Rational Self-Government: An Investigation of Personal Autonomy and Its Platonic Origin
Personal autonomy is reasonably described in terms of the ability to determine one's own thoughts and actions unaffected by external coercion. One common understanding of this is that autonomy is the unimpeded and self-sufficient capacity to satisfy one's own wishes and desires. Qualified in preferentialist terms, this means that to respect someone's autonomy is to respect what that person prefers. This idea has an important rival in the rationalist view: Conditioned by the linguistic means of distanced self-reflection, personal autonomy is identified as the ability to ground one's thoughts and actions in a higher order deliberative evaluation. Plato provides a robust framework for an inquiry into this field in a non-preferentialist and relational setting. His unprecedented notion of self-government establishes a link between personal autonomy and moral integrity. The platonic demand for self-knowledge and a critical appraisal of the means of discursive deliberation suggest ways in which language, reason and autonomy relate. Yet the ancient debate is significantly absent in the contemporary discussion. One of the two goals of this project is to mend this flaw; the other is to deepen our understanding of the ancient discussion. By means of a thorough investigation of the conceptual origins of autonomy and self-government in the platonic tradition, the project aims to produce new historical knowledge and to show how this knowledge is fruitful for philosophising about autonomy.
Final report
FINAL REPORT
Project Purpose and Development
Ancient sources in general and Plato’s dialogues in particular abound with discussions on self-motion and the contrast between external and internal sources of motivation. Self-governance is understood in contrast to slavery and the rule of non-rational sources of motivation. Internal or psychological powers are contrasted to external and socio-political coercion. All of this suggests that there is an important ancient debate about something we today call personal autonomy. Yet, according to the philosophical view that has left lasting marks on our use of the term ‘autonomy’, the Kantian conception, being autonomous is confined to being a matter of self-legislation founded in the individual ability to decide her own goals as an independent agent, and to pursue them in action. And such a conception, so the story goes, is completely foreign to the ancient thinkers. Does this mean that the concept is best left out in our treatments of ancient philosophical sources? And if so, how should we interpret their undeniable interest in questions about self-rule and non-coerced sources of motivation? The project set out to find what kind of conception of autonomy, if any, Plato operated with, and how and why the ancient framework differs from the Kantian.
As the project evolved, we soon realized that the individualist and Kantian theoretical framework was inapt to ask the right question to capture the ancient discussions of self-government and internal sources of motivation. Instead of using a Kantian or post-Kantian theoretical framework, we started to develop a new conceptual framework to ask a different set of questions. Out point of departure could no longer be to isolate and establish criteria for individual or preferentialist autonomy, but needed rather to look for more commonplace functions of the term: a general desire and a craving for personal freedom. On this view, autonomy involves a broad range of questions relevant to the pursuit of self-rule and the constitution of non-coerced source of motivation that are more apt to the ancient Greek sources: Which types of freedom, or lack of coercion and servitude, are the ancient philosophers interested in and why? What is an illegitimate or inauthentic source of motivation? What kinds of discursive and social dependencies were seen as a threat to self-government? How do external powers, such as legislation, epistemic authority and shared political decision-making, on the one hand condition, and on the other hand support the development of personal self-government and rational agency?
The Project’s Three Most Important Results
In asking, and answering, these questions, the following three themes were among the project’s most important results: (i) By a thorough reassessment of what questions were adequate to address to the ancient sources, the project was not only able to clarify the way the ancient and contemporary notions of autonomy overlap but also able to point towards their main points of divergence. As for the latter, it emerged that the ancient debate often occurs in contexts of an individual’s harmony with, and sometimes adoption of, the telos and the higher, divine or cosmic, principles. In the ancient context, self-determination is not opposite to, but actually coincides with the assimilation to principles higher than oneself. (ii) Our work also pointed towards commonalities with more contemporary conceptions in that we were able to show that a certain kind of conception of a dependent autonomous subject or agent was of central interest to Plato. Both ancient and contemporary discussions connect autonomy to the importance of being the origin of movement and control. In the Platonic tradition such a subject is not the possessor of individual preferences, nor someone with a personally unique take on the world, but, rather, a unified agent who in collaborative activities originates her own motion and reasons, and in this way commits in a profound sense to her own actions. In most of these activities, the inescapable human setting is both discursive and social-political. The feasibility of individual unification towards stable agency is seen as conditioned necessarily by various forms of social collaborations, such as legislation and private, as well as political, co-dependent dialogue. (iii) The necessary overlap between questions of individual self-government and the two realms larger than the individual – the rational or cosmic order and the socio-political – gives rise to a notion of external authority, e.g. discursive coercion, law, or social pressure, that was not directly seen as a threat to a person’s autonomous development, but rather as misdirected sources of rationality. These condition the Platonic notion of moral and epistemic improvement. That is, insofar as one’s motivational sources are properly redirected, they can both accommodate the practical limitations of individual human vulnerability and help unify the individual into a self-governing agent. In the end, it is this form of dependent autonomy that we want to label ‘Platonic’.
Project Implementation
The project had two main tools of implementation, individual research work and top-level international events. Within individual research, Olof Pettersson concentrated especially on two questions, on the limits of discursive reason in Plato’s characterization of external sources of motivation and on the social and political aspects of knowledge production and communication. The emphasis on Pauliina Remes’ work was, on the one hand, in late Platonic developments, and on the other hand on the theme of how cognitive functions and self-relations give rise to self-governance. In 2017, the project’s third international member, Amber Carpenter, gave a seminar series on Autonomy, Integrity and Knowledge in Plato, in Uppsala.
The project also organized two top-level conferences that both created new lines of thought and acted as an vital venue to make our research results available to the international community: An international symposium on Power and Knowledge in Plato and the Platonic Tradition, organized in Uppsala in May 2019 and an international conference, entitled Plato’s Alcibiades I Revisited, in Cambridge, in September 2018. Among other smaller events, Pettersson also organized a round-table in Beijing, at the XXIV World Congress in Philosophy, in 2018; Pettersson and Remes arranged a workshop on Plato's Use of Logos, 2016 in Uppsala; and Remes organized a Scandinavian symposium on Logos in Antiquity, as part of Platonsällskapets activities in 2017 (see also list of publications). Uppsala was also visited by all six members of the advisory board. All of our activities are also documented at the project’s official website: https://rationalselfgovernment.se/
New Research Questions
Drawing on the results outlined above, Pettersson has started to develop a new research project on Epistemic Authoritarianism. Asking in more detail about the various forms of external epistemic coercion identified and described as part of Plato’s attempt to isolate and define what it means to be a unified, authentic and rational agent, Pettersson has started to explore Plato’s defense of the intellectual authority of philosophy against the treats of false epistemic sources of influence, most famously represented by what Plato labels the sophists and their way to contravene the discursive conditions of sound rational deliberation. Given the way Plato depicts a joint discussion as one of the main means for a person to develop both intellectually and as a self-governing agent, Remes attention was turned to the vehicle of that activity, conversation and philosophical inquiry. She has started to explore the conditions of joint dialogue and how conversation can act a as a primary tool for information exchange and philosophizing, not only in Plato, but also in the continuing practice of academic seminars and other venues of joint inquiry.
Research Dissemination and International Collaboration
The results of the project have been communicated in articles in peer-reviewed journals and in edited volumes (see list of publications), where open access has been secured by submitting accepted or published versions in the public digital research archive DiVA. In addition, our results have also been disseminates as contributions to workshops, conferences and seminars. In and through the international conferences and guest speakers in the Uppsala history of philosophy research seminar, the project also connected Uppsala ancient philosophy group strongly to the international Plato community. We organized events in, e.g., Uppsala, Bergen, Beijing and Cambridge (UK). Existing connections to especially UK and US were also strengthened, and new ones created. Co-operation with University of Tartu has already led to new plans of joint events and research projects.
The results of the last large conference in Uppsala are also to be published in a book project, Platonic Autonomy: Essays on Unity and Cooperation in Plato and the Platonic Tradition, one of the main concrete result of the project. Its contributors are Nicholas Smith (Lewis & Clark), Maria McCoy (Boston), Olof Pettersson (Uppsala), Oda Tvedt (Uppsala), Susan Mayer (Univeristy of Pennsylvania), Charlotta Weigelt (Södertörn), Franco Trivigno (Oslo), Amber Carpenter (Singapore, Yale-NUS), Andrew German (Ben Gurion), Tony Leyth (Emory), James Ambury (King's College, Pennsylvania) and Toomas Lott (Tartu).
We have also disseminated our research results to a wider public audience. In 2017, for example, Remes participated in the podcast Philosophers’ Life and Thoughts, produced by Lund University. In 2019 Pettersson gave a guest lecture at SH, published this year as an article in Filosofisk Tidsskrift. Both Remes and Pettersson have also published parts of the result of the project’s research in other non-specialist journals (see list of publications).
Project Purpose and Development
Ancient sources in general and Plato’s dialogues in particular abound with discussions on self-motion and the contrast between external and internal sources of motivation. Self-governance is understood in contrast to slavery and the rule of non-rational sources of motivation. Internal or psychological powers are contrasted to external and socio-political coercion. All of this suggests that there is an important ancient debate about something we today call personal autonomy. Yet, according to the philosophical view that has left lasting marks on our use of the term ‘autonomy’, the Kantian conception, being autonomous is confined to being a matter of self-legislation founded in the individual ability to decide her own goals as an independent agent, and to pursue them in action. And such a conception, so the story goes, is completely foreign to the ancient thinkers. Does this mean that the concept is best left out in our treatments of ancient philosophical sources? And if so, how should we interpret their undeniable interest in questions about self-rule and non-coerced sources of motivation? The project set out to find what kind of conception of autonomy, if any, Plato operated with, and how and why the ancient framework differs from the Kantian.
As the project evolved, we soon realized that the individualist and Kantian theoretical framework was inapt to ask the right question to capture the ancient discussions of self-government and internal sources of motivation. Instead of using a Kantian or post-Kantian theoretical framework, we started to develop a new conceptual framework to ask a different set of questions. Out point of departure could no longer be to isolate and establish criteria for individual or preferentialist autonomy, but needed rather to look for more commonplace functions of the term: a general desire and a craving for personal freedom. On this view, autonomy involves a broad range of questions relevant to the pursuit of self-rule and the constitution of non-coerced source of motivation that are more apt to the ancient Greek sources: Which types of freedom, or lack of coercion and servitude, are the ancient philosophers interested in and why? What is an illegitimate or inauthentic source of motivation? What kinds of discursive and social dependencies were seen as a threat to self-government? How do external powers, such as legislation, epistemic authority and shared political decision-making, on the one hand condition, and on the other hand support the development of personal self-government and rational agency?
The Project’s Three Most Important Results
In asking, and answering, these questions, the following three themes were among the project’s most important results: (i) By a thorough reassessment of what questions were adequate to address to the ancient sources, the project was not only able to clarify the way the ancient and contemporary notions of autonomy overlap but also able to point towards their main points of divergence. As for the latter, it emerged that the ancient debate often occurs in contexts of an individual’s harmony with, and sometimes adoption of, the telos and the higher, divine or cosmic, principles. In the ancient context, self-determination is not opposite to, but actually coincides with the assimilation to principles higher than oneself. (ii) Our work also pointed towards commonalities with more contemporary conceptions in that we were able to show that a certain kind of conception of a dependent autonomous subject or agent was of central interest to Plato. Both ancient and contemporary discussions connect autonomy to the importance of being the origin of movement and control. In the Platonic tradition such a subject is not the possessor of individual preferences, nor someone with a personally unique take on the world, but, rather, a unified agent who in collaborative activities originates her own motion and reasons, and in this way commits in a profound sense to her own actions. In most of these activities, the inescapable human setting is both discursive and social-political. The feasibility of individual unification towards stable agency is seen as conditioned necessarily by various forms of social collaborations, such as legislation and private, as well as political, co-dependent dialogue. (iii) The necessary overlap between questions of individual self-government and the two realms larger than the individual – the rational or cosmic order and the socio-political – gives rise to a notion of external authority, e.g. discursive coercion, law, or social pressure, that was not directly seen as a threat to a person’s autonomous development, but rather as misdirected sources of rationality. These condition the Platonic notion of moral and epistemic improvement. That is, insofar as one’s motivational sources are properly redirected, they can both accommodate the practical limitations of individual human vulnerability and help unify the individual into a self-governing agent. In the end, it is this form of dependent autonomy that we want to label ‘Platonic’.
Project Implementation
The project had two main tools of implementation, individual research work and top-level international events. Within individual research, Olof Pettersson concentrated especially on two questions, on the limits of discursive reason in Plato’s characterization of external sources of motivation and on the social and political aspects of knowledge production and communication. The emphasis on Pauliina Remes’ work was, on the one hand, in late Platonic developments, and on the other hand on the theme of how cognitive functions and self-relations give rise to self-governance. In 2017, the project’s third international member, Amber Carpenter, gave a seminar series on Autonomy, Integrity and Knowledge in Plato, in Uppsala.
The project also organized two top-level conferences that both created new lines of thought and acted as an vital venue to make our research results available to the international community: An international symposium on Power and Knowledge in Plato and the Platonic Tradition, organized in Uppsala in May 2019 and an international conference, entitled Plato’s Alcibiades I Revisited, in Cambridge, in September 2018. Among other smaller events, Pettersson also organized a round-table in Beijing, at the XXIV World Congress in Philosophy, in 2018; Pettersson and Remes arranged a workshop on Plato's Use of Logos, 2016 in Uppsala; and Remes organized a Scandinavian symposium on Logos in Antiquity, as part of Platonsällskapets activities in 2017 (see also list of publications). Uppsala was also visited by all six members of the advisory board. All of our activities are also documented at the project’s official website: https://rationalselfgovernment.se/
New Research Questions
Drawing on the results outlined above, Pettersson has started to develop a new research project on Epistemic Authoritarianism. Asking in more detail about the various forms of external epistemic coercion identified and described as part of Plato’s attempt to isolate and define what it means to be a unified, authentic and rational agent, Pettersson has started to explore Plato’s defense of the intellectual authority of philosophy against the treats of false epistemic sources of influence, most famously represented by what Plato labels the sophists and their way to contravene the discursive conditions of sound rational deliberation. Given the way Plato depicts a joint discussion as one of the main means for a person to develop both intellectually and as a self-governing agent, Remes attention was turned to the vehicle of that activity, conversation and philosophical inquiry. She has started to explore the conditions of joint dialogue and how conversation can act a as a primary tool for information exchange and philosophizing, not only in Plato, but also in the continuing practice of academic seminars and other venues of joint inquiry.
Research Dissemination and International Collaboration
The results of the project have been communicated in articles in peer-reviewed journals and in edited volumes (see list of publications), where open access has been secured by submitting accepted or published versions in the public digital research archive DiVA. In addition, our results have also been disseminates as contributions to workshops, conferences and seminars. In and through the international conferences and guest speakers in the Uppsala history of philosophy research seminar, the project also connected Uppsala ancient philosophy group strongly to the international Plato community. We organized events in, e.g., Uppsala, Bergen, Beijing and Cambridge (UK). Existing connections to especially UK and US were also strengthened, and new ones created. Co-operation with University of Tartu has already led to new plans of joint events and research projects.
The results of the last large conference in Uppsala are also to be published in a book project, Platonic Autonomy: Essays on Unity and Cooperation in Plato and the Platonic Tradition, one of the main concrete result of the project. Its contributors are Nicholas Smith (Lewis & Clark), Maria McCoy (Boston), Olof Pettersson (Uppsala), Oda Tvedt (Uppsala), Susan Mayer (Univeristy of Pennsylvania), Charlotta Weigelt (Södertörn), Franco Trivigno (Oslo), Amber Carpenter (Singapore, Yale-NUS), Andrew German (Ben Gurion), Tony Leyth (Emory), James Ambury (King's College, Pennsylvania) and Toomas Lott (Tartu).
We have also disseminated our research results to a wider public audience. In 2017, for example, Remes participated in the podcast Philosophers’ Life and Thoughts, produced by Lund University. In 2019 Pettersson gave a guest lecture at SH, published this year as an article in Filosofisk Tidsskrift. Both Remes and Pettersson have also published parts of the result of the project’s research in other non-specialist journals (see list of publications).