It sounds impossible, arrogant, exaggerated - particularly the vaunted self-sufficiency of that phrase "without any help from anyone else". Nevertheless, it captures something crucial about what has since become modernity's conception of independent rational inquiry. According to this modern conception, the authentic search for truth always requires a preparedness to set aside received wisdom or the authority of the past. Each of us is in one sense on our own, in the struggle to achieve a rationally secure understanding of what we can know, how we should live, and what is our human place in the scheme of things.

Descartes does not use the word "autonomy". But as we move from the early?modern period forward to the Enlightenment, the message of Cartesian individualism gathers momentum. Not just in the abstract search for knowledge, but in our ethics and our whole worldview, it begins to be felt that each of us must strike out on our own, deciding for ourselves what is or is not acceptable. For Immanuel Kant, "the basis of the dignity of human nature and of every rational nature" is that aspect of our will whereby it must be considered as selbstgesetzgebend ("giving the law to itself"). No longer do we subordinate ourselves to a supposed higher reality: no longer do we say with Dante, E'n la sua volontade è nostra pace ("and in His will is our peace"). Instead, we are individual, self-determining, self-deciding, autonomous agents.

How do things stand today? It is often said (indeed it is almost a cliché to say) that we now live in a "post-Enlightenment" or a "post-modernist" age. It has become fashionable in many academic circles to challenge some of the assumptions of the Enlightenment (and some of those challenges may be valuable); but in many respects I think it is clear that the Enlightenment value of individual autonomy still exerts a powerful hold on us. But what exactly does the ideal of individual autonomy amount to; and would we really be better off jettisoning it?