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

  • From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, John Wager <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 3 Sep 2007 15:54:59 -0230

Please see replies to John and Mike below ---------->



Quoting John Wager <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx>:

> As a philosophy teacher at a community college, I have both a 
> theoretical and a practical interest in "autonomy." 
> 
> Many of my students sign up for a section of philosophy because it meets 
> at 10 a.m. on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with no clue as to what it 
> is.  Many of the students want to major in either engineering or 
> business or pre-med or computers, simply because that's where they have 
> heard the money is.  "Autonomy" is, in this "field" or context, a 
> relative concept, agreed, but it's an essential concept.  To be 
> "autonomous" is to be able to make fundamental choices, not just of 
> "means" but "ends."  To do so, students have to HAVE choices; they have 
> to think about the range of human possibilities, at least a bit. It's a 
> necessary (but not sufficient) characteristic of choice that there be 
> more than one object from which to "choose." 


------------------> True, but that's only one condition. Another is that the
choices possess different values, lest we all starve to death like Buridan's
ass. An unfortunate characteristic of many young people today is precisely the
lack of recognition of genuine value. Too many students (and people in general)
shrug their way through life, smirking "Yeah, whatever." 


> 
> My sense of  what a "liberal" education is, requires that students be 
> presented with choices about the kinds of life they could lead, and the 
> kinds of people they could become. I have seen the practical 
> consequences of students who were only concerned with a choice of 
> "means" to an end that they hadn't even known was also an object of 
> choice; they tend to lead lives that look a lot like Aristotle's idea of 
> "natural slaves;" they can follow what other people want, but cannot 
> really make relatively independent, "autonomous" choices of their own.  
> They tend to get "used" by their employers (or others) more than those 
> students who try to think through for themselves what they really want 
> out of life.
> 
> Any theoretical grasp of "autonomy" should take such practical concerns 
> into account.


---------------> Agreed. But where we may differ is on the nature and scope of a
liberal education. I understand a liberal education to not only open things up
for choice, but also to judiciously restrict the scope of possible choices
students would otherwise make. Basket weaving is not, in my mind, a
"discipline" of a liberal education and students ought not to have that
"choice" offered them within a liberal education. I believe the "liberating"
dimension of education is the result of initiation into the traditions of
inquiry that we have come up with over the many years of civilization. And this
for its own sake, as both Socrates and Aristotle say. (Part of the "Yeah
whatever" syndrome is the absence of an appreciation of things that are
worthwhile in themselves, intrinsically. An important pedagogical aim of
professional education is to disabuse students of thinking simply
instrumentally. Practices too have intrinsic worth.
> 
> I agree with Mike that we are "trapped" in social connections, but I 
> disagree with him about the degree to which this happens.  Clearly there 
> is some benefit to be gained by trying to examine and reflect on that 
> "web" with an eye to becoming a bit less trapped.  This is not a black 
> and white issue; there is a large gray web that's neither completely 
> free nor completely determined by social connections.  Far from being 
> "meaningless" it is essential to keep autonomy as an ideal.

------> Although autonomy isn't simply an ideal to be prescribed or proscribed.
I think it's also a necessary presupposition for the possibility of inquiry and
practices, as I try to illustrate below in reply to Mike.

> 
> Mike Geary wrote:
> 
> > So, do you believe in the individual -- she who can free her mind from 
> > all learned restraints and strike out on her own original course?  

------------> Yes. So does anybody who believes in the possibility of a
university, a court of law, a constitutional democracy, a cooking recipe open
to unpredicted flourishes of creativity, and Maria Sharapova having the freedom
to choose, on most returned, where to place the shot. And surely Mike wouldn't
deny that his views are really his own, and not simply the trappings of social
conventions.

>>  In 
> > other words, do you believe in autonomous human beings?  

---------------> As a character disposition, yes.


>> I'll bet you 
> > don't.  

---------> You lose. But since your decision to offer the bet was but a causal
product of your socialization, I'll let you keep the case of malt.

> > No more so than I do.  I'll bet you believe that we're all so 
> > goddam trapped in the web of our social connections that it's 
> > impossible to think for one's self -- that such an expression is 
> > meaningless. 

-------------> Either you posess highly gifted powers of psychoanalysis or I'm
suffering from a deplorable lack of self-knowledge. Actually the statement
should take the form of a conditional. not a disjunction: If you possess ....
then ... self-knowledge.



> > I'll bet that you agree that even the most private 
> > thinking is an historically-dependent event -- every step of the way 
> > having been laid by progenitors.  

-----------------> That case of malt I shall not forfeit. Address to be provided
offline.


> > You say that Torture Field is 
> > speaking to issues of autonomy beyond being the property of 
> > individuals or the property of acts.  OK.  So what the hell is he 
> > speaking about?  Some perifery issue?  Torture seems more radical to 
> > me than that.  But I don't know.  He's philosophical too, and you know 
> > how worrisome they can be.  Is autonomy possible?  That's what I want 
> > to know and I say it isn't though I'd love to be contradicted 
> > convincingly.

------------> I think he's speaking of the sort of autonomy we predicate of
institutions and practices. I addressed that view in an earlier post.


> >
> > You can counter that I misunderstand the whole tete-a-tete, but I'll 
> > just come back with a Cheney jeer.

----------------> That's not an argument. (Nor is it even strategically
successful.)

Walter O.
MUN



> >
> > Mike Geary
> > Memphis
> >
> >
> > ----- Original Message ----- From: "John McCreery" 
> > <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
> > To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2007 8:52 PM
> > Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Kinds of autonomy (was Kant: Ethnic Pride, 
> > Black Truck Style)
> >
> >
> >> On 8/22/07, Mike Geary <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>
> >>> 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.
> >>
> >>
> >> "Expertise" is too intellectual, too entangled with the notion that
> >> autonomy is a property of individuals. As Torgeir observes, Bourdieu
> >> treats autonomy neither as a property of individuals nor as property
> >> of acts. Instead he talks about the (always relative) autonomy of
> >> social fields. Here "social field" refers to a zone of life in which
> >> particular rules, distinct at least partially from those of other
> >> social fields, apply.
> >>
> >> The easiest way to get a handle on this is to use one of Bourdieu's
> >> own examples, a soccer field. To be part of the game, players must
> >> accept rules specific to the game. The specificity of the rules, in
> >> combination with differences in talent, training, and the accidents of
> >> play make it possible, for example, for someone who has a brilliant
> >> soccer career to be a lousy businessman and of no consequence
> >> whatsoever as an artist or air conditioning specialist.
> >>
> >> It is, however, characteristic of complex societies that narrow
> >> fields, like soccer or air conditioning repair, may overlap with or
> >> even wholly embedded in other fields, creating opportunities for
> >> individuals to exchange the cultural capital (including expertise)
> >> acquired in one field into higher status in another, a process in
> >> which many other agents besides the individual in question may also be
> >> involved.
> >>
> >> Consider, for example, David Beckham, whose stellar performance as a
> >> soccer player in Europe and marriage to one of the Spice Girls made
> >> him a global fashion icon used, for example, to advertise cell phones
> >> in Japan. Given the relative autonomy of the fields we call art,
> >> politics and law, he is, nonetheless, unlikely to have paintings
> >> appear beside the Picassos or Rothkos at the Philipps collection, be
> >> seen as a viable political candidate, or become a famous trial lawyer
> >> or judge.
> >>
> >> Arguably it is in precisely those cases where the rules are most taken
> >> for granted that the individual appears most autonomous. Since neither
> >> Jeeves nor Bertie Wooster aspires to be the other and both accept the
> >> rules that govern their relative status, each appears free to focus on
> >> choices within the spheres available to them. When we foreground their
> >> eccentricities, we tacitly accept the rules of their game, leaving
> >> them blurred in the background. We may even discover, as Bourdieu
> >> does, that the rules only set the stage. They do not determine the
> >> performance or, reverting to the sport metaphor, how the game plays
> >> out.
> >
> >
> >
> 
> 
> -- 
> -------------------------------------------------
> "Never attribute to malice that which can be     
> explained by incompetence and ignorance."        
> -------------------------------------------------
> John Wager                john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx
>                                    Lisle, IL, USA
> 
> 
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