Autonomy. Beate Roessler

Autonomy - Beate Roessler


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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.

      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.

      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.

      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

      In


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