autonomy

The dominant political unit of ancient Greece was the polis or the city-state. Greece's many mountains, islands, and isthmuses formed pockets where discrete socioeconomic entities arose. Each city's traditions, rites, and resources were long-established and unique. And for that reason, the organic identity of the polis was fiercely defended. The ideal was autonomia, the freedom of the polis to determine its own laws and to be free from a hegemon's will.

Autonomy descends from the Greek auto- (self) and nómos (law). The word appears often in the context of negotiated and fragile standing. In History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides writes of a weaker city pleading for its autonomy before a stronger one. Autonomia was never a solitary characteristic, but an attribute of a community, itself embedded within a system of powers. It was something recognized or revoked by others.

We see 'autonomy' most decisively turning to the self and mind during the Enlightenment, particularly through the work of Immanuel Kant. Autonomy was the individual's application of moral law to oneself. It is an attribute "by which it is a law to itself (independently of any property of objects of volition)." If an individual acts on an ephemeral desire, it is heteronomy, as those desires are caused or conditioned by the situation rather than by universal maxims. In his famous "What Is Enlightenment?," Kant dares us to think for ourselves (sapere aude). Yet more deeply, he argues that enlightenment is the public use of reason. To think aloud in front of an audience of other thinkers who can verify and legitimize your reasoning.

Autonomy was born relational, public, and precarious.

We are in an era increasingly agitated with experts. After all, technocrats have held the reins for decades, yet our material, social, and spiritual realities have degraded. Trust in informational institutions like media and medicine has plummeted. The Internet allows us to bypass traditional knowledge gatekeepers so we can "do our own research." Meanwhile, social media platforms elevate sensational and contrarian viewpoints, so that niche opinions appear like gospel. All of this feeds and is fed by modern Western culture's emphasis on self-definition. Rejection of mainstream consensus becomes a form of intellectual and cultural superiority. Thus, "free-thinkers" and "contrarians" abound, those who proclaim their minds self-made. But that's impossible.

"I think for myself." Even that very phrase is constituted of words formed and shaped by countless others. No language is intelligible to only one person. Meaning is something that requires public criteria of correct use. Thinking runs on language, and language is inherited and communal, ergo: no mind can be self-made! Heavyweight philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein makes this point most saliently. No one builds their own mind from scratch in isolation. A solitary mind has no way of anchoring the meaning of its own thoughts, and so paradoxically, individuality depends on participation in a larger community.

Autonomy cannot be an atomized attribute, but an interdependent one. The concept of "second persons," coined by New Zealand philosopher Annette Baier, rejects the view of humanity as isolated individuals. We come after and before others in a continuous chain of existence. Most prominently in childhood, we learn from others the skills of being a person. Beautifully, she argues that self-consciousness develops because we are addressed by and respond to other second persons, learning the linguistic and social meaning of "you." Jennifer Nedelsky's "Reconceiving Autonomy" reinforces that autonomy is downstream of being cared for. It is best fostered by relationships (especially early caregiving) rather than by non-interference.

Autonomy demands reflection, self-trust, the imagination of alternatives. These capacities are built and only built via relationships with other human beings. Autonomy is an achievement of good dependence, not the absence of dependence. We must not divorce ourselves from the expertise of others, but develop a relation of healthy skepticism.

No single mind navigates a ship. The captain may direct its goings, but a system of minds and instruments keeps it afloat. It takes a crew to man a ship. Just as it takes a tribe to discover fire, learn local flora and fauna, and raise children. The idea that individuals can think and act independently and rationally is a myth that fuels misperceptions of autonomy. It was exactly Homo Sapiens' knack for thinking in large groups—synthesizing and sharing knowledge—that made us undisputed masters of the planet.

Yuval Harari's Sapiens argues that our belief in shared fictions builds collective capacity. When chimpanzee bands grow beyond 100-ish members, they collapse. Humans, however, can cooperate flexibly in groups numbering in the millions. Our knowledge is stitched together with the fabric of fictions: capitalism, animism, Islam, limited liability companies, the nations of France and Eswatini, Christianity, human rights. No one individual could build a palace or a nuclear weapon, but here we are.

Sloman and Fernbach's The Knowledge Illusion examines both our sheer ignorance as individuals and our unfathomable wisdom as a collective. Unlike hunter-gatherers (who knew a vast array of skills and expertise), we modern humans know humblingly little. Do I know how a ballpoint pen works? A zipper? I instinctively want to say I do, because I use both so often. But I only have a faint idea. We feel like we know a lot, but that is only because we treat other humans' knowledge as our own. And not just of other humans, but the knowledge that has bled onto tablets and notebooks and phones.

Yet we evolved for the complexity of a savanna. Not a hyper-globalized and digitized world. Our reliance on groupthink has been extraordinarily helpful, but now leads us to hold diehard views on issues we haven't a clue about. We must recognize and appreciate humanity's distributed cognition. We must be aware of our personal shortcomings—our capacity for error, irrationality, and ignorance. Autonomy does not and should not have to forsake the knowledge of others.

The goddess Circe warned Ulysses (or Odysseus) of the sirens and their bewitching song. While his men plugged their ears with wax, Ulysses, consumed with curiosity, wished to listen. Per Circe's command, his crew tied him to the mast with knotted rope, so he would not join the "great heaps of men, flesh rotting from their bones, their skin all shriveled up (Wilson, 12.46-7). To maximize his own autonomy—to listen to the Sirens when no one else could—he had to restrict himself.

Jon Elster's Ulysses and the Sirens argues that the deepest expression of autonomy is precommitment. To stay true to his overarching goals and values, Ulysses chose to bind his future self and avoid temptation and impulse. We confuse autonomy with the lack of constraints, but the free individual is the very author of her own constraints. Delete that app, keep the sabbath, submit to an editor, honor that debt! Consider and formulate your own bindings.

As we will see in the two Shadow meditations below, the ideal of precommitment is an easy discriminator between true and false autonomies. The Free-Thinker refuses all restrictions and is thus governed by impulse. The Contrarian accepts constraints she never examined. The Erudite is lashed to the mast on her own orders.

A short but sweet Aesopian fable goes like this:

A hungry fox tries to reach a grapevine, and despite giving it his best efforts, is unable to reach them. As the fox left, she remarked, "Oh, you aren't even ripe yet! I don't need any sour grapes."

This describes something that Jon Elster calls adaptive preferences. Our desires are subconsciously reshaped by constraints. Rather than accept the maladjustment of defeat, we alter our original volition and strive for nothing we aren't sure we'll achieve. The caged bird forsakes the sky and sits smug in her wisdom.

Isiah Berlin, in "Two Concepts of Liberty," details the rationale behind redefining your freedom on account of what you cannot have. If I am prevented from my aims, either by whim or nature or fellow humans, "I must liberate myself from desires that I know I can not realize." He says, "I wish to be master of my kingdom, but my frontiers are long and insecure... I contract them in order to reduce or eliminate the vulnerable area." What follows is Berlin's famous line of retreating into the inner citadel, a place where one cannot be touched by "external blind force, nor human malice." With a wounded leg, you can either do the hard work of healing or amputate. Autonomy is not chopping off a leg to celebrate freedom from it. Autonomy demands a rigorous self-examination not just of your beliefs, but your wants, asking who or what shaped them.

Berlin calls this the "traditional self-emancipation of ascetics and quietists," a retreat available to stoics and Buddhist sages alike: abandon the path rather than clear the obstacles from it. "All political isolationism, all economic autarky, every form of autonomy, has in it some element of this attitude," when we recoil into insulation. We become sheltered from any voice we did not choose to hear. This is not freedom, but "the search for security." Do not mistake self-accommodation for autonomy.

"You don't owe anyone anything." One of the many horseshit mantras to emerge from the excesses of therapy culture and self-help platforms. I respect the need to help victims of toxic families or abusive environments. I understand the impulse of hyper-individualized self-preservation in a world of collectivist pressures. Yet that mindset is false and it is dangerous. The so-called 'Free-Thinker' is not just a manosphere trope of chauvinism and ego-worship. It can also manifest as anyone who rejects their debt to others and closes their mind to public scrutiny.

Traditional ethics ignore how vulnerable human beings are, particularly in infancy, illness, and old age. Alasdair MacIntyre's Dependent Rational Animals roots our rationality and morality in our shared animal vulnerability. We are born helpless and we will likely die helpless. The stage of life that is independent and rational is a stage in a lifecycle that begins and ends in dependence and irrationality. We become mature inside "networks of giving and receiving." We rack up debts to others that can never be fully repaid or even calculated. MacIntyre argues that we must acknowledge our dependence to flourish. We can simultaneously have independent thought, while accepting our mutual need to give and receive care within local communities.

French sociologist Marcel Mauss, in The Gift (Essai sur le don), highlights the three functions of gifts. First, someone gives something to another, beginning a social relationship. The other receives the gift, acknowledging the giver and the bond. Finally, the act must be repaid to maintain balance, honor, and peace. Obligation is the fabric of every human society ever studied. It is economic, it is spiritual, it is political, and it is cultural.

Most associate bartering with primitive culture, but ancient groups used informal credit. American anthropologist David Graeber, in Debt, argues that the imprecise, informal, community-building indebtedness of organic human exchange only gave way to the firmly enforced, money-denominated debts through the introduction of state-sponsored violence. We evolved to consider the social and personal dimensions of debt. The demand to owe nothing is the fantasy of someone who wants her relations settled in cash so they can be terminated. In other words, "you don't owe anyone anything" is not a philosophy of freedom but of exit. Because owing is an intersubjective relation, the person who owes nothing is also owed nothing. They are destitute, tetherless.

Ayn Rand, that bitch, did immeasurable damage to our view of humanity. In Atlas Shrugged, John Galt vows: "I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." She paints the rugged individual as besieged by moochers. She recasts the mind as pristine private property. Galt's Gulch, a fantasy town secluded in a Colorado mountain valley, serves as Rand's ideal society. In short, hundreds of rich artists, judges, and entrepreneurs live in blissful, selfish harmony to escape the evil socialist bureaucracy of the world government. The unrealism is astounding: the town requires Galt's motor, a fictional device that can produce infinite energy. They somehow grow tobacco and oranges in the mountains of Colorado. Laborers simply do not exist, and it is as if Rand believes material prosperity grows out of sheer willpower. The Gulch never did and will never exist. Yet the most astounding feats of human ingenuity were born in networks. Bell Labs, the Manhattan Project, Xerox PARC, and the open-source movement, for examples. Autonomy is not self-indulgence, nor selfish go-it-alone-ism. Autonomy is accepting dependence on others, one's own contamination by others. Autonomy is paying it forward.

The Contrarian is governed entirely by what she opposes. Her positions are computable from her enemies'. We associate intellectual and cultural superiority with dissidence and nonconformity, and often rightly so! Yet when you simply manufacture dissent for the sake of dissenting (or worse, for provocation), you are naïve. The conformist does not examine their opinions but moves with the ebbs and flows of the mainstream. The non-conformist, without critical thinking, merely reacts, parasitic on whatever the mainstream happens to be. She is pure negation.

And so the thoughtless contrarian is equivalent in method to the thoughtless conformist. Evil doesn't have to arise from malice or conviction, but by the lack of what Hannah Arendt calls the "two-in-one." That conversation between me and myself, the act of thinking as a perpetual self-interrogation. Because even solitary thinking is structured as a relationship, the Self can be divided into speaker and auditor and audience. To be truly present in your own thoughts is to confront and question your convictions. If you neglect to self-legislate and introspect, if you outsource judgment, that vacancy will blind you to what is good or bad. Arendt calls this process the "banality of evil," which is thoughtlessness and reflexive obedience that lead ordinary people to commit horrific acts. Autonomy cannot be downstream from blind opposition.