Autonomy, Authenticity and Culture by Geoffrey Brahm Levey

Author:Geoffrey Brahm Levey [Levey, Geoffrey Brahm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Political, Political Science, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781138845213
Google: a26yoQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 22942928
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Of course, it also is rather tricky to formulate standards of minimalist authenticity as coherence in two other dimensions. As we all (should) know, the self has many names in a synchronic perspective and more often than not they conflict with each other. So difficult questions also arise here: Which one is the “real self”? Can or should one require that they are in harmony and, if so, why and how? What does “coherence” mean and imply not only for the “presentation of self in everyday life,” but also for the simultaneous yet competing self-definitions and identities? (see Bader 1991b: 104–120). Moreover, the self is a rather flexible, quixotic target in a diachronic perspective and indeed an individual’s self during her life history has many names as well, whether she is aware of this or not. What does “authenticity as coherence” mean and imply in this regard? How much “continuity” is required and how much (radical) rupture is allowable? A liberal, anti-perfectionist theory of “autonomy as consistency” should clearly allow for Roberto Unger’s “super-liberalism” and his (mythology of) frenzied, context-smashing animals (Unger 1984) as well as for ultra-orthodox religious adherents and their (mythology) of the ultra-stable and identical self. In other words, “authenticity” has to be completely stripped from all remnants of romantic or existentialist self-creation or authorship of an original, unique self6 (which, by the way, is nowadays shamelessly exploited by commercial branding strategies).

Looking back at the attempts to specify minimalist thresholds and criteria of liberal autonomy as competencies and as authenticity we have to acknowledge that huge difficulties remain even for a sober, realistic approach. Perhaps the distinction between the concept of a minimal liberal autonomy and a broader transcultural and transhistorical concept of agency will diminish in this process. In any case, we can understand why productive theories of liberal autonomy ultimately need to focus on the circumstances or conditions of individual autonomy (or agency, more generally), to which I now turn.

The circumstances of individual autonomy

The external circumstances of individual autonomy include socioeconomic, social, educational, legal, political, and cultural conditions. In earlier work, I dealt extensively with the most important legal and political conditions (Bader 2007a: chapter 6) and the tensions between individual and collective autonomy within LDC (chapters 4 and 5). Hence, in order to avoid repetition, I want to focus here only on social-cum-educational and cultural conditions.

Compared with some competencies and certainly with authenticity, external circumstances do not depend on introspection and subjective feelings and reasoning but can be analyzed in a more objective way. While this is a huge advantage for possible policies of liberal democratic states, it certainly does not mean that their analysis and design is easy. All is contested and my preferred strategy is to find reasonable and realistic thresholds, that is, what minimal autonomy and minimal morality require and exclude. This negative approach of specifying serious violations of autonomy, minimally understood, is clearly at odds with the still reigning maximizing or optimizing theories that are not satisfied with, for example,

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