1) To piggyback on Jill's question about whether it can be considered an act of autonomy to cede one's autonomy, it reminds me of the age old debate in the "freedom first" crowd about whether someone ought to be able to consent to slavery.
My sense from his rejection of Kierkegaard's leap into faith is that Kaufmann's answer would rely on the fact that someone choosing slavery voluntarily is unlikely to have healthy, considered reasons for doing so.
Now, supposing that the person did have good reasons... or is that supposing the absurd?
2) My sense from everyone else is that there is consensus that making every decision with autonomy is absurd, but I can think of two different reasons for this. The first, which is more mundane, is that it is simply too costly to spend all this time thinking about every decision. As Alfred North Whitehead said "Civilization advances by increasing the number of things we can do without thinking about them." The second has more to do with the embodied wisdom of tradition. To believe that our rational considerations of the facts will always surpass the wisdom of years, generations or centuries of acquired experience is extremely arrogant. As Friedrich Hayek says "If we stopped doing everything for which we do not know the reason, or for which we cannot provide a justification, ... we would probably soon be dead."
My concern is that it is equally true that if we did everything someone told us to do without asking them to provide a justification, we would also probably soon be dead. Or in the words of my mother, "If all your friends were jumping off of bridges would you do that too?"
Clearly there is room for judgment and taste in this balancing act. For this reason, I think we should attempt to classify the types of situations in which decidophobia is a danger and those in which it is emphatically not.
I'm going to avoid making my list because I want to think about it a bit more, but in my first few minutes thinking about it, it struck me that perhaps answering this question is a really good way to figure out what matters to you or what characteristics you value in others.
Suppose you generated a survey along the following lines:
You will read about a number of hypothetical decisions that a person might have to make in their lifetime. How important is it to think carefully about each of these situations before reaching a decision:
Rate on a scale of (Not at All Important[1] to Very Important[5])
Choosing a political party
Becoming a vegetarian
Learning to drive a car
Deciding to go to church
etc...
Could you use that to predict anything? Should I sell the idea to Match.com?
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3 comments:
I think this thought goes best with Erik's "Choosing Not to Choose", although it pertains more to group membership than economy of mental energy.
Someone who leaves their group is alone. He is free to cross whatever boundaries the group mandated he stay within. But he is not free to partake in the huge benefits of being part of a group. People evolved by forming successful groups. Groups are powerful, safe, and can be a lot of fun. Joining a group and conforming is a very rational thing to do.
It's true that being part of a group limits your choices. But your choices are limited anyway. We are constantly trading one kind of freedom for another. The freedom from work vs. the freedom from hunger. The freedom to hurt others compromises our freedom to live with our neighbors in harmony.
Becoming a monk, since Kaufmann brought them up, could be viewed as an excercise of extreme autonomy. Most people spend their whole lives chasing after nice cars and "worldly desires," but the monk, through great force of individual will, has freed himself from that rat race to accomplish something else. Or I could imagine becoming a monk as a means of escaping fateful decisions.
He explains the difference in Part 3: "In many situations a human being may choose suicide with open eyes after considering what speaks against it and examining the major alternatives. Suicide can be wholly admirable. Nor need it be primarily an act of either fear or courage; it can also be an attempt at revenge or a form of protest. Similarly, not every member of every religion is a decidophobe."
So, in his view, joining a group (religion, movement, school of thought) is not an automatic surrender of autonomy. If the group is joined on purpose with "open eyes after considering what speaks against it." I feel this is key to understanding what his autonomy IS, instead of only discussing peoples' exit strategies.
Also, I am skeptical of the "unanimous and harmonious ant heap." Anyone who has ever been part of an organization (or gone on a family vacation) knows that human collectives are anything but unanimous and harmonious. A church who is passionately united on one issue, abortion for example, is rife with conflict over other issues such as whether women should be allowed to preach. Academic departments are full of arguments and sometimes bitter disagreements. People can get their toes stepped on so harshly in organizations that they leave, whether it be a church, workplace, or even family.
In your comment on Jill's post, you suggest that Kaufmann is primarily concerned with decidophobia in the moral realm. That means for him - and for me - moral decidophobia is one of the most serious forms.
I wonder, though, about how many cases of decidophobia just delay (rather than avoid) actual decisions. Example: my lease is up on July 31. If I were a decidophobe about renting a new place, I would put off my decision until the last minute. Nonetheless I'd still be moving out on July 31. If I used a strategy - joining the Army, say - to avoid the decision... Well, I would still have made a decision. Do you think this is true in most cases, or can decidophobes really avoid many (important) decisions indefinitely?
Yes Erik -- I'm not a big Rush fan -- but I like the lyrics to that song :) and yes you should sell the idea to Match.com
I also agree that the plethora of choices available today have changed the dynamics of choice. What drives decidophobia may be much different now than it was in the past. No longer driven by the more basic needs for survival -- as already mentioned -- we have perhaps a more modern luxury of drifting or procrastination, etc. The consequences today, at least, seem to be less for being a decidophobe. However, the situations and institutions mentioned by Kaufman are not necessarily new to society and culture.
Religion, for instance, -- has always and is still based on rituals and rules. But to ponder about his further, do people choose say religion today for different reasons than they used to? Are religious followers today more or less autonomous? Does the religion matter? I think these answers are somewhat hard to pinpoint. Say the (Christian) church use to be so intertwined with everyday life that people didn't think twice about it -- maybe they were less autonomous... or perhaps the consequences for questioning were so great that to choose other wise was foolish for most (Galileo maybe being a great example of this problem). As more people became literate and could decipher textsfor themselves -- and Luther posts his 95 Theses -- they seemed to become more autonomous, more inclined to make their own decisions by way of trying to find answers to their own questions or at least break free from the Catholic church, but then were they just trading one form of slavery for another? And you could also argue both points today -- many that follow a religion don't question the rules and know very little about the actual scripture and history -- they follow blindly and perhaps concede autonomy, while on the other hand, perhaps because religion (in many places) is not a predominate institution as a whole (like the Catholic church once way) we could say that people who choose to follow a religion today have come to their choice after great thought and consideration -- since there are no real consequences of not following.
So what then? I would like, as many of us have talked about, to pin down exactly what decidophobia IS to Kaufman. To me, it has a negative connotation -- those who do not choose autonomy are making a bad choice? But it's still a choice, isn't it? And is it not just as bad -- even say hypocritical -- to try to force autonomy on those who do not want it?
As Erik mentioned, perhaps we should create some sort of list of when autonomy is beneficial and when it's not -- but how do we determine what falls where?
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