The Sovereign Self

Illiberal Metaphysics in a Liberal World

The noble lie on which liberalism is founded is the belief in the sovereign self.

The right says we aren’t sovereign because we’ve been brainwashed by liberal / libertine culture.

The left say we aren’t sovereign because we’ve been brainwashed by capitalism, racism, and/or patriarchy.

The question is whether you can defend liberalism without believing in the sovereign self.

I learned from reading Luke Burgis’s Wanting that Peter Thiel’s orthodox libertarianism was disturbed by Girard's teaching that we are fundamentally imitative creatures, meaning our sovereignty is not self-standing. He says this insight is “dangerous.” I agree.

I learned from reading interviews with Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex, that some forms of feminism believe “consent” between adults in sexual ethics is necessary, but insufficient, for similar reasons. Our desires are warped and not always self-justifying. “My body my choice” only works as a maxim in a world you are presumed to be autonomous. But can we assume autonomy in a world where we are fundamentally imitative?

If you follow this gnostic reasoning to conclusion, consent is meaningless in a world where we are already unfree.

Isaiah Berlin believes that gnostic reasoning leads to totalitarianism, because it introduces the idea that a vanguard knows better than we do about who we really are.

I agree with Burgis and Srinivasan, and with many important existentialist thinkers, like Augustine, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Arendt, and Sartre, that we are not transparent to ourselves. I also am partial to the holistic metaphysics that on the whole lead to anti-liberalism.

But pointing to the foundational contradictions of liberalism is not enough to warrant throwing out the myth of the sovereign self altogether.

So I think this makes me what Sloterdijk and Zizek would call “cynical”—a liberal who can no longer believe in the rationality of liberalism, but who must now believe even though or because it is absurd.

For what it’s worth, I think a lot of Western critics of liberalism are also cynical, from the other side, enjoying the fruits of a world based on the myth of the sovereign self and then from a place of abundance criticizing it.

Maybe this framing is too absolutist, and the question is how much should we weight the myth of the sovereign self against other myths like the myth of interdependence or the myth popularized by the Matrix, that we are living under some fundamental illusion. Going with the metaphor of homeopathy, perhaps we need a small dose of non and illiberal myths to inoculate us from the strong challenge they pose.

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