Ethical self-understanding as a dimension of personal autonomy

Abstract

Over the course of his career, Jürgen Habermas has developed several conceptions of autonomy, most notably moral, private, and public autonomy.. Despite this interest, he has never engaged methodically with the idea of personal autonomy. Notwithstanding this absence, his work contains some ideas that are suggestive of the idea of personal autonomy and that can be developed into a coherent and comprehensive theory. As I state below, his underdeveloped idea of a conscious conduct of life (bewuβte Lebensführung) approximates significantly contemporary conceptions of personal autonomy. A close reading of his work suggests that the idea of a consciously lived life is composed of three interrelated ideas: ethical self-understanding, strong evaluation, and the recognition of participants in communication as competent communicative agents who are expected to speak for themselves. The idea of a conscious conduct of life can be developed into a multidimensional theory of personal autonomy, with each of the three constitutive ideas developed into specific dimensions.

In this article, I will develop Habermas’s idea of ethical self-understanding, understood as a dimension of a Habermas-inspired theory of personal autonomy as a conscious conduct of life. I will start by first situating the idea of a conscious conduct of life within Habermas’s framework of practical reason and briefly explain the above-proposed three dimensions of a conscious conduct of life. Following this, I will then explain what Habermas understands by ethical self-understanding, and by drawing from the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, whom Habermas cites in one of his brief explications of ethical self-understanding, I will then develop the idea of ethical self-understanding in more detail. Finally, by drawing from the work of Rahel Jaeggi, I will develop two conceptions of two defective modes of ethical self-understanding that tend to close off the possibility of leading a conscious conduct of life.