Richard Dien Winfield - Autonomy and Normativity: Investigations of Truth, Right and Beauty

AUTONOMY AND NORMATIVITY

A radical and systematic critique of some of the mainstream thinkers by means of a single unifying principle. This book will contribute very constructively to current philosophical debate.

Wilfried Ver Eecke, Professor of Philosophy, Georgetown University, USA

Winfield has a very clear position, namely that normativity must be foundation-free and so self-determining, and he explores the implications of this position with great energy and clarity. It is very helpful to have these essays collected together so coherently in this single volume which will appeal to students and scholars coming from a broadly Hegelian direction, as well as those working on political questions from the perspectives of Kant, Marx, Rawls or Habermas.

Stephen Houlgate, Professor of Philosophy, University of Warwick, UK

Autonomy and Normativity explores central topics in current philosophical debate, challenging the prevailing post-modern dogma that theory, practice and art are captive to contingent historical foundations by showing how foundational dilemmas are overcome once validity is recognized to reside in self-determination.

Through constructive arguments covering the principal topics and controversies in epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics, Autonomy and Normativity demonstrates how truth, right and beauty can retain universal validity without succumbing to the mistaken Enlightenment strategy of seeking foundations for rational autonomy. Presenting a compact, yet comprehensive statement of a powerful and provocative alternative to the reigning orthodoxies of current philosophical debate, Richard Winfield employs Hegelian techniques and focus to object to opponents, and presents a radical and systematic critique of the work of mainstream thinkers including Kant, Rawls, Husserl, Habermas and others. The ramifications for the legitimation of modernity are thoroughly explored, in conjunction with an analysis of the fate of theory, practice and art in the modern world. This book offers an invaluable resource for students of both analytic and continental philosophical traditions, and related areas of law, social theory and aesthetics.

In memory of my brother-in-law,
Siddhartha Gautam

Autonomy and Normativity

Investigations of Truth, Right and Beauty

RICHARD DIEN WINFIELD

First published 2001 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge

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ISBN 13: 978-1-138-70679-8 (hbk)

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Contents

Those chapters that were previously published are listed below with the corresponding publication credits. The respective journals and presses are thanked for granting permission to include these studies, which are here integrated with certain alterations.

Chapter One: Freedom from Foundations: The Normativity of Autonomy in Theory and Practice, Jadavpur Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 4, No. 1, Fall 1992, .

Chapter Two: Hegels Remedy for the Impasse of Contemporary Philosophy, Reason Papers, Vol. 16, Summer 1991, .

Chapter Three: Review of William Makers Philosophy without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel, The Owl of Minerva, Vol. 28, No. 1, Fall 1996, .

Chapter Four: Concept, Individuality and Truth, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, Nos. 39/40, 1999, .

Chapter Five: Space, Time and Matter: Conceiving Nature without Foundations, in Hegels Philosophy of Nature, edited by Stephen Houlgate (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 68.

Chapter Six: Ethical Community without Communitarianism, Philosophy Today, No. 2, 1996, pp. 310320.

Chapter Eight: With What Must Ethics Begin? Reflections on Bensons Account of Property and Contract, Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 11, No. 3, February 1990, pp. 537548.

Chapter Nine: Unity in the Common Law?, The Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence, Vol. IX, No. 2, July 1996, pp. 411422.

Chapter Ten: Friendship, Family and Ethical Community, The Philosophical Forum, Vol. 28, No. 4 and Vol. 29, No. 1, Fall 1997-Winter 1998, .

Chapter Twelve: Should the Economy be Democratized?, Southeastern Political Review, Vol. 23, No. 4, December 1995, pp. 689702.

Chapter Thirteen: Relativism and Democracy, Jadavpur Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 10, No. 1, Fall 1998, .

Chapter Fourteen: Post-Colonialism and Right, in Hegels Philosophy of Right, edited by Robert Williams (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).

Chapter Fifteen: The Individuality of Art and the Collapse of Metaphysical Aesthetics, in American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1, January 1994, .

Chapter Sixteen: Hegel, Romanticism, and Modernity, The Owl of Minerva, Vol. 27, No. 1, Fall 1995, .

Chapter Seventeen: The Challenge of Architecture to Hegels Aesthetics, in Hegels Aesthetics, edited by William Maker (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), .

Autonomy and normativity have had an often beleaguered association in the annals of theory, practice, and art, but seldom has their link been suppressed. From the beginning, philosophy has understood its pursuit of truth to depend upon the autonomy of reason. Without reasons liberty to question everything, philosophical inquiry could never escape the hold of prevailing authority and a relativizing subservience to whatever claims that authority privileges. Moreover, without the positive freedom to generate ideas independently of antecedent dogma, philosophy could never advance from conditioned opinion to truths unconditioned by bondage to unexamined givens. Whenever the legitimacy of conduct has become an issue, freedom has equally had to be enlisted, first, as the constituent gateway to the sphere of responsible action circumscribing right and wrong, and second, as the conduit from enslavement under ruling convention to the enactment of practices that are as they ought to be. Finally, for beauty to be evaluated in its own right, shorn of magical, sacred, or prosaic concerns, the necessities of given form and antecedent rules have had to make way for autonomy to accommodate the individuality, originality and creativity pervading the aesthetic fit of meaning and configuration.

At each turn, the demands of normative justification require a liberation from the given as well as a positive autonomy to deliver a content independent of external foundations. Neither truth, nor right, nor beauty can be defined by anything lacking the normativity they each constitutively possess. Yet if truth cannot be determined by what lies outside the truth, if what is right cannot be prescribed by what is not itself right, and if beauty cannot be extracted from what lacks aesthetic worth, that is, if, generally, what is normative cannot be defined by what is normatively neutral, normativity seems to revert to an empty tautology where whatever claims validity for itself has nothing to offer in its own support than the self-identity that any arbitrary assertion might share. The alternatives seem starkly bleak: if normativity gets rooted in some distinct foundation, that foundation can never satisfy the standard of normativity that it endows by founding what derives from it. As the antecedent ground of what counts as valid, the privileged foundation would have to be its own ground to enjoy the normativity it establishes. Otherwise, the foundations own character would be a dogmatic given that cannot meet its own requirement of resting upon the privileged ground from which validity is supposed to derive. Yet if the foundation does rest upon itself, it ceases to be the foundation of something other than itself, eliminating the entire relation of ground and grounded by which its own privileged foundational role is defined. On the other hand, if normativity cannot be based upon something lying outside itself, it seems condemned to an arbitrary content, whose presumed privilege can be challenged by any competitor, insofar as each and every discernible candidate can claim an individuality making it a law unto itself. Normativity would seem reduced to the sheer positivity of residing in whatever is put forward as exclusively privileged.