But this argument falls short, or at least does not get at the whole truth. For the true-to-life entanglements of Murdoch’s protagonists demonstrate that confronting the contingencies and social complications that arise in our own lives can indeed lead to justified doubts about our ability to determine our lives ourselves. It is precisely the ordinariness of these characters and their experiences that casts doubt on the prospect of self-determination. For if my life is defined not by my decisions or my actions but by contingency and indeterminacy, by the social ties and relationships that I am always already entangled in, then it becomes difficult to believe that my own reasoning and my own actions can be decisive factors in my life. The abysses into which Murdoch’s protagonists often fall, along with the melancholy apathy that goes hand in hand with their doubts about the use or point of life and their ability to determine their own lives, make it clear that lived everyday experiences – whether autonomous or precisely not – have a phenomenology and plausibility all their own, one that for the most part is better described by authors of fiction than through contrived – at times downright clumsy – philosophical examples. That is why I will continue to draw on examples from literature in the ensuing chapters.
Despite all of these illuminating descriptions of the non-self-determined aspects of everyday life, however, it is also clear that, in important dimensions of life, self-determination remains our guiding principle – this is the only reason why we and Iris Murdoch can even describe the failure of self-determination as such. It is only in contrast to the normative idea of autonomy that contingencies, obligations, psychological inabilities, and structural obstacles can be characterized as such. Autonomy, I want to argue, has value and significance for us because it is constitutive of our ability to shape ourselves and the world and adopt them as our own. Yet ambivalence, self-alienation, our own inscrutability to ourselves, and structures that impede or obstruct autonomy are all part of our autonomously lived everyday experience – and this is precisely why we are confronted here with tensions.
Personal autonomy, however, also has a decidedly political side. As the Lebanese author Samir Frangieh explains:
I believe that the most important phenomenon that we have witnessed during the revolutions is the rediscovery of personal autonomy. In other words: people are conscious that they can become the makers of their own history. In fact, this is rather new in a region where for decades the individual has been reduced to groups, groups to parties representing them, and parties representing them to their leader. As a result, we found ourselves in a situation in which entire countries were reduced to one person. Examples are Assad’s Syria and the entire Arab world, which was merely defined by 10 names. We are talking about 500 million people here, reduced to between 10 and 15 names. This is precisely what the Arab Spring has changed.8
This political side of personal autonomy still proves to be explosive, not just as a call for change in non-democratic countries but also within liberal-democratic societies: when the limits placed on government encroachments on personal autonomy become structurally compromised, when rights have only formal rather than any material validity, when intrusions by the state threaten to undermine personal autonomy. Such intrusions include government surveillance operations and other violations of informational privacy, as well as social structures, such as patriarchy, that can impede autonomy. This makes it clear that political conditions secure not only negative freedom but positive freedom as well, and that only if both together can ensure autonomy. Therefore the relation between freedom and autonomy will also play an important role in this book.
What I am primarily interested in pursuing in the following chapters, however, is the problem of individual autonomy in everyday life, the side of individual experience and individual capability. We can call this an ethical question as it concerns the possibility of leading an autonomous, well-lived life. I use the term “ethics” here in the broad (Aristotelian) sense that Bernard Williams and others have refamiliarized us with, which deals with questions not only of morality but also of the good life. In later chapters, however, I will also take into account the social and political side of autonomy, which shows how the idea of personal autonomy both is made possible and at the same time can be threatened by social and political conditions.
At this point, I should briefly introduce the various perspectives that I will take up in this book regarding the problem of autonomy. How is the idea of autonomy to be understood, and what tradition is it a part of? In chapter 1, I want to address conceptual issues and elucidate in what sense autonomy is related to individual freedom, what capacities we should ascribe to an autonomous person, and what the limiting cases of such ascriptions are. We will also see that we are only ever autonomous together with others.
Are autonomous action and autonomous reflection necessarily free of any ambivalence? Must an autonomous person always be able to say, “Here I stand, I can do no other”? I consider the problem of the ambivalent person in chapter 2, in which I hope to make clear that ambivalence is by no means always a threat to our autonomy. On the contrary, it is a natural part of our self-determined – and rational – everyday life.
In chapter 3, I ask why autonomy is in fact so valuable and important. I pose this question as the question of the relationship between autonomy and the meaning of life. Is a life meaningful only if it is autonomous? And can it be meaningful – and autonomous – without being happy? Must it be objectively meaningful, or is it enough if it can be understood as autonomous and subjectively meaningful? Here again, I shall draw on literary examples in order to better understand these tensions or contradictions and to demonstrate the constitutive connection between self-determination and meaning in one’s own life.
Persons who act autonomously know what they think and know what they want. That is, in order for individuals to be able to act and live autonomously, they must know themselves. But how – after Freud – can we demand self-transparency as a condition of autonomy? Chapter 4 considers the question of what form of self-awareness and self-knowledge we can reasonably attribute to an autonomous person, given the widespread phenomenon of self-deception. I also discuss whether or not new “self-tracking technologies” are in fact capable of contributing to self-knowledge and thus promoting autonomy.
I take up a different perspective on the tensions in our autonomously lived everyday lives in chapter 5. In the course of interpreting selected passages from various diaries and blogs, I investigate whether the process of reflection that I earlier described as characteristic of autonomy can be found in such writings in exemplary form. If we accept the premise that at least the classic diary is a paradigmatic space of everyday confrontation with one’s own life, then such accounts should be able to help us show what autonomy actually means in everyday life. And looking at modern blogs and vlogs, we can further ask whether this form of confronting one’s own autonomy has changed within and through these new media.
The focus of chapter 6 is the question of the relation between autonomy and the good life. Is post-Kantian moral philosophy capable of developing a substantive theory of the good life at all? Is it ethically defensible to create standards to judge whether a life is good or well lived? With the aid of the concept of alienation and an analysis of why it is that autonomous choice is so critical for the good, autonomous life, I want to probe whether we can make critical statements about the good life without at the same time casting doubt on the autonomy of those who have chosen it or in any case live it.
Chapter 7, on the relation between autonomy and privacy, concerns the ethical as well as the political question of the necessity of protecting individual privacy if living an autonomous life is to be possible. I would like to consider the question of why a free, autonomous