From Shows About Nothing by Thomas Hibbs:
According to…Immanuel Kant, a democracy is a community of individuals who are simultaneously sovereigns and subjects. No longer is revealed religion, nature or nature’s God an appropriate basis for our own self-understanding. Since these are all in some measure extrinsic to the human will, reliance on them is seen to be alienating, an infringment of the dignity of the individual. In Kant’s technical language, submission to them puts the individual in a state of ‘heteronomy’, the exact opposite of autonomy. Kant is remarkably optimistic about the agreement that is likely to result from everyone cultivating his autonmy, for he supposess that since each is under his own command, each will acknowledge and respect the dignity of the others in their capacity for self legislation.
Hibbs then goes on to ponder these arguments in an analysis of the film To Kill a Mockingbird:.
…Mockingbird seems to be of two minds about tradition and cultural particularity. On the one hand, in Kantian fashion, it asks us to prescind from the prejudices of blind tradition and look past the superficial veils of race. On the other hand, the conception of duty that Atticus embodies is infused with the code of honor appropriate to the Southern gentleman. From the Kantian perspective, then, To Kill a Mockingbird would be a somewhat impure depiction of the politics of autonomy. That assessment may tell us more about the deficiencies of the model of autonomy than about the dramatic flaws of the film. The problem is that radical autonomy, since it undercuts faith in any objective or communally shared source of morality, easily gives way to nihilism. Once cultural nihilism becaomes prevalent, no one has the right or the capacity to determine where the laws ought to be drawn.
Hibbs whole conjecture here revolves around the inherent tension between “too much” autonomy [anarchy] and “too little” [autocracy]. And this applies not just in the narrow political sense but in all other aspects of human interaction as well. He draws our attention to the role of “liberal democracy” and how, perhaps, in taking so much of what we once traditionally construed as essentially right and wrong behavior [think of sexual mores in the 50’s and sexual mores today, for example] off the leash, we have created a debilitating and herterogenous rootlessnees that, perhaps, might necessitate reintroducing a more…well…heteronomous frame of mind all over again. But of course “common sense” would prevail in the end.
Ah, but which rendition of it? And common sense all too often devolves over time into the “lowest common denominator” sensibilities of “the masses”.
Kant, of course, was able to subsume all this in a rational philosophical assessment of human ethical interaction. The mind would deduce the requisite a priori assumptions respecting the manner in which “practical reason” [in conjunction with a Good Will] would then become the horse pulling and regulating the cart. Then, perforce, this philosophically motivated moral agent would derive just the right mix of autonomy so as to convey to the world those behaviors deemed to be either universally right or universally wrong.
In theory, as it were. But, ironically…i.e. for all practical purposes…this has rarely been sustained beyond particular individuals who claim to live their lives in the moral tradition of Kant. Which, however, is seen as being superior to those who live their lives in the moral tradition of, say, Plato. Why? Because Kant’s rendition of it is “squared” with the phenomenal world somehow. God is, well, a lot deeper in the background.
Authority therefore would be rooted categorically and imperatively in one’s moral duty. As though throughout the entire history of human social, political and economic relationships this has ever actually happened self-consciously [over large segments of a population acting out a philosophical agenda]. As though Kant’s rendition of human moral interaction isn’t just the equivalent of a footnote in the works of Marx and Engels.
But then Nietzsche’s biggest blunder may well have revolved around his failure to read Marx in turn. Philosophy, after all, is to political economy what lungs are to air. You can’t really make sense out of one until you understand its relationship to the other. And what good are lungs without air?