Claude-Adrien Helvetius, determined to challenge the legitimacy of the existing order in France, did not value autonomy for its own sake. For example, he advocated freedom of the press,26 but only because it would enable citizens to “perfect their laws.”27 The truth is good only because it is useful.28 Ultimately, Helvetius's ethics envisioned a manipulative legislator cognizant of the axiom that “to guide the motions of the human puppet, it is necessary to know the wires by which he is moved.”29 Paradoxically, the “maturity” we achieve in casting aside superstition and metaphysics seems to imply acquiescence in a thoroughly determined, mechanistic order. The best we can do, on the “radical” Enlightenment view, is to replace irrational, counterproductive conditioning with laws and mores that maximize pleasure and minimize pain.
The reformist bent of someone such as Mendelssohn and Helvetius certainly implied the value of self-direction, critique, and “maturity” in the use of one's intellect, but their teleological and/or naturalistic horizons tended to draw their attention to the objects of reform rather than the process, the subjective or formal aspect, of enlightenment. But autonomy understood as an explicit, self-conscious aspiration, an indispensable expression of human dignity, first crystallizes in Kant. The outlines of Kant's “official” theory of moral autonomy are familiar and may be summarized briefly by reference to the scheme suggested earlier.
For Kant, autonomy involves, as with the Stoics, a contest between reason and certain spontaneous, unreflective reactions that must be mastered. But Kant defined both elements more precisely. Moral autonomy requires that agents give themselves the law by which they act. That law, of course, must be the categorical imperative. Autonomy requires that one interrupt the natural flow of inclinations, replacing the object's effect on the will with the motive of reason. The Stoic merely sought to stave off entrapping and unsettling influences by attaining inner tranquillity. By contrast, Kant's moral agent negated their power, overriding them by another kind of causality, derived from pure reason.
More important, the role of the external world has changed almost completely in Kant's version of moral autonomy. It has now been defined, following the new science, as a realm of physical motions and laws. But one must also assume the existence of other self-legislating (autonomous) beings toward whom the agent has moral duties. Taken together, these autonomous agents constituted a “kingdom of ends,” a “systematic union of rational beings by common objective laws.”30 Autonomy essentially involved the kingdom of ends, since, when individuals submitted their maxims to the test of universalizability, they imagined them to be laws capable of being followed by all other “citizens” of that kingdom. Thus autonomous agents alone could claim an absolute right to be treated according to the moral law (as ends rather than as means only) because they were capable of self-legislation and were not simply (in Helvetius's word) “puppets”: “Autonomy then is the basis of the dignity of human and of every rational nature.”31
Earlier I suggested that Kant's metaphysical account of autonomy did not fully express the meaning of the term today and that his idea of Mündigkeit captures its contemporary sense more accurately. Yet I believe there is a connection between his notions of autonomy and maturity. Moral autonomy depends, Kant insisted, on the capacity to universalize one's maxims, to ask whether they could be adopted as laws by all rational beings. In the Groundwork, Kant took for granted the capacity to universalize, but in other writings he sketched in some of the factors that affect this faculty as well as the knack of applying rules to real-life situations. Kant's formal ethics, depending as it does on the notion of self-legislated moral rules, actually required these “psychological” additions. For if Kant could not show that—and how—we universalize our maxims, then his whole notion of moral autonomy would have become uselessly counterfactual, something like writing an ethics for wolves or pigs.
In the Critique of Judgment, Kant pointed out that our judgments must rely in part on the sensus communis, the “power to judge that in reflecting takes account (a priori) in our thought, of everyone else's way of presenting [something], in order as it were to compare our own judgment with human reason in general and thus escape the illusion that arises from the ease of mistaking subjective and private conditions for objective ones.”32 The most formidable obstacles to universalizing one's judgments proved to be “prejudice” and “superstition.” People whose thinking cannot advance beyond these impediments demonstrate thereby their need to be “guided by others.” The proper remedy for prejudice and superstition, Kant remarked, is “enlightenment.”33 Although referring to aesthetic judgments in this context, Kant implied that these have a bearing on moral judgments too.34 We must be able to learn how to escape the bias inherent in judging things in light of our own interest and ingrained prejudices. The “enlightened” mind in aesthetic and moral matters will learn to disengage itself from the patterns of seeing and responding that self-interest and habit have rendered almost automatic, and will consider a situation from the viewpoint of other (rational) beings. In both cases we “put ourselves in the position of everyone else, merely by abstracting from the limitations that (may) happen to attach to our own judging.”35
The idea of a sensus communis in the Critique of Judgment has an analogue in Kant's essay on enlightenment. While it was difficult for individuals to escape from their self-incurred immaturity, Kant observed “that the public should enlighten itself is more possible; indeed, if only freedom is granted, enlightenment is almost sure to follow.”36 The public meant, for Kant, the reading public addressed by scholars and literati in journals like the Berlinische Monatsschrift. On one level, Kant's essay on enlightenment represented merely one more contribution to ongoing debates about freedom of the press and its limitations.37 But from the viewpoint of political theory, this essay changed the terms in which the notion of autonomy had traditionally been posed. We have moved from the Stoic position, in which the autonomous sage wages a personal struggle against passions and desires, to “enlightened” autonomy, in which intellectually emancipated individuals participate in a continuous public, critical discussion, at least vicariously through books and journals. Such discussion enlivens and develops individuals' powers of universalization while dissolving the encrustations of prejudice and habit. Thus both moral autonomy and universality of aesthetic judgment presuppose the formative influence of public enlightenment.
If one places Kant's various accounts of autonomy and Mündigkeit in the context of the mainstream of the Enlightenment, they at first appear idiosyncratic and unorthodox. Most other Enlightenment figures emphasized the objective values and goals of their movement: utility, self-improve- ment, scientific progress, cultural development (Bildung), and (speaking anachronistically) the modernization of regime and society. Although Kant too treated the progress of humanity as the moral “final purpose” of the world, and hypothesized a civilizing telos of nature working through man's “unsociable sociability,” he carefully avoided grounding his conceptions of moral worth and autonomy on these postulates.38 Still, judging from the benefit of hindsight, one might suggest that Kant grasped the critical, self-liberating spirit of the Enlightenment better than most of his contemporaries did. At any rate, his invocation of moral autonomy, intellectual independence, and public debate marked a turning point in the Enlightenment. One current, represented by the utilitarian wing, emphasized its objectivizing, modernizing, and “scientific” side and downplayed the theme of autonomy. This wing has been transformed, after various complex theoretical shifts of emphasis, into modern utilitarianism and certain schools of social science but has also influenced Foucault via Nietzsche's “positivistic” writings. Meanwhile, Kantian ideas have entered into contemporary notions of autonomy directly, but also obliquely, through the media of romanticism and German idealism, which, of course, complained about the dualisms and disharmonies of Kant's critical philosophy and sought to overcome them in diverse syntheses of the allegedly sundered, alienated elements of the human self. It is difficult to understand the accretions of meaning that have grown up around “autonomy” without taking into account its assimilation by these post-Kantian movements. Moreover, they have affected even the twentieth-century currents of thought that still cling to Kant's program of emancipating the intellect from immaturity, especially the critical theory of Habermas, contemporary American liberalism after the manner of Rawls, Feinberg, Richards, and others, and even some postmodern writers like Foucault.
III
We will not be able to understand twentieth-century accounts of autonomy without acknowledging how deeply they have been influenced by a different, aesthetic-metaphysical tradition that variously has been called romanticism, expressivism, or in certain cases the “counter-Enlightenment.”39 Some of its luminaries, such as Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, also contemn a life lived under the aegis of unexamined prejudice, sheer habit, and mental sloth. But their counterimage to such a life usually goes by the name of “individuality.” It describes the way in which a person, or even a whole nation—drawing on traditions, language, culture, and natural environment—can fashion an inchoate, unformed identity into a many-sided, coherent, aesthetically pleasing totality. The idea is precisely not to adopt a universalizing stance toward one's own moral and emotional life, to “get outside” the self toward some more impartial, truer vantage point, but instead to externalize what has always lain within, albeit only dimly recognized, as the unique, noninterchangeble core of self. Humboldt remarked that “the ultimate object of all our moral strivings is solely to discover, nourish, and re-create what truly exists in ourselves and others.”40
Notice that the elements of autonomy have changed their relative positions in these invocations of individuality. Natural impulses, passions, feelings, and inchoate strivings for coherence used to be classed as irrational obstacles to autonomy and thus as the element to be controlled, ruled, and mastered. Now they become the “law,” the very nomos in autonomy. Reason, the formerly ordering, controlling element in the Kantian scheme, now must accommodate itself to the inner law of a person's unique individuality. In a sense, it becomes precisely the element to be directed and ruled so that it does not block off the channels of individual self-expression.
The external environment displays a twofold character. On one side, especially in Goethe and Schiller, nature is often portrayed as a demonic, demiurgic power that actually strives for expression in the individuality of the person (especially the artist). Echoing the Stoics, albeit in a very different context, Goethe, Schiller, and Schelling can treat nature as a meaning-laden macrocosm intensified and concentrated within the microcosmic individual. By contrast, especially in John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, society's rules, conventions, and pressures assume a repressive, stifling aspect. While the Aufklärer had denounced convention or prejudice for hampering a person's intellect (especially the ability to universalize judgments and adopt other points of view), the defenders of individuality indicted it for making people inauthentic automatons. What counts in this new image of self-direction is that my thoughts, ideas, actions, and social relationships should really be mine, expressing my individual nature rather than the internalized expectations of others. On this account, society—even a reading public such as Kant invoked—becomes potentially inimical to the project of self-determination.
Before tracing out the fate of the concept of autonomy in the twentieth century, we need to describe one other way in which it was challenged and transformed in the nineteenth century. Although Hegel did not directly criticize the notion of autonomy that Kant worked out, he undermined it by treating the Enlightenment generally as a “shape of consciousness” that belonged to a now-superseded context of spirit's self-development.41 From the vantage point of Hegel's Phenomenology and History of Philosophy, the Enlightenment, including especially Kant's polemical essay, appears naive because it does not reflect on its own process of self-constitution.
In Hegel's view, Kant simply did not recognize the continuity between spirit's self-manifestation as Enlightenment and its previous “shapes,” especially religious faith. A historically adequate notion of the Enlightenment would have to restore that continuity and read its dichotomizations of truth/error, enlightenment/superstition, and autonomy/heteronomy as ways to deny and suppress the myriad connections (even identities) between it and the religious, political, and cultural patterns that its champions scorned. In this sense, Hegelian “enlightenment” is far more latitudinarian, inclusive, and historicist than the Aufklärung itself.
Hegel's Phenomenology thus alters the context of the discussion of autonomy in two respects. On the one hand, the demand for autonomy can now be ascribed to a certain stage of European history; its critical, emancipatory thrust can be blunted by treating it as the symptom of an incomplete, naive self-understanding, a relic of a kind of culture now behind us. In a different direction, the notion of autonomy can be interpreted as the expression of what Taylor called the “punctual self” that emerged in early modern European philosophy. On this reading, which is consciously Hegelian, the question “Can and should a person aspire to be autonomous, mature, and self-determining?” resolves itself into a deeper question: “Doesn't it distort matters to treat the self as though it really could, out of its own resources, objectify and disengage from its social and cultural milieu, universalize its judgment, purge itself of prejudice?” On either reading, autonomy can no longer be taken on its own terms; it must be interrogated so as to yield up clues about the hidden contexts that allow it to surface as a political and philosophical issue in the first place (e.g., the formation of the modern self, the “normalization” of society, the interweaving of metaphysical with gender-specific categories).
IV
One factor that renders the twentieth-century political landscape so complex is the way in which ideals, theories, ideologies, and evaluations from earlier periods of history survive into the present. In the case of autonomy, we shall see that its liberal-Kantian variant persists in an almost pure form (e.g., in John Rawls), along with other hybrid shapes influenced by romantic individuality, Hegelianism, and existentialism. Then we will see how this tradition in all of its variants has been challenged by more historicist currents of thought that, following the road mapped by Hegel, want to question the very context in which the “autonomous self” could be constituted at all.
Adopting the standpoint of Kant's moral philosophy, Rawls accepts the equation of morality and autonomy and tries to make it more persuasive than Kant did. One objection to Kant's theory is that there is no compelling reason to assume that the person who chooses to lead a bad life has not acted autonomously. Why couldn't such a life represent that person's considered judgment about how to express his or her essential nature? Rawls replies: If a human being's essential nature is to be free, equal, and rational, then people can best express that nature by showing that they are free from “natural contingencies and social accident.” Rawls's “original position” by definition satisfies these conditions, since it requires us not to “look at the social order from our situation but take up a point of view that everyone can adopt on an equal footing.”42 Therefore, to act on principles chosen in the original position means acting on the basis of reason alone, rather than having one's decisions dictated by inclinations to attain objects that are desirable because of one's particular station. Rawls concludes: “Following the Kantian interpretation of justice as fairness, we can say that by acting from these principles persons are acting autonomously: they are acting from principles that they would acknowledge under conditions that best express their nature as free and rational beings.”43
Yet Rawlsian autonomy differs from its Kantian prototype in at least one important respect. Rawls feels compelled to defend it against what can be called the “brave new world syndrome”: the suspicion that what might appear to be autonomous thoughts or decisions could have been manipulated by conditioning, genetic engineering, or social pressures so subtle that they would be difficult to detect. What if the rationality and universality that Kant regarded as the hallmark of autonomy was instead merely part of the circuitry of social control? Rawls dismisses such concerns rather condescendingly as appropriate to “times of social doubt and loss of faith in long-established values.”44 Since Rawls himself has not lost faith in such values (i.e., the Kantian ones), he sees no reason to worry much about the issue of whether our apparently rational, self-legislated moral standards are really our own.45
But other liberal theorists of autonomy have been much more concerned about what they sometimes call the “authenticity” of our choices and even our feelings. Unlike Rawls, they have incorporated into their work elements of the tradition of “individuality” referred to earlier. Indeed, many of the liberal theories we shall examine prove to be unstable amalgams of Kantian and romantic-individualist elements, running the gamut from predominantly rationalist theories to those that verge on pure individual self-expression. In my view, none has really succeeded in showing how these elements can be made to cohere.
At the “rationalist” end stands Richard Lindley's Autonomy. Partly in response to the brave new world syndrome, he advocates a notion of autonomy that stresses “active theoretical rationality,” a “disposition to question received wisdom, or indeed any proposition one is inclined to accept…out of concern for truth itself.”46 Of course, the ideal of Kantian “maturity” underlies Lindley's position, but now it is deepened by a conviction that would-be autonomous individuals must ceaselessly struggle against the distortions and deceptions that elites want to impose on them. Moral autonomy in the sense of Kant and Rawls is not sufficient to escape a brave new world; autonomous individuals must also in fact “not be deluded about the nature of their goals and the consequences of their actions.”47
In itself, such a conception of autonomy would be coherent, although it threatens to founder on our lack of an uncontested vision of moral, political, and religious truth. But Lindley, clearly impressed by the romantic-individualist tradition, also stipulates that “autonomy requires a person to reflect on the influences of her culture, to sort out those of her felt impulses which are really expressions of her unique nature from those which are merely the product of external impulses.”48 Active theoretical rationality seems to concern the intersubjectively verifiable or falsifiable content of a person's beliefs; the individuality criterion appears to interrogate their origin and thus their authenticity. What, if any, is the necessary connection between these criteria?
Still further toward the romantic-individualist end of the spectrum, we encounter a cluster of arguments worked out by some eminent analytic philosophers. John Christman's The Inner Citadel groups them under the rubric of the “Dworkin-Frankfurt (D-F) model,”49 although his own theory and that of Joel Feinberg resemble this model enough that we may discuss all four together. All of these thinkers believe themselves to be working in the Kantian tradition, in the loose sense that they treat autonomous decisions (or an autonomous life) as self-legislated. But they abandon Kant's (and Rawls's) equation of autonomy with obedience to the moral law. As Gerald Dworkin bluntly puts it, “There is no specific content to the decisions an autonomous person may take [A] saint or a sinner, a rugged individualist or a conformist” would all qualify.50
The D-F model constructs a two-tier system of reflective choice. Every agent has “first-order” desires and preferences that correspond roughly to Kant's “inclinations.” But most people also have the capacity to reflect on those preferences with an eye to deciding whether they really want to have them or not. Autonomy obtains in Dworkin's version when two conditions are satisfied: “(a) a person must identify with his desires, goals, and values; (b) such identification is not itself influenced in ways which make the process of identification…alien to the individual.”51 Feinberg's account differs mainly in emphasizing the “committed process of continually reconstructing the value system” one has inherited, which I take to satisfy condition (b).
Obviously, these accounts of autonomy, even though constructed by “liberal” philosophers otherwise in the Enlightenment tradition, have far more affinity to romantic-individualist quests for a true self. Moreover, Feinberg's comments betray how much the brave new world syndrome affects his thinking as well. “What liberals have always rightly deplored has been the effects on individual character of social manipulation, the condition in which individuality is swallowed up by the collective mass, and persons are interchangeable parts in a great organic machine.”52 Actually, Mill seems to have been the only bona fide liberal before the twentieth century who worried much about individuality. Enlightenment liberals such as Kant simply did not think of autonomy in those terms at all. Feinberg is inadvertently projecting onto the liberal tradition aspirations toward romantic individuality that were espoused by some writers of dubious liberal credentials.
Starting from very different assumptions, Ernst Tugendhat, a German analytic philosopher, approaches rather closely to the D-F model. Having rejected the paradigm of theoretical self-consciousness that prevailed in the writings of the German idealists, Tugendhat tries to rescue the notion of self-determination through a critical reading of Heidegger. Tugendhat finds in the latter the insight that human existence is unique in posing fundamental questions about its very meaning. People do not merely have wants and preferences; they may also ask whether the whole of their existence is meaningful or empty, resolute or adrift, and even whether it should be continued at all. Moreover, they may also evade such questions and “flee” from self-responsibility. What is decisive, though, is that this sort of existential self-interrogation cannot be universal à la Kant and Rawls. Only the individual can do it, and only in light of his or her own unique existence. The questions posed are thus eminently practical ones, because the way they are answered will determine who a person is going to be. We literally choose ourselves. Or, more exactly, we either make that choice in full awareness or we relinquish it to the inertia of everyday life and its internal agent, das Man (the collective and impersonal “they”), that always constitutes one dimension of individual identity. To exist “authentically”—to be an “individual,” in the language of an older tradition—thus means, among other things, that I choose for myself rather than allow the impersonal “they” to make my choices for me.
Tugendhat accepts Heidegger's argument up to a point. He speaks of the irreducible existential, individual component in all choice: “there is an ultimate point in deliberation at which we simply can no longer justify the decision objectively; rather what is best for me at this point is itself only constituted in my wanting it.”53 If my decision making could be thoroughly rationalized (as for example in Kant and Rawls), then, Tugendhat claims, the decisions would no longer really be mine; the element of individual will would be lacking. However, Tugendhat cannot accept Heidegger's complete divorce of existential choice from moral reasoning. He therefore constructs an account of self-determination that supplements Being and Time by adding an account of rational justification in decision making as well as a more elaborate and “positive” way of taking into account the consensus of one's community. Tugendhat's “final” theory of self-determination thus ultimately comes to resemble the D-F model: a choice cannot be understood as self-determined (a) if one denies its irreducible volitional character, that is, if one claims to reduce it to rationality, or (b) if one denies that it must be able to rest on justification at all, casting it as a pure act of individuality.
Almost all these theories share the following complex of elements. There are first impulses, desires, and preferences, but these now have an ambiguous status. Either they can be authentically mine, or they may have been induced in me by an outside, alien source. The focus of autonomy must then be the second-order reflection and evaluation that lead me either to identify with these states, desires, and preferences or to reject them as infiltrations of das Man. The evaluation and decision making must be rational, even in Tugendhat, and oriented to objective truth, as in Lindley. But it can never become too rational. The external world is now viewed almost entirely negatively, as a threat to autonomy, except perhaps in Tugendhat, who still clings to the Kantian notion of a rational public opinion. There is no “nomos” left in autonomy, no sense of a law or rule that individuals give to themselves. Nor do these contemporary theories have any sense of a sustaining natural order (even a postulated one as in Kant) that might be favorable to self-determination. For liberal philosophers, autonomy has become a deeply problematic concept: its advocates are no longer really committed to the Enlightenment projects of reform and self-improvement, but they are unwilling to forgo the advantages of reason and reflective deliberation. It is not clear how autonomy can be both Kantian and romantic- individualist yet still remain a coherent idea. If one starts from the Hei- deggerian position but concedes that decisions ought to involve some rational deliberation, how does one know where to draw the line? At what point does a rationalized decision cease to embody the agent's will? But if one begins from Kantian and analytic premises while defining autonomy in terms of authenticity and individual self-expression, how can one distinguish clearly (as Kant and Rawls still can) between autonomy and heteronomy? Dworkin's answer would be that if a person's second-order identifications are “influenced overly by others,” then his decisions lack procedural independence, that is, “his motivational structure is his but not his own.”54 But how much is “overly”? As critics have often objected, wouldn't we need a third-order reflection to check on whether second-order reflections were overly influenced? And wouldn't that generate an infinite regress?
V
One way postmodernist thinkers might interpret these predominantly liberal and analytic theories of autonomy would be to recognize that their advocates are seeking to defend something of great value: a certain spark of resistance, a refusal to be governed, at least in certain ways and at a certain price,55 the right to struggle against vulnerability to manipulation and control. But their resistance must fail, because it depends on language that has become implicated in the very forms of social control they want to defy. Whatever may have been the liberating potential during the eighteenth century of notions such as “individuality,” “objective truth,” the “autonomous subject,” or “public consensus,” in the late twentieth they only serve to obscure patterns of social control and domination that require a different, subtler analysis.56 In a nutshell, this is the kind of critique that “postmodern” thinkers such as Foucault have made of autonomy and related notions.
Difficulties in evaluating postmodern critiques arise when one questions whether they are rejecting only the discourse of autonomy or in some respects the “substance” of it as well, the political and ethical aspirations that Kant had in mind when he urged his readers, qua members of the enlightened public, to throw off the yoke of tutelage and use their own intellects.57 To achieve some clarity on this question, I will try to piece together a Foucauldian “theory” of autonomy, recognizing that Foucault probably would have rejected the word theory to characterize his writings about the cluster of issues that bear on this theme.
Kant's accounts of autonomy, as we have noted, featured a superior element, practical reason (the noumenal self)—imposing rules on a set of phenomenal impulses and inclinations. The former was identified with the “true” self, the latter with alien (i.e., natural) causality. What allowed practical reason to work in the “real” world was the sensus communis, the consensus of an instructed public that encouraged and helped individuals make their exit from self-incurred immaturity, by getting them to transcend their narrow, particular, self-interested view of things and to move toward an unsituated, universal perspective. Insofar as Kant's autonomous self designates the subject of modern philosophy, Foucault would not accept it at face value. As he so often points out, the subject is constituted differently in a variety of historically distinct practices and relationships: “[The subject] is a form and this form is not above all or always identical to itself…and it is precisely the historical constitution of these different forms of subject relating to games of truth that interest me.”58 To Foucault, then, Kant's invocation of a transcendental self as the reference point of autonomy simply overlooks the process of constitution, an issue we considered in discussing Hegel earlier.
However, Foucault's process of constitution does not, like Hegel's, take place primarily in the realm of philosophical or religious self-interpretations (though these certainly do play some role); rather, the modern self is constituted by a series of disciplinary practices that become particularly visible in institutions designed to enforce regular, predictable behavior (e.g., prisons, schools, armies). The autonomous subject of philosophy and the juridical individual correspond to the controlled and manipulated subject of scientific experiments, medical knowledge, and political domination.59 From Foucault's perspective, it becomes much easier to relate the “autonomy” side of the Enlightenment to its “social control” side, as expressed in Helvetius, Mendelssohn, and numerous obscure Aufklärer who toiled in the vineyards of the “popular” Enlightenment.60
If one attends to the language of the quest for autonomy as described by contemporary theorists, it bears a close resemblance to the techniques of “confession” that Foucault described in the History of Sexuality. To be autonomous for Dworkin, Young, or Tugendhat would mean being able to sort out those aspects of self that are truly one's own, from those that are alien or imposed. Foucault related this sort of self-inquisition to techniques of power.
The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, “demands” only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place [I]t can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation.61
In other words, the lines of social control do not simply connect to our preferences and thoughts; they encircle the very process of self-reflection. In principle, there can be no “procedural independence” in second-order evaluation, as Feinberg had stipulated for an autonomous self-relation. Therefore, the only light one can shed on the self as presupposed by autonomy theory comes from a “genealogy of the subject as a subject of ethical actions”62 that unearths, in very specific contexts, the forms of subjection, how they changed over time, and how they were resisted. In sum, conventional liberal-analytic theories of autonomy would only depict a simulacrum of self-determination, since the pattern of self-interrogation they prescribe simply continues, in a disguised shape, a venerable technique of discipline and normalization.
Some commentators have concluded that Foucault embraced a “scientistic concept of theory,” a “functional model of discourse and practice” that would exclude, on methodological grounds, any notion of autonomy.63 But scattered remarks, especially in his later writings and interviews, suggest a different conclusion. In a rare reflection on the genealogy of his own work, Foucault aligned himself not with Helvetius and Comte but with Hegel, Nietzsche, Weber, and the Frankfurt School. Like them, he tried to elaborate a “critical philosophy” that would also be an “ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves.”64 And in his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault suggested that he had adopted at least the attitude of Kant's work of the same title, one that commits the critic to “analyzing and reflecting upon limits.”65 In practice, this would certainly mean opposing the sort of humanism of which Kant was a part, but “by the principle of a critique and a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy.”66
Foucault, in short, did depart at least now and then from his customarily detached, “scientistic” viewpoint and engage himself as a partisan of autonomy, in some sense. Determining exactly what he meant by it is another matter. Perhaps the most tantalizing clue may be his remark that critique, reflecting on limits, now means almost the opposite of what it did in 1784:
This critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing or thinking what we are, do, or think—seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom.67
We cannot treat autonomy in the Kantian manner as action or thought in accord with a self that is universal and rational. Rather, our autonomous impulses emanate from the corners and pockets of our being that have escaped being completely caught up in the meshes of universalizing, normalizing practices.
However, Foucault could not have meant by autonomy anything like the impetus toward individuality or authenticity as Mill and his liberal successors understood it. Criticizing Jean-Paul Sartre, who held one version of this view, Foucault observed, “I think that from the theoretical point of view, Sartre avoids the idea of the self as something which is given to us, but through the moral notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves—to be truly our true self.” What Foucault objected to in the equation “autonomy = authenticity” was the assumption that, however inchoate it may be, we have a “true self” to be discovered. Following Nietzsche, he wanted to claim that the self must be created: “From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.”68
Foucault made these remarks while completing his study of the history of sexuality. Evidently he had become fascinated by the “technology” of the self practiced by the Stoics and Cynics. Thus, ironically, Foucauldian autonomy came full circle and resurrected a certain kind of Stoic autonomy,69 albeit understood in a highly idiosyncratic, selective way. As Foucault read these ancient writers, they tended to see their desires, pleasures, social relationships—in short, their entire lives—as elements of an aesthetic whole to be created for their own satisfaction, but also for possible spectators. Their ascetic practices had nothing to do with hostility to desire per se, or fear of its corrupting influence, as would be the case for Christianity later. They simply wanted to achieve a harmony that would be impossible unless they knew how to govern themselves and keep unruly elements in their proper place. Aesthetic Stoicism appealed to Foucault because it contains a model for how the quest for autonomy can be kept separate from issues of scientific truth, moral correctness, and political authority, that is, exactly the “normalizations” to which it had been so closely tied by Kant, Mendelssohn, and the other Aufklärer.70 Although Foucault never put it this way, he seemed to be suggesting that moral autonomy and the closely related idea of intellectual maturity in Kant involve orientation to universal standards. I am expected to shed my prejudices and think of myself as a participant in the Kingdom of Ends, the sensus communis or the reading public. I cannot “create” myself, since I am, as a rational being, irrevocably committed to an objective view of my situation. But in aesthetic Stoicism, I do not need to take account of any transindividual standard, any “we,” except the very general requirements of beauty and harmony. Although my life may appear beautiful to others, I alone know how it got to be that way, since I created the blueprint of what I intended to be and labored to realize it against the recalcitrance of the flesh. Indeed, it is misleading to say that “I” created myself as a work of art, since that statement implies that I preceded the act of creation. But Foucault insisted that the opposite is true: “We should not have to refer the creative activity of somebody to the kind of relation he has to himself, but should relate the kind of relation one has to oneself to a creative activity.”71
In terms of the framework adopted earlier for discussing different conceptions of autonomy, Foucault's “late” account now looks like this: the “ruled” elements, those subject to nomos, are bodily desires and especially pleasures but also our “relations to self,” the stances we take toward our own existence, or what analytic philosophers call second-order preferences. The ruling element simply cannot be described (except in negative terms) since it has been boiled down to pure creative activity that cannot be traced back to any antecedent. The external elements that affect autonomy are above all the patterns of social control that have constituted us as the selves we now are, that have “normalized” us and formed the relations to selves that we have become. Thus autonomy for Foucault involved, first, the Herculean effort to carry out a “critique” of the constitution of the selves we now are and then, in whatever spaces of freedom we have managed to clear, the project of creating (or re-creating) “a beautiful life.”72 The only “external” aids we might have would be those traditions, such as aesthetic Stoicism, that have been half-forgotten or obscured by the dominant power/knowledge complex. Foucault's vision of autonomy was, in a way, what remained when one had stripped away the shells or layers of objective knowledge and rational orientation that still characterized earlier conceptions of a self-directed life. Once one dissolved such notions as a Bestimmungdes Menschen, a moral law, the public, or even a true individuality, what could autonomy mean besides an activity in which certain forms of selfrelation issue mysteriously from a hidden source?
It is not certain, however, that these elements of earlier versions of autonomy really deserve to be scrapped. There may be a way to preservethem in a less problematic, less metaphysical form.
VI
Postmodernists have not been the only recent social theorists to thematize the process of constitution of modern subjectivity. The Frankfurt School, especially Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, anticipated many of Foucault's arguments by a generation. These thinkers desublimated the Kantian conception of reason's “maturity” into its unspokentelos: the imperative of self-preservation.73 The linchpin of all of Kant's critiques, they argued, is the subject, the “I think” of transcendental apperception. But the “I” does not conjure itself into existence ex nihilo. It emerges as a detached, punctual self-consciousness in the course of a millennia-long historical struggle to achieve distance from and domination over the forces of nature, both internal and external. The very power of reason to dissolve superstitions, discredit objectivist metaphysics, and arbitrate the boundaries of its own operations are (or at least have been predominately) instruments in humankind's collective effort to preserve itself. Thus, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, Kant's explicit appeal to “man” to use his own intellect without the tutelage of another carried the implicit message that “immaturity” means lack of self-discipline, relapse into primitive and obsolescent modes of thought, failure to keep up with the latest moves in the formalization of reason.
But autonomy and maturity understood as the assertion of humanity's collective effort at self-preservation recoil against themselves. For one thing, reason progressively disenchants the world by subjugating its “nonidentical” elements (including those aspects of individual existence not deployed in the service of survival) to the process of rationalization, that is, the principle of identity developed into formal logic and scientific reasoning. In short, humanity ends up instrumentalizing the autonomous self and whatever remains of the world that still charms, arrests, enchants, or frightens. Slavery to things, to matter, to religious belief is broken only by a deeper enslavement to the blind, “natural” drive for self-preservation.74 Thus autonomy cancels itself; maturity degenerates into uncritical positivism.
The Dialectic of Enlightenment parallels many of Foucault's argumentsabout the regime of power/knowledge. In our context, the most crucial argument is the one that, at least in tendency, “unmasks” appeals to autonomous reason and maturity as contributions, albeit unintended, to the smoother and more efficient functioning of the process of social reproduction. Although Foucault would have rejected the premise of a single subject “behind” that process, he too would have underscored the instrumental, system-maintaining function of such appeals. Not surprisingly, Adorno and Horkheimer, like Foucault, painted themselves into a tight corner. By defining autonomy, maturity, universalizability, and the other key terms of Enlightenment rhetoric in so relentlessly instrumentalist a way, they left themselves few resources from which to fashion an alternative vision of a self-directed life. Horkheimer and Adorno could only glimpse rays of hope in the few nooks and crannies of our “enlightened” society that have not yet quite completely succumbed to the imperatives of functional, instrumental reason: the “negative” dialectic of critical theory itself and certain forms of modern art.
This is the point at which Habermas's work becomes important for anyone who aspires to preserve the continuity of autonomy as an ideal from the Enlightenment to the present. He is one of the few contemporary social theorists who takes seriously the sociohistorical process of constitution of the so-called autonomous individual and yet finds a way to defend the rational core of autonomy that Kant had stressed.
As far back as 1965, Habermas insisted on the differentiation of reason according to the “interests” that guide it. On the one hand, reason has been an instrument in the collective, historical struggle for self-preservation (as Adorno and Horkheimer claimed). On the other hand, reason is not simply equivalent to “claws and teeth” as a tool of adaptation. For one thing, it develops and is exercised in the “communication system of a social life-world”75 that cannot be reduced without distortion to a system of survival. Moreover, participants in the life-world may reflect rationally on the practices, beliefs, and institutions of social life as well as the relationship between these and the ongoing process of social reproduction, in terms of issues that transcend simple survival, for example, justice.
Adapting Kant's argument about the transcendental constitution of the objects of knowledge under categories and intuitions, Habermas's theory of knowledge-constitutive “interests” captures the way in which such interests are already inscribed in what we apprehend empirically. Of these, the relevant one for our context is the “emancipatory interest” in self-reflection that may “release the subject from dependence on hypostatized powers”76 and that finds expression in “sciences of action” like psychoanalysis and the Marxist critique of ideology.
Although Habermas's terminology and even some of his specific arguments have evolved, he has never abandoned the belief that reason plays anemancipatory role, that it is not simply an instrument of social and technical control. And he has been consistent in tracing this emancipatory role back to language, especially the model of dialogue.
The human interest in autonomy and responsibility [these two words translate the German Mündigkeit] is not mere fancy, for it can be apprehended a priori. What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its structure, autonomy and responsibility are posited for us. Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus.77
These lines have defined Habermas's research program for more than a quarter of a century. Only against the implicit background of an ideal speech situation, as he later would call it, can philosophy discover “the traces of violence that deform repeated attempts at dialogue and recurrently close off the path to unconstrained communication.”78 The claim that language contains an a priori element means only that, in the everyday context of speech, we assume a consensus about norms, which, however, we could always problematize and make into the object of a discourse. The latter would commit us to treating the other participant as a subject, someone who can give an account of what she does and why she does it. That account and the alternative one we might provide would then be measured against one another in such a way that we would recognize and submit to the persuasive power of the better argument.
In short, the way that Habermas unpacks the intention of language use reveals in it the tendency toward universalization that Kant made the touchstone of autonomy. But from Habermas's point of view, it would be unacceptable to call failure to achieve the ideal speech situation self-incurred immaturity; the point, rather, is to investigate the structural reasons why in actual practice we do not achieve it and why force and fraud so often determine which “argument” carries the day.
At the highest level of generality, then, truth must enter into the definition of autonomy, just as it did for the major Enlightenment figures considered earlier. And so too must the notion of a “public,” as Kant suggested, since the “public” embodies the standard of rational speech moving toward consensus. But Kant's model of autonomy falls short of Habermas's criteria in at least two respects. First, Kant simply did not realize that the processes of modernization (the development of productive forces, the rationalization of beliefs, the growth of bureaucracy, etc.) then so closely linked to enlightenment could insinuate themselves into the human personality in ways that might (as Foucault would have it) “normalize” people and thereby impede autonomy. Thus, second, he did not realize that, in countering its absorption into the rationalization of the world, the self would have to develop the powers of resistance that have been associated, in this discussion, with individuality and authenticity.
Habermas's theory of autonomy takes these tendencies into account. On one side, he carefully distinguishes three different kinds of validity claims that, in principle, a participant in communicative action might have to redeem: (a) truth, (b) normative rightness, and (c) authenticity. All of these validity claims ultimately presuppose the possibility of discursive coming- to-agreement (Verständigung). Habermas's model of communicative action thus resembles Kant's enlightened public, in the sense that both philosophers distinguish discussions governed by the “better argument” from pseudocommunication distorted by force, ideology, and interest (a distinction, incidentally, that is not often made by postmodern writers). However, each of the three kinds of validity claims has its proper standards and can only be adjudicated on its own terms. The third, “authenticity,” corresponds to the versions of autonomy defended by Tugendhat, Young, and other liberal writers. Like them, Habermas emphasizes that our actions and speech may embody an inner dimension of genuineness such that we put them forward as sincerely our own and not as feigned, mendacious, or reified. For Habermas, this dimension of individuality/authenticity has close affinity to the aesthetic autonomy adumbrated by Foucault.79 However, as noted, it does implicitly require that one defend the choice of “who one wants to be.”80 This choice is not a pure creative act; it actually resembles the criterion of independence for second-order evaluations described by Dworkin. But for Habermas, it involves a complicated effort to achieve a narrative unity of one's own life by joining together the fragments of past and present into a coherent whole, to “build up new identities from shattered or superseded identities, and to integrate them with old identities in such a way that the fabric of one's interactions is organized into the unity of a life history that is both unmistakable and accountable.”81
Clearly, individuality in this sense presupposes the ability to universalize, to think of one's identity in light of certain universal standards of what one could or should be. These, in turn, arise and persist in the life-world that both preserves and continually criticizes traditional norms. Accordingly, Habermas tries to link the Kantian “public-universal” notion of autonomy to the individualizing, romantic-expressive strain in the following way.
The ideal communication community can be seen to contain two Utopian projections. Each of them stylizes one of two moments still fused together in ritual practice: the moral-practical and the expressive Let us imagine individuals being socialized as members of an ideal communication community; they would in the same measure acquire an identity with two complementary aspects: one universalizing, one particularizing. On one hand, these persons raised under idealized conditions learn to orient themselves within a universalistic framework, that is, to act autonomously. On the other hand, they learn to use this autonomy, which makes them equal to every other morally acting subject, to develop themselves in their subjectivity and singularity.82
The perspective Habermas sketches out here (borrowed from G. H. Mead) suggests that the Kantian and the romantic-individualizing theories of autonomy actually belong together if one considers their historical process of constitution. The progress of enlightenment—of modernizing and rationalizing traditional beliefs and practices—extricated the reflective, universalizing subject from the web of relationships that had previously surrounded it, but at the same time objectivized that self as a “puppet” whose “strings” one needed to control more effectively. Individuality, authenticity, and aesthetic self-creation are all just so many ways to tag the inner tensions in the concept of autonomy and to redefine it as a process of liberating oneself from internal normalization. What Habermas adds is the observation that individual authenticity presupposes, at least implicitly, the existence of a life-world that has not become thoroughly instrumentalized, one in which a “public,” rational discussion of traditional norms and values can continuously but critically reappropriate them. Even the most intensely individual self-reflection has a covert connection to the standards of public discourse and accountability. Because that is so, autonomy qua individuality has an inherent limitation. In Hegel's Phenomenology, the various shapes of Individualität that try to develop purely expressivist, self-referential norms eventually “experience” their inclusion in the common life of Geist. Habermas, in his own way, has re-created this dialectical movement by reaffirming the indispensability of Kantian/universalist autonomy to its romantic-individualistic critics.
NOTES
1. For a sample of such acknowledgments, see, e.g., Robert Young, Personal Autonomy: Beyond Negative and Positive Liberty (New York, 1986), 2; Richard Lindley, Autonomy (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1986), 13–27; and Joel Feinberg, “Autonomy,” p. 34, Thomas Hill, “The Kantian Conception of Autonomy,” Robert Young, “Autonomy and the Inner Self,” and David A.J. Richards, “Rights and Autonomy,” p. 207, all in The Inner Citadel, ed. John Christman (New York and Oxford, 1989).
2. Feinberg, “Autonomy,” 36.
3. S. I. Benn, “Freedom, Autonomy and the Concept of a Person,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (January 1976): 124.
4. Richards, “Rights and Autonomy,” 207.
5. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge, 1991), 54. The word Unmündigkeit usually suggested legal nonage, i.e., the status of requiring a guardian (Vormund) to handle one's affairs. See also Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague, 1974), 79–80.
6. See Charles Taylor, (Cambridge, 1975), 3–50.
7. Michael J. Meyer, “Stoics, Rights, and Autonomy,” American Philosophical Quarterly 24, no. 7 (July 1987): 267–271.
8. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 126.
9. Ibid., 143–176.
10. Consider, for example, Locke's famous “biblical” justification of private property in par. 34 of the Second Treatise.
11. Taylor, Sources of the Self 150.
12. René Descartes, Discourse on Method (Indianapolis, 1980), 14.
13. Taylor, Sources of the Self 167.
14. See Horst Stuke, “Aufklärung,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Histonsches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhard Koselleck (Stuttgart, 1975), 265. On the unorthodoxy and originality of Kant's essay, see James Schmidt, “The Question of Enlightenment: Kant, Mendelssohn, and the Mittwochgesellschaft,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50, no. 2 (1989): 269–270. Let it be noted, however, that Rousseau's notion of the general will does present a principle of self-legislation that is analogous to and influential for Kant's own.
15. See Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Pnnciples of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Thomas K. Abbot (Indianapolis, 1949), 49–50 (p. 62 in the Rosenkrantz-Schubert edition).
16. For a detailed and thorough comparison of the two articles, see James Schmidt, “What Enlightenment Was: How Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant Responded to the Berlinische Monatsschrift,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 30, no. 1 (1992): 77–102.
17. Moses Mendelssohn, “Über die Frage: Was heisst aufklären?” in Gesammelte Schriften Jubilaeumsausgabe, ed. ?. Altmann et al. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstadt, 1971), 6, no. 1: 115–119.
18. See Moses Mendelssohn, “Votum zu Moehsens Aufsatz über Aufklärung,” in Gesammelte Schriften 6, no. 1: 110.
19. Mendelssohn, “Über die Frage,” 117.
20. Ibid., 115.
21. See Schmidt, “What Enlightenment Was,” 82–86.
22. Cited in Stuke, “Aufklärung,” 256. All translations from Stuke are the author's.
23. Ibid., 263.
24. Ibid., 274.
25. Ibid., 272.
26. Claude-Adrien Helvetius, A Treatise on Man (New York, 1970), 11:317.
27. Ibid., 11:129.
28. Claude-Adrien Helvetius, Essays on the Mind (New York, 1970), 292.
29. Helvetius, Treatise on Man, 1:4.
30. Kant, Fundamental Principles, 50 (p. 63, Rosencrantz-Schubert).
31. Ibid., 53 (p. 67, Rosencrantz-Schubert).
32. Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner J. Pluhar (Indianapolis, 1987), par. 40, p. 160.
33. Ibid., 161.
34. Ibid., 228.
35. Ibid., 160.
36. Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” 4.
37. On the political context of Kant's writings and in particular the debate over liberty of the press, see Schmidt, “The Question of Enlightenment,” 285–290, and Eckhardt Hellmuth, “Aufklärung und Pressefreiheit: Zur Debatte der Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft während der Jahre 1783 und 1784,” Zeitschrift fur historische Forschung (1982): 315–345.
38. See, e.g., Kant's essays, “Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht fur die Praxis” and “Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht,” both in Immanuel Kant, Politische Schriften (Koeln and Opladen, 1965), 9–24, 64–103.
39. For a useful discussion of the German resistance to the Enlightenment during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, consult Isaiah Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment,” in Against the Current, ed. Henry Hardy (New York, 1980), 7–20.
40. The following sketch represents an abbreviated and selective account of the development of the individuality idea. For a fuller discussion, see the author's “The Idea of Individuality: Origins, Meaning, and Political Significance,” Journal of Politics 52, no. 3 (August 1990): 759–781.
41. For a more complete and detailed version of the following comments, see the author's Hegel's Critique of the Enlightenment (Gainesville, 1984), 94–184.
42. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 516.
43. Ibid., 515.
44. Ibid., 518, 519.
45. Let it be noted, though, that Rawls lately has seemed to limit his theory of justice (and hence also his conception of full autonomy?) to “a democratic society under modern conditions.” See, for example, John Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 9 (September 1980): 518.
46. Lindley, Autonomy, 48.
47. Ibid., 50.
48. Ibid., 53.
49. For Christman's characterization of the model, see The Inner Citadel, 6–10.
50. Gerald Dworkin, “The Concept of Autonomy,” in Christman, The Inner Citadel., 62.
51. Ibid., 61.
52. Feinberg, “Autonomy,” 45.
53. Ernst Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), 213.
54. Dworkin, “The Concept of Autonomy,” 61.
55. See Michel Foucault, “Qu'est-ce que la critique [Critique et Aufklärung]” Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie 84 (1990): 35–63 [translated above, pp. 382–398].
56. For a spirited indictment of liberalism on these grounds, see David Gruber, “Foucault's Critique of the Liberal Individual,” Journal of Philosophy (November 1989): 615–621.
57. Nancy Fraser's essay, “Foucault—A Young Conservative?” in her Unruly Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 35–53, provides an excellent summary of the alternative readings of Foucault on the question of whether or not he is a humanist, an issue that has obvious relevance for this study.
58. “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault conducted by Raul Fornet-Betancourt, Helmut Becker, and Alfredo Gomez-Mueller,” Philosophy and Social Cúticism 12, nos. 2–3 (1987): 121.
59. On the double meaning of “subject,” see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction (New York, 1980), 60. For Foucault's critique of liberal individualism, see “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, by Michel Foucault, ed. Colin Gordon (New York, 1980), “Second Lecture,” 98: “The individual is an effect of power…and…the element of its articulation.”
60. For a valuable summary of the efforts of the “popular” Enlightenment and its contribution to modernization and normalization of a recalcitrant rural population, see Jonathan Knudsen, “On Enlightenment for the Common Man” (above, pp. 270–290).
61. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1:60.
62. Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984), 356.
63. See Christoph Menke, “Zur Kritik der hermeneutischen Utopie,” in Ethosder Moderne: Foucault's Kritik der Außclärung, ed. Eva Erdmann, Rainer Forst, and Axel Honneth (Frankfurt and New York, 1990), 102.
64. Michel Foucault, “Kant on Enlightenment and Revolution,” Economy and Society 15, no. 1 (February 1986): 96.
65. Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, 45.
66. Ibid., 49.
67. Ibid., 46.
68. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 351.
69. On the Stoic connection, see Foucault's references to Seneca and Plutarch and his comments about Stoic ethics in “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 341–342, and the interview “Ethic of Care,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, 113.
70. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 341.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid.
73. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam, 1947), 102.
74. Ibid., 107.
75. See Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston, 1971), 313.
76. Ibid., 310.
77. Ibid., 314.
78. Ibid., 315.
79. On this affinity, consult either of two excellent articles: Steven White, “Foucault's Challenge to Critical Theory,” American Political Science Review 80, no. 2 (June 1986): 420–430, or Thomas McCarthy, “The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School,” Political Theory 18, no. 3 (August 1990): 437-461.
80. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston, 1987), 2:99.
81. Ibid., 92. The imperative of taking control of the narratives about oneself also figures prominently in certain feminist versions of autonomy theory. See, e.g., Diana T. Meyers, “Personal Autonomy and the Paradox of Feminine Socialization,” Journal of Philosophy 84, no. 11 (November 1987): 619–628.
82. Ibid., 97.