The ‘we’ in the title refers to ‘us’, people in the vaguely described Western world, where the self tends to be big, autonomy is (on paper, at least) held in high esteem, and identity has become a convoluted issue.
‘We’ also refers more specifically to people involved in education, educational research or philosophy of education. The educational domain hosts a number of influential but mutually incoherent discourses about the self. One is that of self-determination theory, according to which it is crucial for people’s growth and well-being that three basic psychological needs are fulfilled, labeled autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Importantly, ‘autonomy’ is interpreted here as a subjective sense that one’s behaviour is autonomous because it is self-willed and self-endorsed. Whether you are actually acting autonomously is (apparently) irrelevant.
Another influential discourse is that of (post-Rawlsian) liberal philosophy of education. Here the emphasis lies on the importance of the ability to reflect on one’s beliefs and commitments and revise them on the basis of rational evidence. To advocates of liberal autonomy it clearly does matter that autonomy is real.
Still, there is an important connection between these two discourses, which we might call a cultural connection – the culture being that of liberal individualism. This is the centrality of choice, the idea that it is crucial (whether subjectively or objectively) that I choose rather than that others choose for me. In other words: ours is a culture of self-importance – so much so, that we often forget how little of who we are and (therefore) what we choose is down to us. Liberal philosophy, in particular, has tended towards a voluntaristic notion of identity, as if who we are is itself a matter of choice rather than the source from which our ‘choices’ spring.
Complicating the mix, yet linking up with the importance of choice, is today’s identity discourse in which one’s identity is increasingly seen as a construction rather than a given and therefore – though it is doubtful if this logically follows – as subject to one’s own decision. You do not have a particular identity, but you identify as someone or something. And all too often this annoys others who assumed you had a particular identity – or who, we should perhaps say, identified you differently.
One way to sum this up is to say that we are too self-absorbed. We are products of our past and our environment; our identity is constructed, but our ‘own’ role in this (if it even makes sense to try to separate ourselves out from what does not belong to ourselves) is very modest; and we feel we act autonomously much more often than we can really be said to do so.
This might not be so bad, if we did not suffer from our illusions concerning our ‘selves’, both individually and collectively. As individuals we spend precious time and energy trying to ‘find ourselves’, find out ‘who we are’ and then to present this ‘identity’ to the world and defend it against challenges by others. Collectively, we suffer both from identity-related violence and from the space demanded by all those big selves, to whom maximum freedom to operate is granted whatever the collective consequences (think climate change, ecological destruction, the undermining of the social fabric).
In this light it is interesting to see that philosophers who think more deeply about this illusive ‘thing’, the self, increasingly often turn to Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian sources, among others. (There are also links with Classical Greek and Stoic philosophy here.) We find various accounts of self-cultivation advocated in these ‘Eastern’ traditions, as well as of unselfing. The combination of the two notions enables a potentially liberating – and highly educationally relevant – perspective on autonomy and identity.
The more we realize that what we think of as our ‘self’ is not a permanent and self-identical entity, and that a lot of the time there is no ‘I’ in control of our thoughts and feelings, but that we are fluid parts of a fluid whole – like waves emerging at the surface of the sea, granted a fleeting existence until they crash on the shore – the less likely we are to overestimate our self-importance. And the more we realize that much of the identities we cling to become harmful if we allow them to harden, the more free we will become. Paradoxically, the key to autonomy may lie in making ourselves smaller. By doing so, by wriggling free from the grip of ‘given’ desires and identities, we make room for another kind of self, insubstantial but crucial to agency based on a calmer and less greedy perception of things.