[lit-ideas] Re: Kinds of autonomy (was Kant: Ethnic Pride, Black Truck Style)

  • From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 20:01:58 -0500

Torture Field writes:
Put more simply, it is because _fields_ are relatively autonomous that those in dominant positions may impose its necessity on the dominated. <<
What I deny is the very notion of "autonomy". It simply doesn't exist, hasn't ever, will never. That said, "autonomy" is an attractive idea. It's suggests an area of expertise. Like Air Conditioning. "What fools these laymen be," I says to myself many times a day -- except for this: they always knows when it ain't working. I can't convince them that it is working, no matter how many years I claims I been doing this work. So there seems to be somekind of commonsense autonomy at work here. But ain't that a contradiction? Expertise ain't common. I know zilch about economics -- micro or macro -- finances are physics to me. There are people who are experts at these things. But they don't thereby know what economic policies should be practiced for the commonweal -- what I means to say is that I know when it ain't working. So do all those for whom it ain't working. Expertise be damned. It ain't working, goddamnit, I don't know why, I just know it ain't working. You're the technician, make it work. And so it goes in every autonomous field, the only real experts are those outside the field. Ain't it so. 

Mike Geary
Memphis
----- Original Message ----- From: "Torgeir Fjeld" <phatic@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2007 4:59 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Kinds of autonomy (was Kant: Ethnic Pride, Black Truck Style) 


Walter O. asks whether is is

that nobody else finds [the nature of autonomy]
philosophically intriguing, pedagogically valuable, or at least
politically important for all of us today?
It may be to overstate the case, but why not add some French flavour by way of a quote from Bourdieu, who -- to perhaps simplify matters --considers autonomy as an aspect of fields rather than agents or actions:
"Paradoxically, it is precisely because thee exist relatively autonomous fields, functioning in accordance with rigorous mechanisms capable of imposing their necessity on the agents, that those who are in a position to command these mechanisms and to appropriate the material and/or symbolic profits accruing from their functioning are able to _dispense with_ strategies aimed _expressly_ (which does not mean manifestly) and directly (i.e. without being mediated by the mechanisms) at the domination of individuals..." (Outline of a Theory of Practice, p.184) 

Bourdieu's perspective may be differentiated from two possible fallacies:
i) the view that a field may be completely autonomous, which could produce the notion that agents impose their free will on dominated actors. To Bourdieu what is imposed is the necessity of fields, not the will of individuals. 
and
ii) the view that a field may be completely subsumed by other spheres of operations, say the economic field, productive of the idea that actions in any field would be determined by states and events outside it. 

Best regards,
Torgeir Fjeld

wokshevs@xxxxxx wrote:
A very interesting and important thread transpired over the weekend of August 3-4 between McCreery, Wager, Enns and "The Sage of the Rock." All this while I 
was in the throes of grading final exams and papers. I now emerge free,
footloose and (relatively) unscathed.

The question was: What did Kant mean by "autonomy"?
And more importantly, what should WE mean by it if we posit it as an
educational and philosophical ideal for multiculturally pluralist democracies. I would like to respond to that discussion and am wondering whether I have all the relevant posts on this thread. Under the thread "Ethnic Pride, Black Truck 
Style" I have:

1. Aug.3: Enns to Okshevsky
2. Aug.4: Enns to McCreery
3. Aug.4: Wager to Enns
4. Aug.4: Enns to Wager

Have there been other posts on this thread that I have missed?
The general issue seems to be whether "autonomy" (for Kant and/or for "us") is 
primarily a predicate of an agent's will or motive, or essentially
a feature of
action itself. If the latter, then the autonomous agent is one who acts in
accordance with a criterion of publicity (as per Kant's later political
writings.) The Wagerian view, in keeping with Kant's moral theory, understands autonomy to comprise a property of an agent's will or motive rather than, as 
per the Ennsian take, the action itself.

As Phil has nicely put it, "This is all pretty slippery." And
indeed it is. But
so is the very idea of a multiculturally pluralist constitutional democracy 
(with a dash of Nussbaumian/Arendtian cosmopolitanism sprinkled in.)
What is also intriguing about this thread is that no other contributions to it 
have been made after Saturday, Aug.4. Is it that nobody else finds
these issues
philosophically intriguing, pedagogically valuable, or at least politically 
important for all of us today? This issue surely must be open to
"discourse" in
Habermas's sense.

Returning to his wonderously sun-splashed deck in the east end,

Walter O.
MUN



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