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Feminist Theory Copyright 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) vol. 4(2): 149164. [1464-7001 (200308) 4:2; 149164; 034369] www.sagepublications.com
philosophy: that autonomy is a personal ideal, according to which individuals are authors of their own lives. This claim is philosophically dubious and ethically pernicious, having excluded women from positions of rational authority. A reading of Ibsens A Dolls House illustrates how this conception of the ideal of autonomy misrepresents the reality of individuals lived experiences and imposes a gendered identity which subordinates women to a masculine narcissism. In Ibsens play the woman, as a doll conned to home, remains dependent on an autonomous man. It would seem that men in modern philosophy could see only their own image as rational agents reected in their ethics; but, in fact, this position is self-defeating. The recognition of our contingencies and so, vulnerability, motivated Kant himself to try to make the moral realm secure with something necessarily common to all human beings: our capacity to reason. The unwitting upshot of Kants ethics has been the restriction of reason to a purely formal function; but this autonomy of reason undermines itself in being unable to guide the writing of the rational agents own life. I propose instead to preserve the capacities of moral rationality, while urging the incorporation of ethical practices previously devalued by their association with vulnerability, such as attention, affection and relationality. My philosophical challenge is, rst, to develop an internal critique of ethics which exposes its authoritative imposition of a gender identity and, next, to propose a revised conception of autonomy, namely, not just writing our own story, but reading the stories in which we nd ourselves.
keywords autonomy, ethical practices, feminist philosophy, Kant, life stories, reason, vulnerability
Introduction
Autonomy holds a privileged place in modern moral philosophy. From Kant to Mill, to Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, Paul Ricoeur and Joseph Raz, and from all of these men to those contemporary philosophers who still play a part in the tradition of political liberalism, we can nd agreement
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My aim is to bring out the lived reality of the relation of autonomy to vulnerability and the signicance of this relation for ethics today. I will suggest that the gendering of autonomy can help us to read and write the narratives which actually shape the lives of men and women, including their personal, material and social relations. To be precise, I will understand the gendering of ethics as an internal process whereby, rst, we become aware of the model of human nature, of identity, which ethics employs; and, second, as feminists we assess whether this identity has been imposed authoritatively in order to subordinate women.3 So gendering is an internal critique (of ethics) rather than a corrective process that operates (on ethics) from outside. As an internal critique, it works from within; which means, in this context, that if masculine narcissism has led to defects in ethical theory, then the problem is not simply descriptive incompleteness. The problem is a failure to respect the presence in moral rationality of capacities such as attention and relationality. These particular capacities are supposedly not those possessed by the autonomous individual yet are apparently (correctly) attributed to women in their roles of wife and mother. For my part I propose that this internal critique of any subordination of women due to the imposition of gender identity should, in addition, be followed by a creativity that initiates a transformation of sexist conditions: a transformation that could be said to constitute a re-gendering. My argument builds upon Kantian discussions of autonomy, including references to critical work by feminists and by some theorists who reject Kant.4 From this grounding, I seek to defend my own view on autonomy,
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Until he is assured that her criminal act of forgery can be concealed, he seems horried. Ironically, this becomes a moment of potential power for Nora. She is able to recognize the role which has been authoritatively imposed upon her. Here she realizes her failure to read her own life in relation to her husband, family and society:
NORA . . . At home, Daddy used to tell me what he thought, then I thought the same. And if I thought differently, I kept quiet about it, because he wouldnt have liked it. He used to call me his baby doll, and he played with me as I used to play with my dolls. Then I came to live in your house. . . . HELMER What way is that to talk about our marriage? NORA What I mean is: I passed out of Daddys hands into yours. You arranged everything to your tastes, and I acquired the same tastes. Or I pretended to . . . I dont really know . . . I think it was a bit of both, sometimes one thing and sometimes the other. When I look back, it seems to me I have been living here like a beggar, from hand to mouth. I lived by doing tricks for you, Torvald. But thats the way you wanted it. You and Daddy did me a great wrong. Its your fault that Ive never made anything of my life. (Ibsen, 1981: 80)
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In this play, the male and female characters equally fail to read the relational context of their lives, despite each shaping the others story. There are at least two moments when Nora discovers her own power to act, in a certain sense, autonomously. First, there is the earlier moment (implied above). At the death of her father she helps her husband, without his awareness, by borrowing money in her fathers name. Second, there is this decisive moment for her own self-knowledge (above), when her husband is horried by the discovery of her autonomous action and she asserts her new intention, that is, to leave him. I urge that we recognize a Kantian possibility for the female character in Ibsens play. There is, on the one hand, the upshot5 of Kants position that a man has autonomy, while a woman lacks the autonomous capacity to reason for herself; a position that was obviously entrenched in the minds of those who reacted furiously to Ibsens implicit proposal in A Dolls House that a woman has autonomy. Yet I contend that there is also, on the other hand, the Kantian possibility that, in asserting herself as a rational agent, the woman can break with a dolls house. Nora takes a step toward self-authorship, or autonomy, by seeking to know herself, the law and society.
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For the Foucauldian it may be that all power is corrupting, or both corrupting and enabling.11 Nevertheless, I maintain that, as vulnerable, the autonomous self would be able to become aware of the power in all relations as both enabling and corrupting. Judith Butlers The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection goes some distance to support this position (Butler, 1997: 12). However, I move in a different direction from Butler. As a Kantian philosopher, I propose that an ethics which genders autonomy would involve two sides: recognition and imagination. On the one hand, one needs to recognize the exclusive, self-contradictory conception of a strictly formal autonomy. Notice, for instance, the contradictory relationship of Torvalds autonomy to Noras sense of identity. And, on the other hand, one must imagine a critically gendered conception of autonomy as necessarily in relation to vulnerability (for example, to love): think, for instance, about the possibility of a principled autonomy for Nora. I seek the latter conception as a middle ground between a strictly formal autonomy and a complete rejection of autonomy as necessarily subordinating material relations. I doubt that Nora can understand, or become, herself by completely rejecting, in her terms, Daddy, husband, the law and society (see Ibsen, 1981: 806). Here, in our process of gendering, autonomys relation to vulnerability is exposed in its specicity for individual men and women. This process enables our becoming aware of the model of identity which ethics employs, as well as enabling us to assess whether this gendered identity has been imposed authoritatively. As soon as we recognize ourselves as embodied agents we must admit the partial nature of our rational knowledge of ourselves. This is reinforced by the contingency of our actual relationships and our dependence on other reasoners as agents and recipients of action (Anderson, 1993). The relevant, Foucauldian point is that we must be alert to the corrupting forces of power in the uses of reason by ethical agents, namely, by ourselves and by others. But we do not learn this today only from Foucault. The corrupting forces of power have a Kantian version in Kants account of the inscrutable origin of radical evil that corrupts the underlying maxims of our action (Kant, 1998b: 4573). My point is that vulnerability as a condition for exclusion and corruption is bound up with the partiality of self-knowledge and this vulnerability is evident in the dialectical nature of the enabling and corrupting, or creating and resisting, power of subjects.
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In response to the above account I stress that autonomy is not wholly unconditioned. Instead it is, as Grimshaw says above, a constant search for coherence balanced against a realism born out of efforts to understand ourselves and others better. So autonomy must be a regulative principle. In other words, a practical ideal autonomy balances self-authorship with the efforts to read our lives and those of others. Women have traditionally been in situations of subordination (of power) and dependency, lacking identity and rights. I have proposed here that we have been most vulnerable in our difculty with a fundamental sort of coherence: a coherence that depends upon making narrative sense of our lives; in both reading and writing our lives in the context of personal, material and social relations. Ricoeur has argued that autonomy presupposes the capacities for creating a narrative identity that encompasses alterity. Alterity includes temporal changes and uctuations in our
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Conclusion
To conclude, a feminist ethics should take seriously a re-reading of modern moral philosophy and a gendering of autonomy. The revised conception of autonomy is not primarily self-authorship. It is autonomous authorship as regulated by reading and writing our relations with the world. So conceived, autonomy becomes, in practical terms, a regulative and always revisable principle. In so far as we achieve a limited authorship, autonomy is necessarily bound up with the partial nature of our knowledge of ourselves, especially knowledge of the contingencies of our lives as sexed/gendered agents in relation to other sexed/gendered agents. Alternatively, we can say, with Butler, that the vulnerability, which is a necessary dimension of ourselves as gendered, reproduces the conditions of our own subordination. To endeavour to account for the material specicities of our vulnerability as men and women with distinctive personal and social identities due to racial, sexual, ethnic and class differences, a feminist ethics of autonomy would have to admit a twofold epistemological task. The rst part of the feminist task is descriptive: we must become critical readers of our own lives in relationship to other actors or agents and this description includes re-reading the way in which our western history of ideas has represented womens lives. Coming after Kant, Ibsens assumptions concerning women and autonomy reect a sense of the upshot of Kantian autonomy. Now feminist philosophers need to describe the upshot of this history of the representations of ideas such as autonomy. The second part of the task is constructive: as nite authors of our own acts and principles, we would have to gain new knowledge by creating narratives out of the phenomenologically accessible, yet never fully intelligible dimensions of our bodily and relational lives. These dimensions include our physical condition, marital or other relational dependencies, emotional health and rational capacities. The constructive part of our epistemological task rests, crucially, on the possibilities inherent in transforming the upshot of the ideas of past philosophers, as well as on our own ideas and ideals. Well before Foucault, Kant laid the ground for the possibility of recognizing our vulnerability, even while seeking to achieve autonomy. Our new knowledge will depend upon the creativity and not
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Notes
1. This consists of a considerable array of representative primary texts which should be read and re-read (Kant, 1998a [1788]; Mill, 1974 [1859]; Berlin, 1969; Rawls, 1971; Ricoeur, 1992a [1990]; Raz, 1986). For two signicant collections of relevant essays on autonomy, see Christman (1989) and MacKenzie and Stoljar (2000). 2. The philosophical literature on the role of narrative, or stories, in constituting self-identity has been signicantly inuenced by the philosophical work of Paul Ricoeur (see Ricoeur, 1992a: 15868, 288; and Kearney, 2002). 3. I am appropriating the terms of gendering as an ethical concept from Sabina Lovibond (see Lovibond, 2001: 1518). 4. Background on my own Kantian position and its defence can be found elsewhere (see Anderson, 1993, 2002, 2003). 5. My use of the upshot and the possibility in the reading of philosophers from the past has a technical signicance derived from recent work in feminist readings of the history of western philosophy. I am indebted to Alix Langley for her work on, and our discussion of, these two terms in particular: Langleys own understanding builds upon, but also goes beyond, the ideas of both Michle Le Doeuff and Genevieve Lloyd (see Langley, forthcoming; compare with Le Doeuff, 1989: 1668; Lloyd, 2000a: 3344 and 2000b: 24563, especially pages 245, 2569). 6. Consider an original account of the way in which action produces life stories, thus affecting other life stories, so that nobody is the (sole) author or producer of her own life story (see Arendt, 1998: 97, 1848, 1919; Beiner and Nedelsky, 2001). 7. Again, Ricoeurs work is signicant (see Ricoeur, 1988: 2419; Ricoeur, 1992a: 11618, 1248, 1608; compare with McNay, 2000: 747, 85116). 8. Foucault has decisively inuenced many feminist readings of Kant (see Code, 1995; Code, 2000: 1834; compare with Foucault, 1984). 9. I appropriate the idea of delineating the steps toward postmodern disillusionment from Miranda Fricker (see Fricker, 2000: 14665). According to Fricker, postmodern scepticism about this authority reects despair over the possibility of distinguishing authoritative and authoritarian uses of reason (Fricker, 2000: 156). 10. Nancy Chodorow made the conception of relational individualism popular for feminist theory generally. Subsequent feminist theorists have developed this in the context of ethical debates (see Chodorow, 1986; Code, 2000: 10320 and 22956). 11. Judith Butler provides a timely discussion of Foucault on power (see Butler, 1997: 1218, 83105). 12. The distinction between the lived and the interpreted body can be read in terms of a dialectical relation (see Vasterling, 1999: 1738). In addition, we might seek to expose the role of social identity in epistemic practices, in order to make intelligible the variables of gender and race which render the differences between the lived and the interpreted body (see Alcoff, 2000: 23562; McNay, 2000: 778).
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References
Alcoff, L. (2000) On Judging Epistemic Credibility: Is Social Identity Relevant?, pp. 23562 in Naomi Zack (ed.) Women of Color and Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. Anderson, P.S. (1993) Ricoeur and Kant: A Philosophy of the Will. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Anderson, P.S. (2002) Ricoeurs Reclamation of Autonomy: Unity, Plurality and Totality, pp. 1531 in John Wall, William Schweiker and W. David Hall (eds) Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought. New York: Routledge. Anderson, P.S. (2003 forthcoming) Ethics Within the Limits of PostRicoeurian Kantian Hermeneutics, in Jeffrey F. Keuss (ed.) The Sacred and the Profane: Contemporary Demands on Hermeneutics. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. Arendt, H. (1998) Human Condition, with an Introduction by Margaret Canovan, second edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Beiner, R. and J. Nedelsky, eds (2001) Judgment, Imagination and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt. Oxford: Rowan and Litteeld Publishers. Berlin, I. (1969) Two Concepts of Liberty, in I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cavarero, A. (2000) Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (trans. Paul A. Kottman). London: Routledge.
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