Philosopher Miriam Rasch helps us think about the mechanisms behind our actions ★★★★☆

You have just made the decision to read this review. That decision came about autonomously, you think, through a rational thought process. Or not? Perhaps you subconsciously feel obliged by your environment to read the book section of de Volkskrant to read, to be able to talk. Or perhaps you are reading this piece online and it has come to you via the guiding algorithms of Google’s databases. So why autonomous?

Philosopher Miriam Rasch goes in her book Autonomy – A self-help guide looking for answers to the question to what extent we can still be autonomous in 2022 (from the Greek cars/self and nomos/law, i.e. governed by its own laws). The subheading ‘a self-help guide’ is of course an ironic joke. The background to her search is that of the data-hungry tech companies, which (as the often-heard cliché goes) know more about us than our own partners do. And that’s how they determine which music we listen to, which series we watch and which products we are tempted to buy. ‘What is personal autonomy worth in relation to the algorithms that are after her?’, Rasch wonders.

That is a valid and urgent question. The starting point of Rasch’s quest is the philosopher Immanuel Kant, of whom she also recorded a long excerpt from the work What is Enlightenment?† Its famous opening sentence reads: “Enlightenment is the emergence of man from the immaturity of which he himself is guilty.” Have the courage to use your own mind, Kant exclaims to his readers. In other words: do not be guided by any external body. More than two hundred years ago, of course, the outside world was not Google or Facebook, but church and state, which from the outside imposed restrictions on freedom of thought. Kant contrasts this with his own, autonomous responsibility.

A difficult ideal

Rasch calls this a ‘beautiful and moving’ passage, despite the objections she has at the same time: ‘I was not allowed, I could not participate in it as a woman, any more than anyone who happened to have no light skin.’ Touching or not, Kant’s rather caricatured understanding of autonomy as a purely reasonable affair has become problematic over time for several reasons. Rasch points out, among other things, ‘an excessive idea of ​​personal responsibility’, which hardens society to the bone. After all, with Kant’s glasses on, everyone is guilty of their miserable existence.

But there is more that has undermined Kant’s ideal, thanks to Newton, Darwin, Marx and Freud, among others, after which the behaviorists, neurologists and computationalists (the philosophical movement that sees man as an information-processing system) finished the work. Man, we now know, is the plaything and outcome of all kinds of forces beyond his control, such as genes, education, culture, brain, hormones, evolution and society. And more recently also of algorithms, which turn us (in the words of writer and historian Yuval Noah Harari) into hackable animals. Rasch notes that, together with free will, the autonomous subject has been relegated to the scrap heap of history. We respond to stimuli and nudges ‘like an automaton that may think it is acting consciously but is actually executing an ancient script’.

‘Autonomous’ machines

End of human autonomy, then? Well no, although it often seems that way in everyday language. We are talking about autonomously driving cars and about computers that make autonomous decisions. We conveniently forget that the same cars and computers make their decisions based on the recipes that have been introduced by people. Apparently we set the autonomy bar for machines a lot lower than for ourselves. But that’s not the path Rasch continues on. Just like her previous books friction and Swimming in the ocean can also Autonomy be read as an answer to the question of what it means to be human in a data-ruled world.

Rasch digs up the concept of autonomy from the scrap heap. She does this with the help of a term that has been around for about forty years: relational autonomy. Kant’s ideal is thus exchanged for ‘the possibility of maintaining a meaningful relationship with the world’. The beauty of this work is that Rasch does not allow himself to be tempted into a smear campaign against technology or Kant. Instead, she is attempting to interpret the concept of autonomy in such a way that it makes sense again.

Or rather: the search for the meaning of autonomy is the first step in her interpretation. “You won’t survive on your own against the mass attack of autonomous or algorithmic techniques,” she concludes. Autonomy means entering into a relationship with the world and the other: ‘Autonomy that dances with heteronomy.’ Still a kind of self-help guide, then.