Autonomy Metaphor: Men as Leaves

Autonomy Metaphor: Men as Leaves

John Locke's Moral Theory

Leaves of Grass & Autonomy

The concept of Autonomy in "Paradise Lost"

Aeneid and Free Will

Inferno

The idea of freedom in Nature

Autonomy and Liberty in the Literary Context

The concept of Practical Freedom in the philosophy of Kant

Equality and Freedom

The evolution of the idea of autonomy:

Within the conceptual framework of traditional philosophy, it is indeed very difficult to understand how freedom and non-sovereignty can exist together…Actually it is as unrealistic to deny freedom because of the fact of human non-sovereignty as it is dangerous to believe that once can be free…as an individual or as a group…only if he is sovereign..Under human conditions…freedom and sovereignty are so little identical that they cannot even exist simultaneously." (Hannah Arendt, 164)

Autonomy can simply be defined as the ability to act independently. Autonomous actors are free agents having a control on their fates to govern their affairs without the constraints of others or the structure and they also need to hold sufficient resources and power to make their desires effective. It means full liberty. An autonomous actor would act from its desires rather than other forces like the influence of the structure over agency. The term "autonomy" is derived from the Greek "autos" (self) and "nomos" (law or rule), and means literally "the having or making of one's own laws." (John Christman, 27)

The current thesis focuses the evolution of the concept of autonomy in the metaphor of men as leaves. The author will discuss the idea of liberty and independence as discussed by Whitman, Kant, and Aristotle. The author will also discuss the John Locke's theory of the state of nature as relevant for natural moral rights. The evolution of concept of liberty; positive and negative liberty and how they are related to each other as well as moral theory followed by a discussion of the appropriate concept of human liberty.

Autonomy and Liberty in the Literary Context

The literature on freewill and determinism is one of the most extensive discussions in the history of philosophy (Kane, 23) yet, libertarians have a great difficulty in finding an explanation for the "Libertarian Dilemma," which is related to the problem of compatibility between free-will and indeterminism. Even if there are agency actions that are not determined, they must be indeterminate, which would mean that they are actually happenings of chance. If it is by chance then its explanation turns to be arbitrary. Even if we recognize the existence of chance and its incompatibility with determinism, it seems to be incompatible with indeterminism as well. "Even some of the greatest defenders of libertarianism, such as Immanuel Kant, have argued that we need to believe in libertarian freedom to make sense of morality and true responsibility, but we cannot completely understand such a freedom in theoretical and scientific terms. (Kane, 2005)

Externalism, in principle, does not reject the idea of free-will but because of its broader framework provides the ground for integrating individual properties. If an externalist theory is able to ignore individual properties at the early stage just by providing a comprehensive nature for agency, it can integrate them in a compatibility form. Compared to irreversible nature of internalist assumptions, externalist theories can refine the intentions of agents.

Within his constructivist theory, Piaget described two kinds of morality, autonomy and heteronomy. By autonomy, Piaget did not mean the independence of doing things by oneself or the right to self-governs. The autonomous person has the ability to be self-governing and to think for oneself. According to Kamii, "Autonomy is the ability to decide between right and wrong in the moral realm and between truth and untruth in the intellectual realm by taking all relevant factors into account, independently of rewards or punishments" (p. 672). Deci and Ryan defined autonomy as "action that is chosen; action for which one is responsible," (p. 1025) whereas heteronomous individuals are governed by someone other than themselves. Autonomy, mutual respect, and empowerment are the goals of the constructivist classroom (Fosnot, 38). If adults do not overuse their authority, children naturally evolve toward autonomous thinking. Although young children are not yet developmentally or emotionally capable of being autonomous, this does not invalidate supporting all children in the process of learning and developing the attitudes and abilities they will need to become self-regulating as adults (Palmer & Wehmeyer, 115).

Yet there are debates on the freedom that there is two types of liberty negative and positive. Early realists like Niebuhr were of the view that human nature is actually bad, relating that assumption to the concept of original sin.

"but thought this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of license; though man in the state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in this possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone; and reason which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions."

The principle of liberty is fundamental for liberation theories of justice. It appears to be widely assumed by many libertarians and their critics that a fundamental natural right to liberty is a fundamental right to negative liberty. As such, liberty is seen as a competing principle with human welfare. (35) there has been a debate that an adequate principle of liberty would need to incorporate aspects of the negative and positive notions. Our moral right to liberty, hence, would include some measure of positive freedom as well.

Within the confines of libertarian theory it would seem that ideal theory and the presumption of strict compliance are essential in delimiting our moral rights. However, one of the problems in saying this is that libertarians are themselves of different persuasions. Normore helps to clarify this for us:

"Libertarian capitalists and libertarian socialists have both, as their best, been motivated by the belief that persons should be free from the impediments which give others power over them. The have disagreed about what those are." (Normore, 201)

Leaves of Grass & Autonomy

Leaves of Grass is the famous collections poetry by Walt Whitman. Here we see the evolution of independences and freedom such as his poem "the song of myself" where he states;'

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,

And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,

And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,

In his poetry we find the evolution of idea of independence and liberty of man. He used his poetic ability in the favor of human liberty and against the slavery. It was in 1845 when he started supporting the ordinary workers and unionism. Basically he was of the view that slavery is not good economically as the broadening the trend of slavery and discovering new states for obtaining slaves will ultimately led to the less jobs for Whiteman. Later his views were completely changed about and turned to be against slavery when he heard the lecture of Henry Giles. Giles was successful to convince his that slavery was unjust "by focusing on the slave's humanity instead of the slaveholder's immorality and cruelty" (Loving 112). This change of focus can be found in Leaves of Grass. Also at this point we find that he rediscovered the Emerson as in his book Brooklyn Eagle, he quoted a paragraph (113) by Emerson stating;

When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embalmed in beauty. Behind us, we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do afar off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and the terrible, are lures of memory…Even the corpse that has lain in the chambers, has added a lose men ornament to the house. The soul will not know either deformity or pain (Loving, 113)

The echo of Emerson's philosophy can be felt in the Whitman Leaves of Grass and it seems that his ideas when comes under Whitman cover a great meaning.

Leaves of Grass was published in 1855 by Whitman. It was such a great work that immediately after its publication both supporter and opponents showed great reaction. We also find the evolution of equality in a "nature that is shared by all individuals alike" and this is the major concept that emerged in his poetry. This statement of equality is evident from "I speak the pass-primeval…I give the sign of democracy, By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms. (Leaves, 680)

Similarly Whitman informs us:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,

You shall possess the good of the earth and sun…there are millions of suns left,

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand…nor look through the eyes of the dead…nor feed on the specters in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me. (Leaves, 663)

America as a democratic state and freedom of individuals was the greatest dream of Whiteman that is evident from the poems in Leave of the Grass

OI believe there is nothing real but America and Freedom!

O to sternly reject all except Democracy! (Roy, 106)

He wanted to see America free of all the evils of democracy such as corruption.

The symbol of leaves and grass itself depict the idea of independence and democracy. As leaves are free and are bound to their nature by attaching to plants in the spring and detaching in the autumn. It is their nature and no one can suppress them to act against their nature. Similarly cluster of grass is the symbol of democracy in the poetry of Whitman. By using grass the poet constructs the bond between man and nature.

In one sense the image of grass is the symbol of poet himself who like all other objects of nature himself is an independent being. Yet he himself explains the grass in the answer and question of a child "How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is/any more than he." (Song of Myself, 48) but when he give invitation to his "soul at his ease observing" the grass, he comes to know of its symbolic meaning and describes it as "flag" of disposition, "out of hopeful green stuff woven." Thus grass is the symbol of independence and liberty.

Similarly the leaves are the symbol of equality and freedom

And that a kelson of the creation is love,

And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,

And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,

And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap's stones, elder, mullein and poke-weed.

The concept of Autonomy in "Paradise Lost"

In Paradise Lost, Milton gives the public role of conscience its inception at the fall. Adam's nominal role as the fore bearer of autonomous reason would appear to place him in a position of epistemological authority over Eve, whose infamous 'rebellion' against him has come to represent her own capacity for autonomous, reasoned decisions. I argue, however, that the fall, for Milton, is the story of reason's education, one that begins with Adam's belief that reason is an autonomous principle of action that derives its sense directly from God, and ends with his conviction that reason is never autonomous to begin with, but draws its sense from the drama of human relations (a conviction, I argue, that Eve has always possessed). In the fall, Milton gives us a story about the relationship between reason and embodiment, a relationship that necessarily preexists Eve's "strange / Desire of wandering," both in that Adam always depends on Eve's sense of the world to make sense of his own experience and in that any vision of the fall is a vision given with postlapsarian eyes. Adam's prelapsarian vision of reason is as illusory for him as it is for his postlapsarian readers. Reason can always imagine itself as exercising principles that need no effort of justification to deserve their intelligibility in the world. But it is here that Milton gives the figure of Eve its crucial import.

Eve is not merely a device designed to thwart Adam and propel the poem from theodicy into drama; rather, Eve challenges Adam's belief that reason is an autonomous faculty that stands apart from his experiences. Neither is she merely the embodiment of the material world and its snares and temptations. Rather, it is both in Eve's sustained curiosity about the natural world and in the primacy she gives to her relationship with Adam that Eve demonstrates reason as a phenomenally-bound activity of the mind. It is only when Adam's worldview is threatened, on the other hand, that he begins to experience the embodied center of rational activity. Because reason draws its sense from the contingent and vulnerable territory of self-understanding, it, too, is vulnerable, susceptible, as Adam comes to find, to the slanted and misleading quality of his perception -- those "imaginations" and "airy shapes" he warns Eve at the beginning of Book V must be combated with reason. There is a mode of reading the story of Adam and Eve that would see the fall as nothing other than the opportunity for blame and regret. Milton gives us something else. Before the fall Adam's sense of himself and of Eve has never been threatened by incoherence of any kind, and its coherence derives from his mistaken perception that Eve's lack of interest in things divine reflects a diminished intellectual faculty relative to himself. Adam's mentality, like that of a metaphysician, is more interested in speculation about the realm of the divine than he is in understanding the ways in which his own mind is an extension of nature and human community. Adam is clearly threatened by the possibility that his own mind is not adequate to control either nature or human community: Eden's various images of "wanton growth," for example, "Ask riddance" just as Eve is "Too much ornament" that requires control through her constant submission. In this way, Adam's metaphysical impulses reflect a posture of defense against the very material that gives his life meaning. Eve's lack of interest in things divine, on the other hand, reflects a receptive attitude to that same material. Her thoughts, never preoccupied, as Adam's are, with "matters hid," suggests that, for her, human sense is the only kind of sense there is. This is not a mark of diminished intellect; it is the thinking of a mature humanist -- one for whom empirical and social experience are both imperfect and adequate measures of human knowledge. It is not until Michael teaches him that his own intellectual faculty was always diminished (and yet still sufficient) relative to God that Adam becomes attuned to the mind's embodiment. And because Eve stands as a figure so attuned, Paradise Lost is a poem with conscience.

The course of redemption through which Michael leads Adam in Books XI and XII of Paradise Lost is essentially about bringing Adam into a correct relation to the expressions of conscience after the fall, a relation that involves and depends on Eve's particular knowledge and experience of both the world and of Adam. The fall is not a matter of lost unity with an immutable, truth entire, but a matter of lost unity with the sense of such a unity. For Milton, conscience was always susceptible of error. But Adam never questions his own convictions until this poignant moment in Book XII, especially where he assumes that Eve must repress her desire to be free from his authority -- an assumption that derives from his own false sense that submission is as limiting as freedom is limitless.

While Paradise Lost and Book XII in particular, does offer a very powerful argument in favor of readers of Milton who contend that a politics of autonomy is not available in his republicanism, the idea that this reflects a deficiency in his politics is predicated on the assumption that Milton's subject aims for a rational autonomy that never really appears either because rational autonomy is itself a chimera, bound conceptually by bourgeois exclusivity, or because devotion to God impedes it. Barker argues that in dedicating himself to the redemptive feature of intellectual pursuits, Milton inadvertently usurps the monarch's for Milton, a society is the public face of conscience, expressing in its laws and institutions its own collective good or bad conscience. 101 In this way, a government that recognizes man's freedom of conviction isn't enough; it must also be a government that recognizes itself as a body of men that holds convictions. Embedded in this view is the idea that a government is accountable to the same principle of justice that expresses the convictions of conscience. To govern according to conscience is to acknowledge law's limited capacity for justice; it is to govern with equity.

Milton does not separate church and state in the sense that he regards state sanctioned authority as secular; he separates "rule by civil power" from "things to be ruled only by spiritual." This is a separation of institutional from personal authority that not only guarantees personal freedom, but also enables governors to exercise their own consciences in the political arena. A society open to the free exchange of ideas is the society in which the "common rule and touchstone is the scripture" for "nothing can be more protestantly permitted than a free and lawful debate at all times by writing, conference, or disputation of what opinion soever, disputable by scripture."107 This is a Protestant vision of government. When Milton says, "any law against conscience is alike in force against any conscience," it is important to keep in mind that he addresses a parliamentary audience -- men of conscience whose authority was attained by the very discourse of liberty that Milton engages to make his argument.

Aeneid and Free Will

The Aeneid as a whole presents itself as a poem to Aeneas, Rome and Golden Age of Augustus. It tells the odyssey of Aeneas who, having fled form the wasteland of Troy, conquered many difficulties in exile and finally established a settlement in Latium. As Jupiter prophesies in Aeneid I, Rome will be founded 333 years later and the empire will be an "emporium sine fine"("empire without end." 1. 279) (1) With Aeneas' conquering of Turnus at the very end of the epic, Trojans begin to realize their coalescence with Latins, and it is from their mixture of blood that the pious race of Rome originates. Throughout the whole text Virgil weaves the details of Roman history into Aeneas' journey and displays them vividly as future visions. In this way he fuses historical reality into poetic imagination.

In this tale, the readers are introduced with the future of Rome and the concept of free will of man. Also there is concept of independence and free will.

Inferno

Inferno is the corrupted version of an earthly city that, in Augustine's depiction, is represented by pagan Rome. Soul as stated by Thomas has two powers; intellect and will. In the context of Inferno I, such state is personified by the principle character's wandering in the dark wood. The three beasts the pilgrim encounters symbolize the corrupted forces of human will respectively: incontinence, violence and malice. It is according to the order of these corrupted appetites that the moral system of Inferno is constructed. In the central par to Purgatorio, a Thomastic understanding of love and free will is uttered by Marco Lombardo, a pilgrim on the terrace of wrath, and by Virgil himself.

It is perhaps not difficult to envision how these two conceptions of freedom might come into tension with each other. The first conception of freedom -- freedom as ruling and being ruled in turn -- was an integral component of the basic institutional framework of Athenian democracy. Such a conception of democratic freedom is directly related to the principle of equality under the law (isonomia), and, more specifically, the idea that everyone was equally entitled to speak (is-goria) and equally entitled to have a share in rule.( Raaflaub 230-231). In short, it is a type of freedom that is only made possible within a type of political regime that protected certain 'civil liberties,' or, as Josiah Ober has argued, noting the absence of anything that strictly meets the contemporary liberal or democratic definition of a 'right' within democratic Athens, certain 'quasi-rights' that were contingent, for their actual concretization, upon the participatory nature of Athenian democracy.( Ober. 4). The second conception of freedom -- 'living as one wants' -- certainly overlaps with the first conception insofar as the ability to 'live as one wants' can also be envisioned as dependent on the presence of a political system that allows for and promotes such freedom. As Pericles states in the second book of Thucydides' History, "the freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes (ei kath' h-don-n ti drai)…" (II.37.2). At the same time, however, there is a potential conflict between these two conceptions of democratic freedom. As Aristotle notes, those who conceive of democratic freedom as 'living as one likes' prefer never being ruled at all. In this respect, the conditions under which it is possible to enjoy such freedom as license -- the creation of a limited sphere within which individuals are not ruled over -- might undermine the democratic values of mutual equality and liberty that are protected via the practice of ruling and being ruled in turn. In particular, there is a danger that the conception of freedom as doing as one likes, if divorced from the mutual responsibility ensured by the practice of ruling and being ruled in turn, can engender practices of tyranny and domination.