What it means to be 'autonomous' today

What does it mean to be “autonomous” (from the ancient Greek words for “self” and “law”) — that is, to be able to be one’s own “law-giver”? I put the word in scare quotes because, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as “complete” autonomy on the part of a person or an institution. At best, one can be “relatively” autonomous, insofar as everyone is to some degree dependent on other people, on conventions and on things that he or she has not created. To this extent, then, one is heteronomous, or subject to the law of the “other”.

When Descartes believed, in the 17th century, that he had successfully excluded everything that could be doubted on the slightest grounds, including conventional beliefs, in this way arriving at the one indubitable proposition, namely his famous “Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), he was seriously mistaken. One could forgive him for the oversight, that the language in which he was writing (and thinking), whether it was French or Latin, was an unavoidable conventional system of meaning, without which he could not have arrived at any “original” insight.

After all, it was only in the late 19th century that the so-called “linguistic turn” started taking shape — the realisation that human beings are thoroughly constituted by and through language, as something that pre-exists any individual — and that the “consciousness-paradigm” within which Descartes still worked, gave way to the affirmation of language as the ontological horizon of human existence.

Once this insight had dawned on human beings, the way was paved to the realization that no man or woman is an island, as it were, and that one’s “autonomy” would always have to be placed in relation to various ineluctable dependencies or “subjections” to the “law of the other” — whether it is the laws of language, mathematics, of a specific country, of nature, and so on.

If this is the case, however, does it still make sense to speak of “autonomy”? Yes, as long as one always admits that it means “relative autonomy”. When Kant wrote, in his wonderful little essay, “Was heisst Aufklärung?” (What is enlightenment?), that the motto of enlightenment (with a small “e”; the state of being “enlightened”, or being able to use one’s own reason; not the historical epoch of the “Enlightenment”) is “Sapere aude”, or “Have the courage to think for yourself”, he touched on the core of what it means to be (relatively) autonomous. After all, to exhort one to think for yourself is to imply that others can and do attempt, all the time, to think on one’s behalf, to their own benefit, of course. And these others comprise the field of what one has to resist in one’s own thinking to be able to claim relative autonomy.

There is a better idiom than that of Descartes or Kant, to articulate what such “limited” autonomy amounts to, however, namely that of poststructuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault. Their point of departure is, broadly, that we are “discursively constituted”, which is a succinct way of saying that human identity is structured by language in the sense of discourse. What is discourse? A brief “definition” is that it is language insofar as meaning and power come together in it. In other words, talking about discourse as that which makes humans distinctive, is an acknowledgement that the language we use is not innocent, but carries the imprint of power relations, and the discourse that first structures our psyche configures it in one way or another as far as these power relations are concerned.

There is not a day when every human being is not caught in the web of discourse, that is, in the network of power relations that the language we speak sets up. The most ubiquitous discourse, which surpasses national and cultural boundaries, is probably patriarchy, which we encounter every time someone uses the term “mankind”, instead of “humankind” or every time a so-called “housewife” discovers the discursive “differend” between her and her husband — that he is not really all that interested in what happened during her day of fetching and carrying children to and from school, and still regards his daily work (in business or as a professional of various kinds) as the true arena where human worth is affirmed. And yet, whether it is the discourse of patriarchy, or that of capitalism, as Foucault has reminded us, we are not conclusively “spoken” by it, which is another way of saying that we are not slaves to it. Wherever discourse operates, a counter-discourse can be activated, which means that dominant discourses can be discursively opposed.

Why is this important for understanding what it means to be autonomous? If all human beings are shaped by discourse — which includes not only the languages they use, but the actions they perform, too — the widespread hold that dominant discourses have on people’s actions can be resisted in only one way: a person has to claim for him or herself a different discourse, one of what Foucault (in his study of ancient Hellenistic, that is, Greek and Roman societies) refers to as “self-mastery”.

Importantly, self-mastery does not depend on “information” as much as on the difficult, painstaking development of the ability to distance oneself from those agencies that constantly tend to “infantilise” people, by treating them as if they are children, incapable of thinking and acting as (relatively) autonomous beings. Such agencies are all around one, even more so than during the Hellenistic era, given the “bio-power” that governments, the media, economic institutions like corporations and churches wield over people’s lives today.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that it is easy to adopt a radically different discursive stance in the face of the dominant discourses that surround one and have shaped the actions of the vast majority of people on Earth today. It is very difficult, especially because it requires nothing less than systematically changing the way in which one thinks and — even more important — acts in society. The reason why Foucault looked to ancient Hellenistic society for examples of this kind of thing — in the Stoic and Epicurean Schools of the time, for instance — was to highlight the kind of discursive training that stands in stark contrast to everything that we have inherited from Christianity as well as from Western modernity (all of which, by large, exhort one to be “obedient” — whether to the church, the state, or more subtly, to the behavioural models promoted by the media — rather than to think and act “autonomously”).

But if the need for individuals to learn the art of “autonomous” action was great in Hellenistic times, when far-flung empires supplanted what used to be the more tangible communities of independent Greek city-states, it is far greater today, when (if we take scientific evidence seriously) we probably face an unprecedented ecological disaster in the not-too-distant future. “Autonomous” living today would therefore probably mean the discursive ability to refuse what the Hellenistic schools would call “false” discourses, opting instead for those that enable one to “master” oneself, instead of succumbing to the lure of fashionable discourses such as that of neo-liberal economics (“brand yourself”, “market yourself”), or of globalisation in the popular (neo-colonial) sense of initiating global economic and cultural flows aimed solely at profiting from others (which is fortunately not the only sense “globalisation” has).

In this context, “mastering oneself” would entail negative and affirmative aspects. Among its negative implications would be the cultivation of an ability to resist the ubiquitous discursive injunction, that to get rich in the material sense of the word is the sole purpose of life. It’s not so much that having material possessions is “wrong” — everyone needs a modicum of “material” to live. Rather, it is a matter of not vesting so much worth in such things that they become a precondition for happiness, which is likely to elude one anyway, once this has been made the exclusive aim of living. The most important affirmative side to adopting a radically different discourse of relative autonomy today, I would think, would be the affirmation, in language as well as in action, of the bond between all people and the natural world which, after all, was our species’ home for hundreds of thousands of years (if one includes our immediate predecessors in the genus Homo, namely Homo erectus and Homo habilis). Ironically, this bond is not likely to be affirmed on a large societal scale; it will have to be done by “autonomous” individuals. Perhaps a new discursive practice would start spreading from there and it would unavoidably lead to a different kind of politics than what we are used to.