BARBARA HENRY

Uno dei possibili modi di stare al gioco.

Note su "una concezione non individualistica di autonomia individuale"

N. 165

Summary — The essay outlines and compares two rival concepts of personal autonomy, deriving from different epistemological issues and giving birth to riva1 interpretative models of political agency in comporary democracies.

The first concept (Frankena, Hirschman) focuses on the primacy of interiority, of the moral sphere of individual life, and pursues personal integrity and moral coherence as preconditions for political partecipation. Autonomy is hence conceived as submission of a lower order of preferences (istincts and momentaneous desires) to a higher order (life-projects and patterns of the self). Sources of this version of autonomy are Hume and Kant.

The weakness of this model reveals itself in underestimating the dangers for personal freedom coming from the hidden processes of opinion manipulation, one of the greatest disfunctions of contemporary political democracies.

The second concept of autonomy (Rorty, Garfinkel) stresses the primacy of intersubjectivity, conceived as linguistic competence in linguistic intercourse. This model dissolves the distinction between moral and non-moral spheres of meaning and acting, rejects any form of methodological individualism and breaks the Humian prohibitions on deriving prescriptions from descriptions, in order to free philosophical reflection on autonomy from the illusion of untouchability of moral sphere and hence to give people more chances of identifying and opposing processes of hidden opinion manipulation. Sources of this model are Mead and Wittgenstein. Autonomy is reduced to metaphorical creativity in linguistic intercourse, because the only possibility of creating something new is innovation in speech.

The weakness of this version of autonomy is the difficulty in explaining the origin of individual creativity, whereas linguistic competence in general is described as acritical, self-repeating, breafly heteronomous, social habit.