The Myth Of Autonomy
By DONALD DeMARCO
I Never Sang for My Father, a 1970 film based on Robert Anderson’s play by the same name, features a father who identifies himself as a “self-made man” who struggled hard for everything he achieved.
Toward the end of the play, the father, now elderly and incapacitated, offers a desperate declaration of his self-sufficiency: “(Shouting.) I don’t want anyone to come in. I can take care of myself. Who needs you? Out!. . . . I have lived each day of my life so that I could look any man in the eye and tell him to Go To Hell!”
Such bravado is bitterly ironic given what soon takes place. “One day, sitting in his wheelchair and staring without comprehension at television…he died…alone…without even an orange in his hand.”
The image of the orange is powerful. It suggests, symbolically, that human beings are meant to be relational, not independent beings. A life without love is a life unlived. We are not autonomous beings who need no one other than ourselves. We are persons who live in community and thrive on positive relations with others. We are interdependent beings.
As we have been told, “It is not good for man to be alone.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson is America’s most eloquent voice that sings of self-reliance. In his 1841 essay on that theme, he writes:
“In the Will work and acquire, and thou hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit out of fear from her rotations.” This is beautifully expressed heroic fantasy. The wheel of chance imposes itself on us regardless of the strength of our will. “Insist on yourself; never imitate.”
America’s most platitudinous essayist also declares: “Discontent is the want of self-reliance. It is infirmity of the will.” America is not yet weaned of Emerson’s influence.
Sober realism informs us that we are mortal, were born without our permission by a mother, cared for and taught by others, sheltered, clothed, and fed by others, and interred by paid undertakers. We are not exactly, self-made, self-reliant, autonomous beings.
But we do have a strong propensity for believing in illusions. We are often more gullible than realistic, more guilty of self-deception than achievers of self-reliance. Abortion and contraception do not give women autonomy or even reproductive freedom. Nor does euthanasia make people autonomous. Autonomy is a myth; finitude is the reality.
G.K. Chesterton talks about the time he walked into a publisher’s store and heard a remark that he regarded as almost the motto of the modern world. The publisher said to him of someone, “That man will get on; he believes in himself.” Chesterton then asked, “Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves?” The publisher was not prepared for his customer’s answer. “The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.”
Here, Chesterton was alluding to man’s inveterate capacity for self-deception and overrating his own abilities. Belief in oneself can easily be believing in one’s illusion of himself.
The publisher then asked, “Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?”
After a long pause, G.K. replied: “I will go home and write a book in answer to that question.”
And so, Orthodoxy was written, a book that led Chesterton into the Catholic Church. Belief in Christ, who cannot deceive us, seemed better than believing the self that possesses so strong a proclivity for deception. Such belief does not negate the self, but forms an alliance with a source, Christ, that is always reliable.
Two heads are better than one, especially when one of them is not in the clouds. We are not the creators of our own selves. We are created by another. That Other knows us better than we know ourselves.
The best-known Delphic injunction that was carved into the lintel at the Temple of Apollo is “Know Thyself” (gnothi seauton). According to the legend, the words were inscribed by the gods to alert humans to the importance of an ideal that often eluded them. This same phrase became associated with Socrates, who taught that the unexamined life is not worth living.
Hence the difficulty people have in coming to a true assessment of themselves. “O God,” cried St. Augustine, “I pray you to let me know myself.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, who had little in common with either Socrates or St. Augustine, fully acknowledged his ignorance of himself: “We are unknown we knowers, to ourselves. . . . Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in our selves we are bound to be mistaken for each of us holds good to all eternity the motto, ‘Each is the farthest away from himself’ — as far as ourselves are concerned we are not knowers.”
We deceive ourselves as to who we are. But we also deceive others and are deceived by them. We need look no further than past cigarette advertising and the influence it had on millions of smokers to affirm this point.
Polonius instructs his daughter, Ophelia, about how untrustworthy a man’s words can be, when he says to her: “When the blood boils, how prodigal the soul lends the tongue vows” (Hamlet, act 1, scene 3).
We creatures, who hardly know who we are, are far removed from autonomy. Nonetheless, by virtue of humility and a relationship with God, we have reason to hope.
Chesterton, though wary of man’s capacity to know himself on his own merits, nonetheless had reason to hope. “If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses,” he once remarked, “what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?”
We do not need autonomy when we can have authenticity.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad; Poetry That Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; and How to Flourish in a Fallen World are available through Amazon.com.
(Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
