“A person is not merely a single subject distinguished from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most immediately in contact.”
–Emile Durkheim
“The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.”
–Georg Simmel
“Human rights are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in…A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice.”
–Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Rebuilding Russia: Reflections and Tentative Proposals
Personal autonomy is basically “political,” not in the ordinary sense we use and understand the term as in leading a nation or governing a country. However, the notions of governing and leading are important aspects of it. More than these, we could add more like planning, organizing and controlling, among others. But in personal autonomy, all these are specifically “operationalized” by the agency of the self within the confines of one’s own individual personal context. Personal autonomy is an issue strictly focused on the capability of a moral agent to manage her/his life, administer rules of conduct to make her/his existence worthwhile and decide on whatever s/he wishes her/his life to become.
As a philosophical concern, personal autonomy starts off with fundamental questions one should ask her/himself as: (1) Why am I here? (2) What must I do? and (3) What can I hope for? Nobody has the ultimate power to realistically respond to these questions except the one who has posed them for these questions are not asked by someone to another but to her/himself alone. These questions put the issue at hand in its proper perspective and simultaneously affirms that personal autonomy is prime and foremost an existential matter.
In Sartrean terms, the existential paradigm is founded on the notion that existence precedes essence (cf. Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism”). As far as the meaningfulness of one’s life/being is concerned, there is no pre-ordained/pre-conceived doctrine or principle except the reality of a human person’s being here and now. This is the begin-all of the world which is characterized by meanings, i.e., perceptions, interpretations and conceptions, that emanate from the conscious minds of its human denizens. There are therefore no overpowering, transcendent and supernatural forces through which the meaningfulness of this world and existence in this world has been eternally pre-determined before the emergence of the self-conscious and intelligent homo sapiens sapiens on planet Earth. In this sense, Plato’s Realm of Universal Ideas is nothing but a delusion.
In a significant sense, we say that this world inhabited by us humans is a human world. But in another sense of equal worth, each of us is also a self-constituted “world” whose depth of personal circumstances can never be fully accessible to any other human being except to the individual self and to her/him alone. In a lot of ways, certain decisions we make as well as certain acts we do are solely our individual selves’ own and thus cannot be delegated to others. These decisions and acts range from the physico-biological to the socio-cultural. These are events that constitute the reality of personal autonomy.
But personal autonomy has its limits. We are not only self-constituted individuals but likewise components of a bigger and wider reality called society. Within the social context we have a culture shared with the other members of society. Many of our decisions and actions concern others and not only ourselves. We may assert in full force our personal autonomy on the one hand but the reality of human relations and the importance of moral responsibility to respect the humanity of our fellow human beings, on the other hand, is of equal importance. This reality puts certain limits to personal autonomy.
Using the dialogical language of the Hasidic philosopher, Martin Buber, the human world is not only an “I-It” state of affairs but more importantly, an “I-Thou” (or ” I-You”) reality. The human world is not only an epistemological realm but a relational sphere. In this condition, we, the knowing subjects (noesis), do not only connect with the known objects (noema). We are self-conscious subjects that relate with fellow self-conscious subjects in a personal way. Even at this point, we realize the fact that the existential doesn’t necessarily end outside of personal autonomy but spontaneously extends to its limits at the level of the relational.
Appropriating Sartrean existentialism once more, we say that as personally autonomous individuals we are “beings-for-ourselves”. The responsibility of signifying our own existence is nobody’s task except ours. We basically create ourselves in the sense of making our lives meaningful and essential. We are not complete and perfect entities incapable of change. We are open-ended beings whose lives and individual meanings depend on how we make them. We are in a continual process of change and all factors that relate to such process is within the scope of our personal autonomy.
However, an affirmation of our co-existence with fellow humans widens the range of our being. We are not only “beings-for-ourselves” but also “beings-for-others”. This reality puts limits to personal autonomy without desecrating and relegating to insignificance the inalienable worth of the personal. We remain at the same platform of human dignity but with due respect to the person of the Other. In the process, we submit ourselves to the rules of proper social engagement that uphold and promote the principles of human rights. Having this in mind, we are morally bound to decide and act without violating the basic human rights of other people. Personal autonomy works well within the subjective bounds of one’s own concerns but may also intersect with the concerns of another person. Yet, we ought to always be cognizant of the fact that in the course of such possibility, we don’t step on another’s toes and be the cause of the desecration of the latter’s very own personal autonomy.
(c) Ruel F. Pepa, 2 July 2014
ZETETIKOS 