ABSTRACT
Autonomy, self-legislating and self-determining individuality, is the foremost achievement of modernity and its despair. What looks like the essential structure of autonomy designates a movement of the will whereby if it is governed by anything other than itself alone it loses itself, it becomes heteronomous. Heteronomy refers to any determination of the will that governs it from without, where what is without, outside, other is simply what is not the will either metaphysically (essentially) or through the work of incorporation. Which is why attaining autonomy has meant either isolating the will, through doubt or conceptual refinement, from everything that could be considered, logically or actually, external to it in order that it might then be in a position to will only itself, its freedom; or, especially in political contexts, reclaiming for the will what originally belonged to or was produced by it but has become alienated or reified in opposition to it—what has become separated from it and come to rule it from without. Despite appearances to the contrary, this latter move equally requires the isolation of the will from its products, even if they are truly morally or metaphysically its, since unless there is a means of identifying the will as intrinsically my or our will, unless the will has a specifiable character and integrity apart from what it wills, then there will be nothing for its products to stand over and against, overwhelm, dominate, and control. Autonomy depends upon locating, above all through the self-reflective self-purification of sceptical doubt, some essential characterization of the will in order that its true, legitimate and rightful, scope and provenance with respect to what lies outside it can be established.
