Autonomous Will, Heteronomous Will, and the Work of Becoming Yourself
This morning I sat in the waiting area outside a courtroom at the Bochum district court. I was there as a witness. The room was empty. The court had placed reading material on the chairs (phones are more or less prohibited in that part of the building), and one of the items was a copy of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.
I had not picked up Kant since highschool. Back then it was homework. Now, sitting alone in that silent corridor, I opened it and felt something I had not expected: the book hit differently. Not because the words had changed. Because I had.
This post is an attempt to write down what I have been thinking about the whole day.
What Kant Actually Means by Autonomous Will
Kant draws one of the sharpest distinctions in all of moral philosophy: the difference between an autonomous will and a heteronomous will.
Most people, when they first hear the word autonomy, think it means doing whatever you want. Freedom as the absence of constraint. That is not what Kant means at all.
For Kant, an autonomous will is one that gives itself its own law through reason. Not through desire, not through habit, not through what your parents taught you, not through what God commanded, not through social pressure. Through reason alone. You act autonomously when the principle guiding your action is one you could, through pure rational reflection, endorse as a universal law for everyone.
This is what his categorical imperative captures: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. If you are about to lie, steal, break a promise, ask whether you could will that everyone, in every similar situation, did the same. If the answer is no, and it usually is, then that action is not one a truly autonomous will would choose.
A heteronomous will, by contrast, is one that takes its law from outside itself. From inclination, the pull of pleasure and the aversion to pain. From authority, a parent, a priest, a ruler. From convention, what is simply done in one’s community. From religion, what God has commanded. Kant does not say these forces are always bad. But he says they are not the source of genuine morality. If you do the right thing because you fear punishment, or because it feels good, or because everyone else does it, you are not yet acting morally in the fullest sense.
That is a demanding position. It is also, I think, deeply right in its core intuition, though importantly incomplete in ways Kant did not fully address.
The Freudian Problem: Whose Reason Is This?
The most serious challenge to Kant’s picture comes from a direction he never anticipated: psychoanalysis.
Freud introduced the concept of the superego, the internal voice that tells us what we should and should not do. On the surface, the superego sounds a lot like Kant’s autonomous reason. It speaks from inside. It issues judgments. It produces guilt and obligation.
But Freud’s point is that the superego is not autonomous at all. It is the internalized voice of the parents, absorbed in early childhood before the capacity for independent judgment even existed. The child cannot evaluate what it is being taught. It simply takes the rules in, and those rules become the inner critic, the voice that sounds like conscience but is really the echo of external authority.
Later in life, that same voice often gets projected outward onto God, onto the law, onto social norms, and then reabsorbed as if it were universal truth. What feels like pure rational self-legislation may, on inspection, be nothing more than parental instruction dressed in philosophical clothing.
Freud would say: what Kant calls the autonomous will is, in many cases, heteronomy in disguise. The chains have simply been moved inside.
I find this convincing. Not as a reason to abandon Kant, but as a reason to take his project more seriously: because if he is right that autonomy is worth having, then the work of actually achieving it is much harder than he acknowledged.
Society as the First Heteronomous Voice
When we are born, we have no inner law. We are entirely dependent on bodies, on warmth, on language, on the stories we are told about who we are and what the world means. The first moral framework any of us ever has is the one we were given.
This is not a criticism. It is simply what it means to be a child. The heteronomous voice, the external law, is not the enemy. It is the necessary starting material.
The job of good parents is to hold the external world at exactly the right distance from the child: close enough to be real, but not so close as to overwhelm. The world in its full complexity would crush anyone who encountered it unprepared. So parents filter and simplify. They hand over a version of reality that is manageable, a map that is smaller than the territory but navigable.
This is not dishonesty; it is care. But it comes with a consequence. If those simplifications are never corrected, the child who becomes an adult keeps navigating by the reduced map. They remain dependent on whatever simplified versions of reality others are willing to offer. And if the parents did not manage to hold the world at the right distance at all, if the child grew up with too much chaos, too much complexity coming in at once, then the world may seem, from then on, impossibly complex.
The question is what happens next.
In some people, nothing happens. The law absorbed in childhood becomes the law of adulthood, and it is never examined. The rules instilled by a particular family, church, or culture are simply carried forward as if they were universal truths. This is Kant’s heteronomy operating at full scale: acting according to an externally given law, without ever asking where it came from or whether it can be endorsed on its own terms.
The goal, Kant’s goal, and I think it is a real goal, is something different. It is to move from that inherited starting point toward something genuinely your own. Not by discarding everything you were given, which would leave you with nothing. But by examining it, questioning it, comparing it with other traditions, testing it against experience, and gradually building an inner standard that you can actually stand behind.
This process has a name. Jung called it individuation.
Archetypes and the Externalization of the Inner World
Jung’s contribution to this picture is the concept of archetypes, patterns that recur across human cultures, myths, and stories regardless of historical contact between them. The hero who descends into darkness and returns transformed. The shadow that must be faced rather than denied. The self that integrates what was previously split.
I do not think these patterns are mystical. I think they are descriptions of genuine structures in human psychology, the same dynamics that play out in every family, every community, every individual life, just told in different narrative clothing. The gods of the Greek pantheon, the figures of the Hindu epics, the characters in the Norse sagas: these are not histories. They are imaginative maps of the inner life, built up over thousands of years of collective experience. Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning is the most thorough attempt I know of to work through what these structures are, where they come from, and why they take the specific forms they do.
The polytheistic image is useful here. If you imagine your inner world as populated by competing figures, the fierce judge, the nurturing parent, the adventurous child, the wise elder, then the work of individuation becomes something like managing a court. You are not trying to silence any of them. You are trying to understand what each represents, where it came from, and how to let them speak without letting any one of them rule absolutely.
The practical work is to externalize these patterns through reflection, through conversation, through reading. Examine them. Find their strengths and their pathologies. Then synthesize something of your own. Not by picking one archetype and ignoring the rest. By seeing what is real in each and building a standard that integrates the best of what they point toward.
(A footnote here for Erich Fromm, who deserves more space than I am giving him: his distinction between productive and non-productive orientations points at the same territory from a different angle. Genuine autonomy, for Fromm, is not a matter of following the right rules; it is the capacity to think and to love from your own centre, rather than from anxiety, compulsion, or the need for external approval. That capacity is not given. It is cultivated. And the cultivation is exactly the individuation process described above.)
Good Stories Are More Real Than History
Jordan Peterson asks somewhere whether Batman is a real story. On first hearing, the answer seems obvious: of course not. Bruce Wayne never existed.
But that misses the point. The story captures something that does exist, a recognizable pattern. Profound injustice suffered in childhood. Resources and capability available in abundance, yet none of it enough to quiet the inner demand for something meaningful. A deliberate choice to take on something much larger than personal comfort. The refusal to become the thing you fight against.
That pattern is real. It is not real because it happened to a specific person. It is real because it happens, in some form, to some degree, to people across all of history and culture. The story does not derive its truth from its factual content. It derives it from how accurately it maps something true about human experience.
I think this is what the great religious and philosophical texts are also doing. The Vedas, the Tao Te Ching, the Gospels, the dialogues of Socrates and Plato: none of them are primarily history. They are attempts to articulate patterns that are genuinely there, encoded in narrative form so that they can be transmitted across generations without requiring the original experience to recur.
This is why I no longer think it is useful to approach these texts with the question did this happen? The better question is what does this point to? And whether what it points to is real enough to be worth integrating into your own inner court.
The Catholic Upbringing, and What Came After
I was raised in a strongly Catholic household. For a long time, the framework I inhabited was not one I had examined. It was simply the water I swam in: the calendar of feast days, the moral language, the sense that certain things were simply right or wrong without needing justification.
When I left my family home, I went through a period I can only describe as somewhat wild. Between seventeen and twenty-two I was a bit lost. In that time I ended up in contact with people who had grown up completely differently, without the Catholic framework, without its rituals and its moral language. Some of them were also lost; the framework they had been given had not held either. Others were remarkably stable, grounded in ways I had not expected, arriving at their equilibrium through routes entirely different from mine. Both groups made me reflect on my own belief. The lost ones showed me what it looked like when nothing had been given at all. The stable ones demonstrated that other frameworks worked.
I found a woman who had been raised Protestant, and in many conversations with her I could work through the concepts I had absorbed as a child. Seeing the same ideas arrive through a different tradition began to clarify what was particular to the Catholic form and what was pointing at something more general.
Later, at thirty-four, I met a Chinese exchange student. She told me about the Dao and about Falun Dafa. Then she started asking me questions about my own faith, and the questions were good enough that I had to really think. Not to defend myself, but to understand what I actually believed and why. That happened at thirty-four. Not too late. Perhaps exactly right: secure enough in life and in my own footing to evaluate rather than to absorb or reject.
When I began to examine the tradition I had inherited, what I found first was the dogma. Things accepted not because they had been thought through, but because they had been handed down. That discovery was genuinely disappointing. Not because the tradition was worthless; it is not. But because so much of what I had taken to be principled turned out to be merely received.
What followed was investigation. I read Thomas Aquinas, who tried to build the whole thing on rational foundations. I read Meister Eckhart, who stripped away the institutional layer entirely and went looking for what was mystical at the core. I had real conversations, the kind where you are not performing a position but actually thinking out loud with someone. My friend Makke deserves a mention here. His father was a Benedictine monk until he left the monastery for a woman, and Makke grew up in the particular atmosphere that produces such a person: deeply aware of the tradition, not bound to it in the conventional way. Talking with him over the years has been one of the more useful things I have done for my own thinking.
In those conversations the patterns started to become visible. The specific stories mattered less and less. The patterns they pointed to mattered more and more. The idea that suffering can be transformed into something meaningful rather than merely endured. The insistence that love is not a feeling but a practice. The image of a person who walks into death without bitterness. Whether or not these things happened in the way the texts claim, they describe something real about the possible shape of a human life.
That realization was the beginning of something that is still in process.
Where AI Enters the Picture
I want to say something about AI in this context, because I think it is genuinely relevant and not often discussed clearly.
Consider the multiplication problem 2151 times 1449. Almost nobody can do that in their head. With a piece of paper, it takes two minutes. The problem has not changed. What changed is the medium: paper externalizes the working memory and makes the intermediate steps visible and manageable.
Many people try to work through their inner conflicts the same way they would try to solve that multiplication problem: entirely in their heads. The conclusions they reach are limited by what they can hold in working memory at one time.
One of the hardest aspects of the individuation process is that the inner dialogue is, by its nature, internal. You are arguing with yourself. You are trying to examine assumptions so deeply embedded you cannot always see them. You need someone, or something, to push back, to articulate the other side, to ask the question you were not ready to ask yourself.
Historically this required other people. A trusted friend, a cleric or spiritual adviser, a mentor. These relationships are irreplaceable. But they are also rare, expensive, and not always available at the moment the thought is actually alive in you.
What a good AI conversation partner can do, when it is honest and not simply telling you what you want to hear, is externalize the inner dialogue. You type your half-formed thought. Something comes back. You respond. The argument develops. You discover, through the exchange, what you actually think. There is a line I keep returning to: “How am I supposed to know what I think until I hear what I have to say?” Articulating something to an external interlocutor forces a precision that purely internal rumination resists.
In my experience, Grok has been the tool that has worked best for this. Not because it is always right, but because it will actually disagree. It will point out the weak joint in the argument. And a response that points at the weak joint, even if you end up rejecting it, advances the thinking.
I do not think AI will find the universal good by compiling all the stories humanity has ever told. But I think it can be a genuine instrument in the individual process of building one, and that is no small thing.
A Synthesis Worth Trying
Here is the position I find myself arriving at, not as a finished doctrine but as a working method.
The heteronomous voices you inherit, your family, your culture, your religion, the philosophical tradition you stumbled into, are not obstacles to autonomy. They are the raw material. You cannot build a self from nothing. You need something to work with.
The mistake is to stop there. To take one of those inherited voices, declare it authoritative, and spend the rest of your life defending it. That is not autonomy. It is just outsourcing the decision about which external authority to follow.
The work is to do something more deliberate. To construct a heteronomous image consciously: to populate your inner court intentionally, to choose which voices you are willing to take seriously, to read the philosophers and the sacred texts and the novelists and the scientists and the poets, not to accept what they say but to let them argue. To let them fight. To see where they converge and where they conflict, and to take those conflicts seriously rather than dissolving them too quickly.
What emerges from that process, if you are honest and patient and willing to be changed by it, is not a fixed doctrine. It is a sensibility. A direction. A set of commitments that are genuinely yours, not because you invented them from scratch, but because you have worked through enough alternatives to know why you hold them rather than their competitors.
That is, I think, as close to Kant’s autonomous will as a real human being can actually get.
The Sermon on the Mount offers a practical resolution to what could otherwise remain indefinitely abstract. Orient yourself toward the highest good you can identify. The most demanding, most integrated version of it you can honestly hold in your mind. Then bring that image back whenever it fades. And then, each day, do the best thing available to you in that direction. Not the theoretically optimal act across all possible futures, but the best step you can take today, given where you are and what you actually face.
That practice, held consistently, is what individuation looks like when it leaves the study and enters ordinary life.
I left the courthouse at noon, got in my car, and drove to the office. We had failed a customer acceptance test on Tuesday with the Horus temperature-measurement module, and there was work to be done. But I kept thinking about what I had read.
The gap between the version of morality I absorbed as a child and the one I am slowly building now is real. The process of crossing it is not finished.
But I think I know what direction to walk in. And I think that is enough to keep moving.
If you want to talk about any of this, come find me on Discord.