in thinking about the human relationship with being “Autonomous”…
a few thoughts came to mind…
one might rethink the entire modern era, as a search for being “Autonomous”
for example in the Renaissance, we see the problem of being “Autonomous”
began to stir…and we see the notion of being “Autonomous” practiced as
ART, and in the lives of the “Artist”…think about the Middle Ages…think
about the people and Artist of the Middle ages… there was no thought to
being “Autonomous” to the church…either you were in or you were out
and if you were out, you were disqualified from any engagement with both
the religious and the political forms of the age… there was no option to
be Autonomous in the Medieval period…
and then, as I mentioned, we have the Renaissance, where people began to
move away from the dogmatic nature of existence… where you were expected
to engage with both the religious and the political functions of the existence as
they told you how to engage with them… no one was Autonomous in the middle ages…
you did as you were told…
the key to understanding the entire modern age need for being Autonomous lie in
the entire Reformation…in the Reformation comes our modern understanding of
the nature of and the being Autonomous…
the Enlightenment was simple an attempt to systemize the Reformation
understanding of being Autonomous…
think about someone like Descartes… his “method”…what was left after
he removed everything… that was a search for being Autonomous…
now he may not have thought of it that way, but that certainly was the
result of his search for “certainty”…the “I think therefore I am”
is an engagement with being Autonomous…
as mentioned, the Enlightenment was an entire intellectual
understanding of what it meant to be Autonomous…
and note that Kant and Hegel, were being Autonomous is, perhaps,
the central concept of both philosophers… how is one supposed to
be Autonomous and how exactly has the search for being Autonomous
has been central to both history and philosophy…(Hegel)
for Kant, for one to be Autonomous, meant that they followed the
the “duty” that one created for oneself…
Recall this saying by Kant:
“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and
awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens
above me and the moral law within me”
that Moral law, for Kant, was the key to being Autonomous…to fulfill
one’s duty to one’s own moral law, which Kant thought was
built into us, a priori knowledge is “knowledge that is absolutely independent
of all experience” was the point of being Autonomous…
but really, is being Autonomous really about acting upon the “moral” laws
built within us? laws built into us by god… although Kant never mentioned
this, this is what he meant… the moral laws that god built into us…
the “duties” that we have to obey god’s laws… Duties that were in us,
“a priori” that is being Autonomous according to Kant…
as all of modern philosophy is a rift off of Kant, that means the entire
history of modern philosophy is a rift off of being Autonomous…
and let us think about philosophers after Kant, like Hegel and Kierkegaard…
for example…Hegel wrote all about the “spirit of the age” what if we
think about “spirit” as just another way of saying Autonomous?
now notice, I am not stating facts, I am simple asking a question…
what if Hegel was simply showing us the history of being Autonomous when
he refers to the history of spirit…
let us engage with Kierkegaard, think about his message… he clearly
had a message about being Autonomous… think about his hatred of
being a “modern” man… which he clearly doesn’t believe to be
Autonomous…“the crowd is untruth” or something like that
K. wrote…and this…
“truth always rests with the minority… because the minority is generally
formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a
majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion”
K. message was about being Autonomous in a modern society…
as was Nietzsche… he was, perhaps, the philosopher who
was most engaged with Autonomy…
and once again think about the historical situation of the 18th and
19th century…man’s belief in god was diminished during those
200 years… in part because of the various revolutions, science,
the industrial, the political, the social and the philosophical
revolutions of the modern age…
so if god is no longer the standard for modern man to work out
his autonomy, then what was the standard? upon what do we
hold to in regards to being Autonomous?
and here we are today… where being Autonomous is no longer the
ideal that it once was… since the time of Luther, say 1500 to 2000 AD…
but I hold that the questions perhaps the only question of the 21st century,
is this, how do we become Autonomous since we have lost our faith in the ism’s
and ideologies that supported human beings for 1500 years?
is the ism of capitalism really bring out being Autonomous? no, I hold
that one of failures, one of many, of capitalism is that it doesn’t bring
about an increase in being autonomous… in fact, I would suggest that ism’s like
capitalism, communism, religions like Buddhism and Catholicism
and even democracy, bring about less Autonomy to modern man then
before…
think about the man who opposes capitalism… he is declared to be
an heretic, a anarchist, an socialist, unamerican, atheists…
there is to be no, NO opposition to the ism of capitalism…one
must have and hold that capitalism to be the one and only form of
economic system worthy of the human being… that belief, capitalism isn’t
about being Autonomous, is it?
the modern day question of how does one become Autonomous, is really
a question about how do we fit into our modern world, as we are seen
as and defined by being numbers, my social security number, my work number,
my driver license, my passport number…I am not a human being within society,
I am a number and how does my being seen only as a number in our modern day society,
being Autonomous? How does one gain Autonomy by only being a number in a world wide system?
this question of Autonomy is a far greater question then it ever was for
Kant or Hegel or Kierkegaard or Nietzsche? they didn’t face a world that
has no need for or doesn’t even engage in any type of questions about
being Autonomous or what it means to be autonomous…
so how do we readmit the question of being an Autonomous person into
modern society?
what needs to happen that will make being an Autonomous person,
something important again?
Kropotkin