Autonomy v. Independence

Matthew B. Crawford argues in The World Beyond Your Head that things discipline our attention and thus make genuine knowledge of the world possible: “things that can serve as a kind of authority for us, by way of structuring our attention. The design of things—for example, cars and children’s toys—conditions the kind of involvement we have in our own activity. Design establishes an ecology of attention that can be more or less well adapted to the requirements of skillful, unimpeded action.”

He recognizes that “submission” and “authority” jar the modern reader. We believe in autonomy, and “the experience of attending to something isn’t easily made sense of within the prevailing Western anthropology that takes autonomy as the central human good.” Autonomy is “giving a law to oneself. The opposite of autonomy thus understood is heteronomy: being ruled by something alien to oneself. In a culture predicated on this opposition (autonomy good, heteronomy bad), it is difficult to think clearly about attention—the faculty that joins us to the world – because everything located beyond your head is regarded as a potential source of heteronomy, and therefore a threat to the self.”

Crawford argues that this belief in autonomy is actually a threat to independence of mind because it is a threat to the development of attentiveness to the world, which is the ground for independence of mind: “the ideal of autonomy seems to work against the development and flourishing of any rich ecology of attention – the sort in which minds may become powerful and achieve genuine independence.” Autonomy seduces us with its flattery, and leaves us vulnerable: “As atomized individuals called to create meaning for ourselves, we find ourselves the recipients of all manner of solicitude and guidance. We are offered forms of unfreedom that come slyly wrapped in autonomy talk: NO LIMITS!, as the credit card offer says. YOU’RE IN CHARGE. Autonomy talk speaks the consumerist language of preference satisfaction. Discovering your true preferences requires maximizing the number of choices you face: precisely the condition that makes for maximum dissipation of one’s energies. Autonomy talk is a flattering mode of speech. It suggests that freedom is something we are entitled to, and it consists in liberation from constraints imposed by one’s circumstances.”

Crawford argues that our environment constitutes our self, rather than posing a threat. Attention is crucial, and attention is fostered by the development of skill, through bodily interaction with the world, which is a form of submission to the authority of things: “Attention is at the core of this constitutive or formative process. When we become competent in some particular field of practice, our perception is disciplined by that practice; we become attuned to pertinent features of a situation that would be invisible to a bystander. Through the exercise of a skill, the self that acts in the world takes on a definite shape. It comes to be in a relation of fit to a world it has grasped.”

In place of the assumption of autonomy, Crawford suggests a different model of free action: “a powerful, independent mind working at full song. Such independence is won through disciplined attention, in the kind of action that joins us to the world. And—this is important—it is precisely those constraining circumstances that provide the discipline. . . . we find ourselves situated in a world that is not of our making, and this ‘situatedness’ is fundamental to what a human being is.”