Generally speaking when we talk about autonomy we are talking about our ability to self-govern, from the Greek αὐτόνομος, making or having one’s own laws. Hopefully, people become
autonomous adults when they no longer depend on their tutors to make decisions concerning choices that may have some sort of influence on their lives, whether it is buying a piece of clothing, deciding to become vegan, or choosing a career. This chapter will deal with autonomy in this very straightforward sense, but it will also draw it closer to an idea of self-knowledge; “autonomy” will be linked to how one’s thoughts are dependent on those of other people (which has been the
cornerstone of the argument). In one sense, we will see how the importance of being autonomous is crucial for both William James and James Joyce when it comes to how they think about themselves, but not precisely in the same sense.
So far, we have been claiming that a person depends on other people not only to build their identity but also to know what that identity is comprised of. When it comes to our two authors, such an affirmation implies a problem with the notion of autonomy, mainly in what it means to be autonomous, for both end up worrying about these matters, even if in a much broader sense than the one we described above. As such, this chapter will deal with how William James feels anxious when it comes to the possibility of his not being autonomous (which is in the centre of his resistance of religion), whereas Joyce, by appearing to accept the idea that a person is never quite the true owner of their thoughts, ends up creating a strategy whereby he wishes to eventually become autonomous by surpassing not only his predecessors but also, and more importantly, his hypothetical successors.
What we will deal with is, then, with the notion that one’s self is outside of one’s self, i.e., that our idea of who we are depends on other people, and that owing one’s thoughts or the characters in one’s novel to others are two not so different things. Even though James and Joyce deal with autonomy differently, as we will see, neither one’s thoughts nor the other’s ideas are exclusively owed to themselves.
First, it is important to define what “autonomy” will mean, in the context of our argument.
In The Invention of Autonomy, Jerome B. Schneewind argues that the idea of autonomy is closely linked to that of morality, and attributes its invention to Immanuel Kant. In this sense, according to Schneewind, “autonomy” is a concept that not only belongs to the field of moral philosophy but also concerns a particular notion of “self-governance”. As he explains at the beginning of his book,
Kant’s explanation of this belief [morality as self-governance] was fuller and more radical than any other. He alone was proposing a truly revolutionary rethinking of morality. He held that we are self-governing because we are autonomous. By this he meant that we ourselves legislate the moral law. It is only because of the legislative action of our own will that we are under moral law; and the same action is what always enables everyone to be law-abiding.
Kant was the first to argue for autonomy in this strong sense. (6)
To lead the reader to this conclusion, that Kant was the inventor of autonomy, Schneewind provides a full and long summary of moral philosophy, from its inception up to Kant. From this quote, we can already begin to see that according to Schneewind, the more “autonomous” we are, the more
“moral” we become, for morality relies heavily upon the notion that, alongside God, human beings are the ones who write their moral laws, making us less dependent on a superior being who rules over everyone and their every action. If morality is what determines human behaviour (good or bad), then people can only be autonomous if they are morally self-governing. This means that moral laws have to be just as divine as they are human, which is to say that they have to have been
written, in equal terms, by humans and God and thus are the same for both.
With this in mind, we will look a little further into Schneewind’s arguments. In a chapter also titled “The invention of autonomy”, he explains that
At the core of the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is the claim that morality centres on a law that human beings impose on themselves, necessarily providing themselves, in doing so, with a motive to obey. Kant speaks of agents who are morally self-governed in this way as autonomous. (483)
Agents are, then, entities who obey their own moral laws: if humans are the ones who create their own morality, when abiding by its laws they are autonomous, and obedience is nothing more than
obedience to oneself, which is the same as obedience to no one superior entity. This is what leads Schneewind to conclude that if
What comes from God’s decisions is necessarily perfect [then] analogously, everything resulting from autonomous choices of humans would necessarily be morally good. And if the human will, like God’s will, is not necessarily determined by external factors, then our exercise of our will is our own responsibility. If we are not always good, we cannot call in nature as an excuse. (501)
Furthermore, Kant explains “that if there is a genuine moral law, then it ‘does not apply to men only, as if other rational beings had no need to observe it’ (4.389; Foundations, p. 5)” (510-511).
These “other rational beings” are a reference to God, to the divine. Humans are as autonomous as God for no entity exterior to them is in charge of either one’s morality. If moral laws are created by both God and human beings, then they have to be perfect. According to Kant, this is because God cannot make anything less than perfect, and so the laws God created (regardless of their having been conceived alongside human beings or not) can never be fallible. Having made perfect moral laws (for those laws were created with God, on equal terms), human beings are responsible for their actions since they were the ones who made the laws that should have guided those very actions.
Near the end of The Invention of Autonomy, Schneewind concludes that “Kantian autonomy does not allow moral law to be constituted by the command of one rational being to another” (522):
not only God is not above man when it comes to morality and moral laws, but also no man should be above any other when it comes to the constitution of moral laws, meaning that human morality, being that which guides human action, is applied to all men equally. This statement is what allows us determine what “autonomy” shall mean here: to be autonomous means that not only Man and God are on the same level when it comes to obeying moral laws, but also that every man is on the same level when it comes not only to morality, but also to beliefs and, therefore, to thoughts and actions.1 As such, in this dissertation, “autonomy” is linked to the idea of “self-governance”, but not
1 “Action” is here being used in as Charles Sanders Peirce describes it in “The Fixation of Belief”: “Our beliefs guide our desires and shape our actions”. (5.371) Our actions are, therefore, dependent upon beliefs, in as broad a sense as our getting up in the morning is dependent upon our believing that the sun always rises. In this sense,
“truth” and “belief” are interchangeable.
exclusively in the sense that it would have been both for Kant and Schneewind, mainly when it comes to James. Even though, in James’s case, we will make considerations regarding religion and one’s subjection to God (we will see that for him, God is always the ruler of any religious person’s actions, and therefore religious people can never be autonomous, for man and God are never on equal terms) for us here, “autonomy” will be closely linked to a certain subservience to other people’s minds and thoughts. Hoping that this will become clearer throughout the chapter, I will begin with The Varieties of Religious Experience.
In her introduction to the Cambridge Companion to William James, Ruth Anna Putman reminds us that “James found the idea of a universe that consisted ultimately of nothing but matter subject to deterministic laws deeply repellent.” (3) As was argued in the previous chapter, obedience was the catholic vow that James found most difficult to understand: “I confess that to myself
[obedience] seems something of a mystery. Yet it evidently corresponds to a profound interior need of many persons, and we must do our best to understand it”. (TVRE 311) Agreeing with Ruth Anna Putman, it is no wonder, then, that for James, the whole idea of determinism, of a destiny, of an almighty God in charge of everyone’s choices and actions, who conditions people’s lives from beginning to end, could only be addressed with repulsion. Earlier in The Varieties of Religious Experience, James had written that
Morality pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the heaviest and coldest heart, and never cease to feel it as a yoke. But for religion, in its strong and fully developed manifestations, the service of the highest never is felt as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place. (TVRE 41)
Morality — detached from religion and as the “law of the whole which it finds reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it” — is always felt as something heavy, a yoke that subjugates the
oppressed. The difference comes when we talk about religious morality. For those who believe that God is the creator of all moral laws, their obedience to those very laws is not felt like something oppressive, but rather as something “cheerful”. As such, James, not being a religious man himself,
can only be left with the first option. The problem here is that, even though acknowledging that religion and religious morality could almost bring some sort of liberation to a believer, James still cannot accept any kind of obedience to an external entity. Hence, James’s idea of morality (mainly when connected with religion) is notably different from the Kantian perspective, as described by Schneewind: be it linked to religion or not, morality is always deeply hierarchical, and imposed on those at the base of the pyramid by those who occupy the top vertex (and we will see how much this has to do with absolutism and with how James could not accept it).
To better explain James’s position concerning his idea of God, psalm 70, “Make haste, O God, to deliver me” is helpful. Here, God is asked to help the psalmist keep his “soul”, so that those who do not believe in God may never have the power to harm him:
Make haste, o God, to deliver me; make haste to help me, O LORD.
Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward, and put to confusion, that desire my hurt.
Let them be turned back for a reward of their shame that say, Aha, aha.
Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee: and let such as love thy salvation say continually, Let God be magnified.
But I am poor and needy: make haste unto me, O God: thou art my help and my deliverer; O LORD, make no tarrying. (King James Version, Ps. 70)
David’s God is the only “deliverer”, the only one who frees, for he helps the faithful while confounding the unfaithful, the persecutors. And He can do this while, at the same time, leading those who seek Him in His direction (or in the direction of “true faith”). Yet, in the sense of what was just said, unlike the author of the psalm, William James does not seem to believe that God (or a religious belief) can free him, whether or not he is being persecuted, i.e., whether he shall ever find himself in David’s position or in the position of any seeker who may, in finding God, “rejoice and be glad”. Thus, it could be said that James’s position regarding faith and religious experience is not far from being opposite to the one occupied by the seekers at the end of the psalm, meaning that, unlike them, he would not seek God.2
2 Even if he seeks religious people and somewhat ersatz religious experiences in the form of séances with mediums or through experimentation with nitrous oxide, these were mere experiences that he knew the mind could somehow get access to, as we will see. As John Kaag reminds us in a recent book, “James, even as a young man, was a scientist, and like any good scientist, he wanted to see Nirvana for himself. Over the next ten years,
To further discuss James’s position regarding these matters, in order to make a point concerning autonomy, I will explore The Varieties of Religious Experience as well as the essays
“The Will to Believe” and “The Sentiment of Rationality”. We will see that the idea of deliverance, as expressed by the author of the psalm, and that of something so “mysterious” as taking the vow of obedience, relates, for James, to the end of one’s will and with the need for intellectual search, two things which are dear to him. In this sense, it is crucial to analyse James’s position before faith, religion, and religious experiences, and not so much his theories regarding these issues.
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, there are many enthusiastic descriptions of religious experiences which often result in peace, a feeling of protection, and inward tranquillity:
“a paradise of inward tranquility” seems to be faith’s usual result; and it is easy, even without being religious one’s self, to understand this. A moment back, in treating of the sense of God’s presence, I spoke of the unaccountable feeling of safety which one may have. And, indeed, how can it possibly fail to steady the nerves (…) if one be sensibly conscious that (…) one’s life as a whole is in the keeping of a power whom one can absolutely trust? In deeply religious men the abandonment of self to this power is passionate. Whoever not only says, but feels, “God’s will be done”, is mailed against every weakness; and the whole historic array of martyrs, missionaries and religious reformers is there to prove the tranquil-mindedness, under naturally agitating of distressing circumstances, which self-surrender brings. (TVRE 285)
Before such enthusiastic descriptions of the feelings encountered by the type of people to which the seekers in psalm 70 belong — those who found God, i.e. peace, inward tranquillity, safety, … —, one could be contemplate the possibility that James could yearn for religious faith, considering his description of what could come from it.3 Still, even if James’s deflated idea that aesthetic and psychological experiences are not different in kind from religious experiences4 could somehow comfort him in case he coveted religious faith, it does not seem to me that James would need any sort of consolation prize. Hence, going back to when we claimed that James, not being a seeker, did not truly want to be aided by God, it is now important to understand that in the desire of not
James followed [Benjamin] Blood’s lead repeatedly, testing different (even near-fatal) doses of nitrous oxide.”
(123) Or, concerning mediumship, “in September, James visited Leonora Piper, a medium (…) He had doubts about Piper but concluded that the woman might have what he called ‘supernatural powers.’ James was still, and always, the consummate empiricist, and wanted to test these powers more carefully”. (178)
3 This hypothesis will be useful when it comes to trying to understand what James thinks regarding the way he would like to relate to his subjects.
4 See chapter I.
wanting to be helped lies an absence of any kind of envy towards those who have religious mystical experiences. So that this may become clear, my concern now will be to understand two things that, for James, are above any other, namely faith and religious experiences (and that were mentioned above): reasoning and personal/free will, which not only are connected but are what will help us discuss James’s problem with autonomy.
When we use the word “reasoning”, we are simply referring to a common use of the word, in the sense of the ability to understand anything through reason. Declaring that, for James,
“reasoning” — that which is in the basis of thought, or rather critical thought — is one of the characteristics of human nature that he holds most dear, can imply that the very act of searching for solutions ends up being, to a certain extent, more important than finding those very solutions, in the sense that when one finds a solution for a particular problem one no longer has to reason to find an answer: that particular problem is solved. This is not to say that James would not enjoy finding solutions, it merely means that it is one of the motives why he would not particularly fancy the idea of there being an ultimate solution, an ultimate response for every question or problem that may be formulated. Seeing that James, as a philosopher, could consider that the ultimate goal of philosophy would be to find final answers and, therefore, to end any search, this seems paradoxical.
Nonetheless, it is in this paradox that lies, in part, James’s rejection of religion and, deep down, of a particular type of philosophy — which, by professing absolutism, as will be explained ahead, has to do with ending reasoning.
Considering the role of reasoning in religion, more than the issue that James discusses regarding the existence of living or dead hypothesis, whether they are more or less intellectually believable5, it is important to understand two things: first, that James considers that intelligent
5 In The Will to Believe, James explains what he means by “live” and “dead” hypotheses:
Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature,--it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Madhi’s followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act.
The maximum of liveness in hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency wherever there is willingness to act at all.
people who dedicate themselves entirely to religion are squandering their talents; and secondly, that his ability to reason is the faculty to which he feels most attached, and which he considers the strongest trait of his personality. In “The Value of Saintliness”, James writes that
In the life of saints, technically so called, the spiritual faculties are strong, but what gives the impression of extravagance proves usually on examination to be a relative deficiency of intellect. Spiritual excitement takes pathological forms whenever other interests are too few and the intellect too narrow. (TVRE 340)
Reading this, it becomes clear that, associated with the idea of James resisting religion6, there is also a tone close to disdain towards a life devoted to it that arises in spite (or because) of any attempt of legitimisation.7 There is, then, a limit beyond which James considers it is pathological to believe, which essentially occurs when a person’s intellect is not strong enough to deal with beliefs capable of causing pathological behaviours.8 Because James does not really understand why someone would adopt a religious belief, he becomes amazed by the results that occur when one does so, especially with the promises of “inward tranquillity” and happiness, described earlier. However, in moments such as the one just quoted, it can be understood that, in fact, that which we called disdain ends up overlapping any amazement, and the solution found to solve the problem of faith is to claim that it is merely a psychological phenomenon which, especially when it is extreme or extraordinary,
(WB 2-3)
A live or a dead hypothesis implies a cultural, psychological, social, and intellectual basis. One is more willing to believe — and therefore act on — something that is intellectually easier to accept. We will further discuss the importance and influence of other people (who are part of our education, society, culture, …) in the following and final chapter.
6 There are, however, many episodes in James’s biography concerning his interest in spirituality and mediumship.
Despite James’s profound study of Mrs. Piper, a medium he studied thoroughly (see chapter III, note 2) he could never get over the amazement nor could he get over his questioning mind.
7 Like in statements regarding everyone’s right to have a religious belief, which is one of the main cornerstones of the essay “The Will to Believe”:
I have brought with me tonight something like a sermon on justification by faith to read to you,
— I mean an essay in justification of faith, a defence of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.
‘The Will to Believe,’ accordingly, is the title of my paper. (WB 1-2)
8 Here it is important to recall that both strength and veracity of beliefs, according to James, can only be assessed through the results obtained by them. In “Religion and Neurology”, it is stated that “our practice is the only sure evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians” (TVRE 20). And, quoting and agreeing with George Albert Coe, James adds, in “Conversion”, that what counts in the assessment of the value of religion, isn’t how it happens, but what is attained (see TVRE 241)