5 - Autonomy, agency and the self

Summary

Autonomy and authenticity are usually seen as largely individual matters. It is often thought that, in trying to understand what it means genuinely to lead one's own life, we start by trying to get a handle on what individuals themselves want, and then examine the ways in which social pressures, political domination, material deprivation and so on interfere with them in ways that threaten or distort the self. This is the picture we encounter in Locke and Hobbes, right on through to contemporary liberalism. And, with some exceptions, it remains the dominant view.

It is decidedly not Jürgen Habermas's view. He takes autonomy, agency, identity, authenticity and the self to be fundamentally intersubjective phenomena. Moreover, even in comparison with relational or social approaches to autonomy, he conceptualizes this social dimension differently and in ways that cut deeper than the now widely accepted idea that our identity is shaped by our surroundings or that many of our deepest convictions can be realized only together with others. As he remarked in recent autobiographical reflections, his early childhood experiences with surgery on his cleft palate, and the frustrating, humiliating difficulties in making himself understood through his speech impediment, “opened [his] eyes to the intersubjective constitution of the human mind and the social core of our subjectivity, as well as to the fragility of communicative forms of life and the fact that socialized individuals are in need of special protection” (BNR: 17).