Autonomy and its Discontents

What does it mean to lead a free life? The most influential answer proposed by modern philosophy is the idea of autonomy. To lead a free life is to lead your life according to laws you have given to yourself. However, this conception of freedom seems to be in crisis. The most general worry is that instead of liberating us, autonomy has rather subjected us to new forms of unfreedom. This could be true in at least three respects: with regard to our subjective self-relation, with regard to our relation to nature, and with regard to our relation to others. Instead of enabling us to relate freely to ourselves, to nature and to others, autonomy seems to impose a form of freedom on us that subjugates us: As different critics argue, under the heading of autonomy we, firstly, tend to interpret freedom as self-mastery and thus necessarily as the subjugation of a part of ourselves. Secondly, the notion of autonomy suggests to us a  misguided project of one-sided mastery of nature, the unsustainability of which is increasingly evident in the multiple ecological crises of the present. Finally, autonomy has proven to be an oblique mechanism of social control, especially prominent in contemporary forms of governmentality. From this perspective, the current forms of autonomy run the risk of being a source of subjection, exploitation, and normalization and thus a source of deep social and individual pathologies. Even though autonomy has left such a big mark on our self-understanding that it seems almost impossible not to want it, the discontents with autonomy seem only to grow and require a deeper philosophical assessment. At our conference, we want to explore the different manifestations of the crisis of autonomy bringing together a variety of approaches to raise the open question of what the philosophical consequences of the crisis are. Does this crisis reveal the misguidedness of the very idea of autonomy and require an outright rejection of the idea of autonomy? Or do we need to rethink self-determination in new ways? What can we learn from the various attempts to think forms of autonomy without domination, to rethink the relation of autonomy and life, to reconceive of autonomy in relational or more processual terms? What are the resources for rethinking self-determination in such a way that it is not simply a mode of domination of ourselves, of nature, and of others?