Abstract
Kazuo Ishiguro’s book Never Let Me Go is a thoughtful and provocative exploration of what it means to be human. Drawing on insights from the hermeneutic-phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, I argue that the movement of Ishiguro’s story can be understood in terms of actualising the human potential for autonomous action. Liberal theories take autonomy to be concerned with analytically and ethically isolatable social units directing their lives in accordance with self-interested preferences, arrived at by means of rational calculation. However, I argue that such theories are simplistic abstractions from our human-life world, distorting the fundamental embodied, embedded, and relational nature of autonomy. When we attend closely to our concrete, lived existence we see instead that autonomy is about responding appropriately to others with whom we share a world. As we follow the path of Ishiguro’s central character Kathy H., we are shown how an awareness and acceptance of our existential finitude as precarious and fallible creatures is necessary for guiding such appropriate interactions. As Kathy grows and is affirmed into her life-world, which grounds and supports her Being, she moves from heteronomy to autonomy; from being moved by external laws to embodying those laws, thereby becoming autonomous. This is exemplified by her appropriation of the carer role, through which she responds in a fitting way to those with whom she shares her world, bearing the weight of and dwelling responsibly within our human condition.
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Notes
Where a capital “B” is used for “Being” it emphasises the importance that Heidegger puts on the way in which we come to understand and shape our existence (our Being) as someone and the existence (Being) as something of others we encounter.
Although contemporary liberal theories of autonomy recognise the social and/or relational situation of human life, they do so only in a superficial way. For example, John Christman (2004) argues that social/relational factors only functionally contribute to creating an autonomous actor. In his account the individual can still make isolated, self-serving decisions and be considered autonomous; it is not necessary for there to be any substantial relationality about the individual’s thinking and acting. Such accounts confuse selfishness with autonomy. Although Catriona Mackenzie (2008) claims to put forward a constitutionally relational account of autonomy, there is nothing in her approach that makes relations with others constitutive of autonomy. Nor do her criteria require that our autonomous actions are coordinated and integrated with others in any way. Thus, the notion of “relationality” is superfluous to her account.
In her work, “The Truth About Memory” (1994), Marya Schechtman draws on studies conducted by Barsalou (1988) and others that show how individuals do not remember particular events in a straightforward, causally connected way, but instead they summarise, condense, and edit their recollections around themes or the gist of the events, recasting anomalies and overemphasizing those which seem the most salient, congruent with their self-understanding.
To be oriented to the ethical significance of things and to see the moral demand of a situation as a call for a response from us requires more than an intellectual understanding; it requires that we become affectively disposed to a situation in a way that enables us to form a motivating connection to those claims on us. We may not act on it, but we must feel its pull. Peter Strawson (1976) has discussed how the formation of patterns of behaviour occurs in response to the “reactive attitudes of others.” We are shaped through our encounters with others, responding to “reactive attitudes” such as praise, condemnation, and so on, so that our character and our ways of acting arise in response to others.
Hans Georg Gadamer (1996) has noted that the Greek language possesses two different words for “life”: zoe and bios. The way in which they are used expresses the way that worldly experience has become sedimented into the meaning of these words. There is a distinction between them and we can see something of this when we consider the meaning of the difference between zoology (from zoe) and biography (from bios). It is a distinction that provides us with an important insight: that bios refers to a life that interprets itself and that can be understood by other interpreting beings; that is, it refers to a human form of life.
Heidegger (2002) calls this circumspective awareness and he also discusses it in his analysis of Plato’s Theaetetus. Others have also acknowledged that our ability to discern is a direct interactive activity. Psychologist James J. Gibson (1986) notes that the act of picking up information from the environment is a continuous, perceptual, psychosomatic act, not of the mind or body, but of a living participant. George Herbert Mead states: “Our whole intelligent process seems to lie in the attention which is selective of certain types of stimuli. Other stimuli which are bombarding the system are in some fashion shunted off. We give our attention to one particular thing. Not only do we open the door to certain stimuli and close it to others, but our attention is an organizing process as well as a selective process. … Here we have the organism as acting and determining its environment” (Mead 1970, 25).
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Bowyer, L. Autonomy and Why You Can “Never Let Me Go”. Bioethical Inquiry 11, 139–149 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-014-9533-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-014-9533-4