some notes on autonomy, a.k.a. freedom of the will
1. I is another.
Freedom of which will? For I find that in myself are all sorts of impulses, sometimes coherent, sometimes incoherent; some of them have a certain closeness to that vague center I tend to call "me", and some of them do not-- those ones I often attribute to my "unconscious" or to my body, though I am obliged by medical science (which has demonstrated that large-scale physical changes made to the brain, such as severing the material connecting its two lobes, have as their direct result profound changes in the subjective experience reported by the possessor of that brain) to consider that all the things happening in my "mind" correspond to things happening in the "body" of which my brain is an integrated part. In any case, I don't only experience my self as a single thing; sometimes I want to say, "I'm not feeling like myself today"-- but who else is there for me to feel like? I want one thing, and I want its opposite; I compromise, I decide, and I reverse my own decision. "I is another," writes the poet Arthur Rimbaud, and I know what he means. So does anyone who has ever stopped to ask "What am I doing? What do I want?"
2. The royal we.
Okay, so the self-- my self, your self, anybody's-- isn't really a single thing, even though sometimes it feels like it is. It's multiple, it's plural. Everybody ought to use the royal we-- or perhaps even a parliamentary "we", a we composed of voting constituents. Nonetheless, I find that my self seems to have a kind of integrity, a wobbly agreement of all its associated parts, and this agreement usually hovers around this uncertain but persistent center that I spoke of. When and where that coalition veers away from the center, I find myself doing things quite "in spite of myself", and when the coalition gets too fractured, too far from consensus, I feel terrible and can't seem to do much at all. Fortunately, it doesn't happen too often to me.
3. Compose yourself!
People are constantly asking me why I do what I'm doing, and expect me to give answers accounting for my behavior-- to tell stories about my self. When this happens, I feel obligated to tell stories about my self that portray it as unified, solidary, an autonomous moral agent, rather than as a collection of notions, forces, perceptions and urges grouped around a center whose nature is hard and perhaps even impossible for me to name adequately. When I let slip the complicated truth about my selfhood, my listeners look at me strangely, as if I am someone they cannot really trust, as if I am confused about my self, which I am.
4. D___, a storyteller.
I do the same to other people, without meaning to be mean or make them feel uncomfortable. When I ask somebody "Why are you doing that?" and they answer with "I dunno" or "Well, I thought... but I kinda wanted to..." then I give them my doubtful look (which on me means that my eyebrows rise up or bunch down, depending, and sometimes I give a wry smile or grimace). I have a friend named D___ who used to vex me whenever I ran into her once every few months (after we left high school), because when I asked her "So what have you been up to lately?" she would tell long, twisty, sometimes sad and/or sordid stories about her self and its recent activities and encounters with other selves-- stories that didn't make any sense to me. They seemed to consist of just one episode after another, strung together only by the name (D___) and the body (D___'s) that they referred to in common. Despite the great risks and losses involved in these isolated scenes, there appeared to be no carryover of experience, no learning, no "I made this mistake once, and now I understand myself better; I won't let it happen to me again". Often she would smile and laugh while she told these stories; yet I don't think she was very happy at all. (She's become a much better storyteller in years since, I'm relieved to say.)
5. A way to write letters.
For four and a half years, one of my best friendships was sustained almost solely through correspondence. M____, who knew me from grade school when my family lived in New Jersey, wrote me a letter the summer after high school graduation, ten years after we'd moved to St. Louis, and I wrote back; the astonishing communion of two souls via travelling pieces of paper that resulted has shaped both of our lives. Among other things, she's taught me to write good letters. When I sit down to write a really good letter, I try to recreate for the addressee the setting I'm in-- I'll describe the room, the time of day, what noises are around me, the light I'm writing by, my state of mind-- and little by little bring him or her into my world. I don't do it all at one sitting; I write the letter in pieces, over the course of a few weeks or a month, as I was making entries in a journal. Sometimes I hate to send the letter off, because I feel like the period of time I've been writing it has been like a visit from my friend that will end when I put it in an envelope and mail it. The aim of the writing is to make my friend present to me, and myself present to him or her. And I find there is another aim as well, when the writing of letters stretches out over a period of time-- because changes can happen so fast (I fall in and out of love, I travel from place to place, I change jobs, schools, I get caught up in things)... I try to write my life as a continuity. When the transformations happen quickly, I (without falsifying anything) write them slowly. As I make myself present, I present myself as something stable if not always unified, as an integrity-in-tension, as something capable of being a perpetual and constant friend to M____, as she is to me even when she is far away. It's such a powerful impulse for me that I've come to think it must be universal, the instinct to present a unified self-- or if it isn't, perhaps it ought to be.
6. Let's Pretend We're Real.
I seem to be recommending some kind of centralization of selfhood, a concentration of something many-sided into a single thing that some might find distasteful or even oppressive. "I don't want to subjugate all my parts to a whole," Somebody says. "I don't even want to call them 'parts', because that presupposes a 'whole' which, as you yourself admit, doesn't really exist outside of our social stories. When I kiss my mother good morning, and then go out to do my job as a policeman evicting poor people, both of those actions are me. And both of those roles-- the loving child, the callous cop-- are not me. A role is just another story about the self, a story that excludes whatever realities conflict with it and denies me the capacity for change. I want more than anything else the freedom to change, the ability to totally reconceive and remake myself, with no regard for consistency or other peoples' expectations. That freedom is worth everything-- it is Life itself. As Miguel de Unamuno once said: 'To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.' The more my behavior becomes predictable, the more I correspond to categories other people made up for me, the more the real me vanishes-- the more you can replace me with your ideals, your abstractions, your prescriptions for what I should be!" I nod to this Somebody, and begin to say, "Yes, but..."
7. Giving yourself away.
"I understand what you mean when you say that you want to be able to change yourself," I say to Somebody, who has just told me that she doesn't want to be forced to live up to anybody's preconceptions and expectations. "Lots of times in my life, I've felt that I was being smothered by certain outworn ideas of who I am-- ideas I and the people who knew me sometimes shared. For a long time, I was a shy and awkward person who couldn't find anyone to fall in love with who would love me back. When I stumbled into my first two love relationships, I had to do a lot of rethinking of those stories about myself, examining them in my mind and remembering how they got written; that's one way that I grew through the experience. I revised my self-stories in ways that allow me to be graceful as well as awkward, open as well as shy, and I think it's made me an easier person to be with on the whole. And I don't mean to sound smug, as if I've become so secure and self-possessed that I need never change again-- on the contrary, I don't think I or anyone else could ever really be done changing."
8. Tell the truth, but tell it slant.
"But let me ask you," I continue, addressing Somebody, who has professed her desire to keep her self open to infinite possibility, "are stories always falsehoods? My own answer would be no. Anyone who has ever loved reading novels knows that in a book full of made-up events, made-up people, and made-up places, a kind of honesty can be found that scarce appears elsewhere. I've read some novels that earned my trust more than most people ever do-- novels that admitted things people are too embarassed, too prudish, or too scared to admit. Truth is what you get from people you trust; you trust people who you consider likely to tell you the truth. Both truth and falsehood, then, can exist only in the context of social relationships-- only in the context of the dialogue between people in and about their shared situations, the back-and-forth storytelling of culture. And if that's the case, how can you even talk as if you could abolish all storytelling about the self? I mean, if you replaced all those stories with silence, how much would be left of your self, or anybody else's?"
9. Inside out.
"All right, let's say that nothing would be left of the self if we didn't tell stories about it," Somebody offers. I demur, since I am not sure that nothing would be left; certainly, some elements of selfhood seem to be beyond storytelling, beyond speaking, beyond language as such. Réne Descartes, for one, pointed out that if I try doubting my own existence, the question arises: Who is doing the doubting? Well, I must be doing it-- and when I allow this, I have discovered a sort of naked fact-of-my-existence, right there: the brute reality of my own subjectivity, my own consciousness. (Many philosophers have lately tried to pooh-pooh Cartesian consciousness, but I think their efforts to do so have been unconvincing.) There is this reality to my self which I know as certainly as I can know anything, and it is a reality that others can never know in the same direct, intuitive way. Thus I modestly claim a little ground for the self outside the realm of storytelling. "Very little is left, then, when we take away the stories," she continues. "Very well. Doesn't that mean that we have to accept all the stories that are imposed on us from outside? If there are better stories and worse stories about the self, how do we distinguish them? Why didn't you just keep accepting all the stories others told you about who you were, no matter how negative they were? Haven't you said, essentially, that each of us is only what is said about us?"
10. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy.
"All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self," says Milan Kundera, one of my favorite moody European writers. There is a novel from almost two and a half centuries ago that reads as if it was written just yesterday, a hilarious book by Laurence Sterne called Tristram Shandy. Tristram, the narrator, is trying to tell the story of his life, but he takes half the damn book just to tell the story of the day he was born, mostly because he keeps getting sidetracked-- there's always something interesting just next to whatever he's trying to tell you about, and something else interesting that this reminds him of, and to tell you about that he has to tell you this other story... Instead of a chain of events that leads you from A to B to C and so on, you get a series of marvelous digressions, each more entertaining than the last, leading nowhere in particular and having a wonderful time getting there. The whole thing suggests that Life is not something that will sit still to have its portrait taken, to be numbered and measured, dissected and labeled. While Sterne's book is one of my favorite examples of a true fiction, I nonetheless want to establish some basis for telling stories about the self that make sense, so that who I am at any given moment is not merely a function of the situation, so that I can grow and change and yet have a kind of integrity and stability. Somebody asks me what kind of rationale I can base these distinctions on. I think I can only explain by retelling a story.
11. Being together.
"When I lived with one version of my self," I answer quietly, "I was limited in my interactions. I was, as Herbert Read puts it, not at liberty to commune with other people. Relatively so, at least. One year, the worst year of my life, in ninth grade, I lost my last friends. I was alone a lot, but I didn't experience this as solitude or peace; it was punishment from the world for being different. I wanted to hide from the world, because I was afraid it was going to destroy me if I showed myself to it in the least. I wore the same outfit-- a self-imposed uniform, really-- every day: grey slacks, plain grey or blue Oxford shirt with the tails out, one pair of shoes. I told a story about myself that said 'This is a non-person. He fades into the wallpaper, into the linoleum tiles, and isn't there.' I don't mean to elicit pity," I add, since my listener is Somebody who evinces a distrust of sentiments like pity, and since my story has a point other than how sorry I am for the way I used to feel. "What I mean to point out is that when I began to consciously change myself, which I started to do the year after that, I chose to tell stories about myself which both opened me to a wider variety of experiences and actions, and made me more able to be with others. I discovered I didn't have to throw away elements of my self which were quirky or eccentric in order to do that; I just needed to tell good stories about them, and have the patience and courage to tell them to people I thought might be able to hear them. The new group of friends I formed let me change myself more than I had been able to do in a year of unwanted solitude." I stop, wondering if I have made myself clear. Making oneself clear is a delicate business, as anyone knows who has ever been misunderstood.
12. I and You.
I think there is good reason to want to change one's self: the good reason is that we need to be connected to other selves. Only in connection to other selves can we experience the greatest freedom to change. That might sound odd, since in our culture (America in the late twentieth century) we tend to think of such connections as constricting, and to value the liberty to go where you wanna go, do what you wanna wanna do with whoever you wanna do it with, as The Mamas And The Papas put it. We equate freedom with individuality, individuality with irresponsibility. But to be free, you first have to be, don't you? If that's the case, how much of your being arises from and subsists within social relations? Try this exercise: think of your self as it is now, and think of all of its elements and qualities. Then, one by one or several at a time, subtract from your self everything that comes from someone else: every conversation you've had, every day of school, every word you know, including the word "word", every fight you had, every love, even your own name... And keep going (although I must admit this is impossible) until you are done. What is left of you as an individual? It's hard to say. Not much. Eliminating social experiences means eliminating almost all experiences-- even, if you think about it, experiences which at first don't seem to refer to any other person, such as the sight of dark trees around a moonlit lake, such experiences being mediated in subtle ways by social meanings assigned to things like darkness, trees, the moon, and still water. Perhaps there are a few basic structures of the mind that stand apart from any particular experiences, but these can only be so generalized (like Descartes' "I doubt, therefore I am", which is true for anyone who ever doubts, in any place, at any time) that they hardly qualify as any sort of individuality. Individuality and sociality are indivisible.
13. You and I.
In relationships of trust, we give each other form; we give each other more being. Before something has a shape or a pattern, it isn't really a "something" yet, but a nothing; after a something loses all form, it goes back to nothing. It's the same with us. In Theodore Sturgeon's story "Slow Sculpture", he compares relationships to the art of bonsai: "There is an exclusive and individual treeness to the tree because it is a living thing and living things change-- and there are definite ways in which the tree desires to change. A man sees the tree and in his mind makes certain extensions and extrapolations of what he sees and sets about making them happen. The tree in turn will do only what a tree can do, will resist to the death any attempt to do what it cannot do or to do in less time than it needs. The shaping of a bonsai is therefore always a compromise and always a cooperation. A man cannot create bonsai, nor can a tree. It takes both and they must understand one another." When I think of the way that friends give each other form, and when I try to explain how this relates to a certain concept of freedom, I think of the conversation at the end of Sturgeon's story:
"You said I was angry-- and afraid. You want to know what I'm afraid of."
"Yes."
"You. I am scared to death of you."
"Are you really?"
"You have a way of provoking honesty," he said with some difficulty. "I'll say what I know you're thinking: I'm afraid of any close human relationship. I'm afraid of something I can't take apart with a screwdriver or a mass spectroscope or a table of cosines and tangents. I don't know how to handle it."
His voice was jocular but his hands were shaking.
"You do it by watering one side," she said softly, "or by turning it just so in the sun. You handle it as if it were a living thing, like a species or a woman or a bonsai. It will be what you want it to be if you let it be itself and take the time and the care."
14. Slow Sculpture.
The project of changing ourselves is caught up in the project of knowing ourselves. We are all the products of our histories: we are all born into situations that pre-exist us, formed by our surroundings (even, and sometimes especially, when we rebel against those conditions). History determines us all, in that sense. Our lives are chains of causes and effects, just like any other part of the universe. But something special can happen for human beings: we can reflect on those chains of causes and effects, consider them in our minds, come to understand them, and so come to alter ourselves in the present. In fact, only insofar as one does this kind of introspection can one truly say that "I am changing myself"; without it, it is more accurate to say "I am undergoing changes, I am being changed". It's the difference between activity and passivity.
15. J__, a macho.
I think of a friend from my last year of high school, a fairly messed-up kid named J__ who talked tough, acted phony, strutted and swaggered, and drove recklessly. He acted in a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream with me, and one time we started writing a long piece of fiction together. Me and my other friends put up with his macho asshole act most of the time, but sometimes it was too much. I usually had a little sympathy for him, though, and eventually I became his sole defender to the rest of the group. I wasn't always sure why. One day, though, I almost felt myself vindicated: we were driving back to school from lunch, when he said suddenly, "I wonder if I'm a bigot." Just like that. "Why do you say that?" I asked. "Because my dad's a bigot. And I think I might have gotten some of that from him." (I should add that his dad, from what we knew, was abusive and drank a lot. J__ didn't like him too much.) It was a fascinating moment for him; the only one I can remember when he was completely serious. It has occurred to me since that he probably was a bigot of sorts, for precisely the reason he cited, and that such a moment of recognition, while it carries no guaranteed effect, no magic, is the only way for such a person to open up the possibility of becoming a non-bigot.
16. Being a machine.
If stopped and asked "Why are you doing what you're doing?" most people, at most times and in most places, would be able to tell a story which answered the question. A lot of those stories, however, would be in some important respect untrue; they would be false stories insofar as they would seek to explain away responsibility for the actions, dissolving the acting self into a background of circumstances and causes. The respect in which such stories are untrue is in the context of ethics. "No action which is not voluntary can be called moral," wrote Mohandas K. Gandhi; "So long as we act like machines, there can be no question of morality." For an act to be "voluntary", by definition it must spring from a "free will". To have "free will" is to have autonomy-- to be able to govern oneself. When we do what we do simply because of what was done to us-- when we have not reflected on the history that produced us and made it conscious-- that is when we "act like machines", like the effects of any number of causes, however complex the relation between those might be. Gandhi is saying that our moral life begins only when we start working towards autonomy, towards that consciousness which is the ground of conscience.
17. Being heteronomous.
When I say (along with Gandhi) that without autonomy there is no possibility of morality, I do not mean to discard what I have said before about the intrinsically social nature of the self (in Greek, the autos), nor do I think that the one point negates the other. On the contrary. True freedom grows from relation, connection, commitment. True autonomy-- the ability to govern oneself-- is not the mortal enemy of heteronomy, if the latter is taken in the sense of "being influenced by others". One thing I am arguing for is that there are ways of being-with-others and of being-influenced-by-others that are not only compatible with but actually prerequisites for fully becoming-a-ruler-of-oneself. There is no autonomy without community. Autonomy is a social project.
18. Reconstruction.
One good way of explaining how autonomy is a social project comes from the French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis says that
The Ego of autonomy is not the absolute Self, the monad cleaning and polishing its external-internal surface in order to eliminate the impurities resulting from contact with others.
In other words, the project of becoming autonomous is not about getting rid of everything that has come to you from the rest of the world (as if there would be anything left of your self once you threw away everything social). If autonomy is not anti-social, what is it? Castoriadis says that "autonomy can be conceived of, even in philosophical terms, only as a social problem and as a social relation": it is a kind of social relation in which all the members of the society are enabled to become self-ruling and self-organizing. In the same way, the self that seeks to become autonomous learns not to reject everything it has been given, but to establish different relations between those elements:
[The Ego of autonomy] is the active and lucid agency that constantly reorganizes its own contents, through the help of these same contents, that produces by means of a material and in relation to needs and ideas, all of which are themselves mixtures of what it has already found there before it and what it has produced itself.
So we can use everything that we have received from our cultures-- all the words, the ideas, the symbolic systems, the traditions, the histories-- to transform those cultures, and our selves with them.
19. Being autonomous.
It's so hard to use this language to voice the kind of simultaneity I mean, to express a real unity of perceived opposites in the same breath with each other. Maybe poetry has a better chance than philosophy at putting it straight, as Octavio Paz does in his Sunstone:
--and this our life, when was it truly ours?
and when are we truly whatever we are?
for surely we are not, we never are
anything alone but spinning and emptiness,
crazy faces made in the mirror, horror,
vomit; life is not ours, it is the others',
it is not anybody's, all of us are
life-- the bread of the sun for all the others,
all of those others who are us, we ourselves--
I am the other when I am myself, my acts
are more my own when they are everybody's,
because to be myself I must be other,
go out of myself, seek my self among others,
those others who are not if I do not exist,
others give me the fullness of my existence,
I am not, there is no I, We are for ever,
and life is otherwise, always there, farther,
beyond thee, beyond me, eternal horizon,
life that is dying for us, life that is made for
and invents us, our faces, eats them away,
the thirst for existence, death, bread of us all.
When we put our heads together to try to dream of real alternatives to the way we're living, when we try to publically imagine a community of autonomy, we might have to resort to poetry. Like the stories that are their cousins, poems seem fantastic but are likewise capable of telling truth.
20. Love.
Howard Richards writes: "Think of a time when your feelings caused problems for you and of a time when they helped you. Are you usually grateful for your feelings (a strange question, perhaps, since gratitude itself may be an emotion), or do you usually wish they would leave you alone? How do you regulate them?" He then asks: "In the last sentence of the above question, who is 'you'?" When I asked which will we ought to advocate the freedom of, I think it is the will of the "you" that Howard points to: a self that governs itself in accordance with a principle of humankindness. It is that selfhood which I want to help cultivate in myself, in others.
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