A Genealogy of Autonomy: Part 3 Immanuel Kant
This one has taken a bit of a while to write, mainly because I haven't had time but also because Immanuel Kant is a little difficult to write about. The outline I offer here aims to give a summary of Kant to support the development of the concept of learner autonomy specifically as we use it in language learning, where autonomy has been a central concept for the past fifty or so years. As already summarised in a previous post (a while ago now), the concept used in language learning can be traced from Rousseau, and is codified under the Bergen definition (in the 1980s).
However, the concept of autonomy as it is used in other fields (e.g. political science, law) draws on a wider range of thinkers, one of the most important being Immanuel Kant. Kant was a German philosopher of the late 18th century from Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia) and one of the great German thinkers that dominated later European philosophy.
Kant's ambition was huge, he sought to synthesise the major philosophical thinkers of the Enlightenment. Principally he wanted to reconcile Newton, who described a physical reality independent of our experience, and David Hume who argued that our understanding of reality can never be independent (we can only ever see the world through our experience of it).
How could he grapple these opposing positions? Kant's starting point was to ask himself “what would have to be true in order for this to be the case?”. From here, he developed a series of concepts in his metaphysics. Kant distinguished between phenomena (the world as we see it) and noumena (the world as it really is, independent of whether or not we perceive it), which he applied to his ontology.
Kant's most famous concept is perhaps the categorical imperative – a universal ethics, which he contrasted with a hypothetical imperative. In brief, the former is true for all no matter what, while the latter is relative. The categorical imperative is imperative because it commands us to do something (though we might not, because we have free will), for example: do not lie. This contrasts with what we ought to do, for example: if you want to eat healthily, eat lots of vegetables. The former depends on a necessary moral law, while the latter depends on how we might wish to engage with the world.
Kant introduces autonomy into the former. For Kant, autonomy is our capacity to use reason to give us a moral foundation. Therefore, autonomy is paradoxically, bound by the moral laws we have given ourselves. We have autonomy but within constraints – our conditions exist a priori. Kant also distinguishes between autonomy and heteronomy – that we may be governed by other things (external forces or our desires), which is a theme we see in other perspectives on autonomy (e.g. passive and active affects).