We have traced the logic carefully: individuation is retrospective; collectives are primary; identity is stabilised relation; even counting presupposes cuts. What remains is the final, deceptively resilient concept: autonomy.
Autonomy is everywhere assumed to be the ultimate marker of individual existence — the last refuge of independence, responsibility, and agency. Yet, once we follow the series’ inversion to its conclusion, autonomy is revealed not as a foundation, but as a narrative stabiliser.
Autonomy as narrative, not ontology
Autonomy functions to reassure:
-
It tells us that individuals act independently.
-
It provides a sense of causal agency where, in reality, relational coherence undercuts isolated causation.
-
It frames identity, responsibility, and social participation as properties of bounded units rather than emergent patterns within a collective.
Autonomy is not false. People can make choices, act, and persist. But the concept of the autonomous individual as ontologically primary is a myth. It is a story told to make stability intelligible, not a description of reality’s fundamental structure.
How the myth persists
The myth survives because it is functionally useful:
-
Epistemically: It simplifies complex relational phenomena into units that can be reasoned about.
-
Socially: It underwrites norms, laws, and institutions built on the idea of responsible, bounded agents.
-
Cognitively: It gives a stable frame for expectation, memory, and projection in human experience.
In all these domains, autonomy is applied retrospectively, much like individuation itself. It describes coherence that already exists in the relational field, but it does not produce that coherence.
Quietly devastating consequences
Recognising autonomy as myth rather than foundation destabilises multiple domains:
-
Political theory: “Sovereign individuals” are not ontologically prior; social cohesion emerges relationally.
-
Ethics: Responsibility does not require metaphysical autonomy; it can be understood in terms of participation within stabilised patterns.
-
Biology and cognition: Organisms and minds are coherent systems within collective potential, not discrete agents acting independently of relational fields.
The key is subtlety. Nothing is banned. Nothing is denied. The phenomena remain real. What is removed is the illusion that these phenomena require a foundation in autonomous individuals.
The final inversion
Taken together, the series presents a quiet but unyielding shift:
-
Stability comes before individuation.
-
Collectives generate potential; individuals are inferred.
-
Identity is relational, not bounded.
-
Counting presupposes cuts, not units.
-
Autonomy is a stabilising narrative, not an ontological primitive.
Autonomy, like individuation, is applied after the fact. It reassures, coordinates, and narrativises, but it does not constitute reality.
Closing
This series does not destroy phenomena. It does not deny persistence, coherence, or action. What it does is more precise, and more powerful: it removes the explanatory scaffolding that has been misattributed to individuals and autonomy.
By the end, the reader should recognise a single principle, quietly woven through all five posts:
Reality is relational, stability is perspectival, and the concepts we rely on to name “individuals” and “autonomous agents” are retrospective readings, not causes.
In accepting this inversion, we gain a clearer, calmer, and far more powerful framework for understanding identity, collectivity, numeracy, and agency — without ever appealing to metaphysical primitives.
No comments:
Post a Comment