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In Greek antiquity, the concept of autonomy (autonomia, self-determination or self-regulation, from autos [self] and nomos [law]) was used, with rare exceptions, in a political frame of reference. It referred to the political independence that was the aim of the Greek city-states. In the ancient Latin world, the concept was absent, but its sense was approximated in such phrasings as “the power to live according to one’s own laws”; except for one appearance of the Greek word itself in Cicero, the word autonomia was not used. In the Latin Middle Ages, too, the concept was absent, but it was revived and played an important role in connection with the political and religious controversies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Only with Kant and post-Kantian idealism does the concept acquire philosophical and theological meanings. This development provides the immediate background of its use, in conjunction with the concepts of heteronomy and theonomy, in the twentieth century. Its most prominent role emerges in the philosophical theology of Paul Tillich.

Early Usage. As a political concept, autonomy signified the right to arrange a political entity’s own affairs independently of outside powers. Herodotus in the fifth century B.C.E. contrasts autonomy both with external dependence on foreign domination and also with internal tyranny. The word’s rare nonpolitical sense is illustrated by Sophocles’ Antigone when she is described as heading toward death not as a victim of disease or the sword but “autonomous, living, alone” (Antigone, line 821). At the beginning of the modern period, the concept becomes important in jurisprudence. Thus, it was invoked to interpret the Peace of Augsburg (1555), which recognized the legitimacy of Lutheran and Catholic confessions by providing an arrangement, lasting until the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), for subjects in each land to follow the religion of their ruler (cuius regio eius religio). In an effort to find a designation for the Protestant demand for religious freedom, Franciscus Burgcardus, author of the important treatise De Autonomia, das ist von Freystellung mehrerlay Religion und Glauben (1586), had recourse to the Greek word autonomia; for, unlike the Latin terms for liberty (libertas) and freedom of religion (licentia credendi), it had political as well as religious connotations. Burgcardus, however, still associated the concept with the medieval theory of social orders rather than with personal subjectivity. In the period following, the term had both a religio-political sense, when referring to the Catholic princes’ loss of their privileges upon converting to Protestantism or to the “establishment of freedom of religion, freedom of conscience” (Peace of Westphalia), and also a more general sense, when referring to having one’s own right and being one’s own master instead of being subject to imperial power.

The Concept in Kant. More important for present-day use of the term in religion and philosophy than the developments in the juridical concept (including the distinction between private autonomy and civic autonomy) is Kant’s embracing philosophical concept of autonomy as expressed in the remark, “All philosophy . . . is autonomy.” Here it means no longer a right to institutional self-determination, but the possibility of human beings to be self-determining according to the form of reason. The concept of autonomy is thus set over against the concepts of nature and of social form; to act freely is synonymous with acting autonomously and in an ethically good way. Autonomy is the capacity of the rational will to determine itself rather than be determined from the outside, that is, by empirical intuitions and natural drives or inclinations (even those leading to self-love and arrogance), hypothetical imperatives (instead of categorical imperatives), and natural causes. If, for example, one furthers the happiness of others because one is moved by sympathy with fellow human beings, the will is determined by an object rather than by a rational form produced by reason; that is a state of heteronomy. If, however, one furthers the happiness of others because reason gives to the self-loving inclinations the form of universality, extending to all rational beings and independent of feelings, then the action is determined by the rational form; and that is autonomy (Critique of Practical Reason, A 59). Along with autonomy and heteronomy, Kant mentions, although only in passing, “heautonomy” as the reflexive power of judgment to prescribe a law not to nature (as it does in autonomy) but to itself (Critique of Judgment, Introduction A xxxv/B xxxvii). Kant regarded the Christian principle of morality itself as autonomous, in contrast to certain theological elements with which it was connected and which made it heteronomous.

Against this Kantian notion of autonomy, made more radical through J. Fichte and F. W. J. Schelling, early opponents raised the objection that it denied the essential human obligation to God. In an essay from 1801, K. L. Reinhold called autonomy the “basic error” that was taken for the “basic truth.” F. H. Jacobi called Kant’s and Fichte’s autonomous form of morality a “self-deification.” F. von Baader called Kantian critique blind to God for not recognizing that conscience is a co-knowledge, a knowing of oneself as being known by God, and that the spontaneity of the will rests on the indwelling of God in the will and not on an impersonal moral law of reason; and to the autonomous self of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) he contraposed the formula cogitor ergo cogitans sum (I am thought, therefore I am a thinking someone). Indeed, Baader regarded as antimoral, antireligious, and revolutionistic all moral doctrines based upon an absolute autonomy.

Neo-Kantianism and After. Kant had developed the concept chiefly by reference to the rational will (practical reason), while also indicating its more comprehensive sense. With Neo-Kantianism this universal sense, which had been obscured by the ethical framework of the discussion, returns. Thus, H. Cohen, in his Ethik des reinen Willens (1907), declares that the concept of autonomy must be drawn from logic as well as from ethics and that what constitutes heteronomy is fundamentally the mistrust of theoretical reason. On this basis, several concrete, autonomous spheres can be defined: the autonomy of science, religion, the social, and the aesthetic. An important variation of ethical autonomy is found in the ethics of material values associated with N. Hartmann and M. Scheler, the latter of whom emphasized that the act of obedience to what is given to reason as a norm is itself an autonomous act of the will. Here the theory of the autonomy of values means that norms of action are pregiven to the individual agent as objective, material values, which the agent needs to appropriate and master, not to produce, through ethical activity. Personal autonomy presupposes the prior existence of such material values. In this case, heteronomous validity is “introcepted” (W. Stern) into an autonomous obligation.

The discussion of autonomy in religious thought today is complicated by the addition of a third concept, theonomy, which emerges briefly in the post-Kantian discussion but does not stand out until Tillich develops it in connection with his theology of culture and of history. Tillich’s discussion of autonomy has the double distinction of working out the dynamics of autonomy and of conceiving the relation between the autonomous and theonomous by reference to what he calls “form” and “depth.”

Autonomous reason is reason that actualizes its structure without regard to its depth; heteronomous reason is a structure of reason that is imposed upon reason as the depth of reason; and theonomous reason is autonomous reason when, as autonomous, it is simultaneously transparent to its depth, or to what in his early works Tillich called Gehalt. “Autonomy does not mean the freedom of the individual to be a law to himself [but] the obedience of the individual to the law of reason, which he finds in himself as a rational being” (Systematic Theology, 1:83f.); the “problem of heteronomy is the problem of an authority which claims to represent reason, namely, the depth of reason, against its autonomous actualization” (1:84); and theonomy means “autonomous reason united with its own depth” (1:85). This concept of autonomy differs from the Kantian conception, according to which empirical knowledge is heteronomous, because it is dependent upon sense-intuition, in contrast to the moral law, which is immanent in reason. For, in contrast to Kant, Tillich conceives autonomy as the self-determination of a structure that is already a bipolar structure of subject and object (in epistemological terms) or self and world (in ontological terms). “The nomos (‘law’) of autos (‘self’) . . . is the law of subjective-objective reason” (1:84). Hence, autonomy is not the self-determination of the subject over against the object but the state in which the subject-object structure determines and is determined by itself; and genuine empirical knowledge is, consequently, not heteronomous, as in Kant, but autonomous (1:64). The question of autonomy in Tillich is not whether the subject is determined by itself or by an object in the world but whether the self-world structure determines and is determined by itself, that is, whether it is free to be the structure it is. Heteronomy has, therefore, a negative connotation in Tillich that it does not have in Kant; it refers to a state of affairs in which one element of the whole structure of reason is equated with the depth of reason and placed over against the structure of reason.

The dynamics of reason are related to the way in which, under the conditions of existence, autonomous reason is in conflict with heteronomous reason as the result of losing its transparency to depth. Heteronomy is the imposition of a law on reason from outside reason; but the outside of reason is in fact an element of reason. “Heteronomy is . . . authority which claims to represent reason . . . against its autonomous actualization” (1:84). Such heteronomy arises as a reaction against an autonomy that has lost its depth. But the reaction is destructive, and the conflict between the two leads to the quest for a new theonomy, that is, a reunion of depth and rational form.

Autonomous reason, the structure of the self in relation to its other, is theonomous when its own rational structure is transparent to the depth of the structure, when “depth” means the transrational that, because it exceeds rational grasp, is neither subject (in opposition to object) nor object (in opposition to subject) but equally beyond as well as apparent in both subject and object—“the absolute Nothing and the absolute Something” that is neither a being nor the substance or totality of beings but “above all being” (“Theology of Culture,” 162). Similarly, autonomous being is theonomous when it is transparent to the depth of being, which is neither the self nor the world but apparent in both of them.

A typology of current usages of the concept of autonomy can be drawn from Tillich’s concept. If Tillich represents one type, then a second type, represented by Karl Barth, sees autonomy and heteronomy as constituting the alternative, the one referring to human self-determination and the other referring to determination by something or someone other than one’s own self, whether the other be worldly objects or other persons. Theonomy, in turn, is not an alternative to autonomy or heteronomy; it belongs to a different frame of reference. Thus, Barth contrasted the theonomy of his dogmatics with the autonomy of a philosophical system by the difference in the center. At the spot where a system of thought has a “basic intuition” as its organizing center, dogmatics has an opening (like, Barth said, the open ring in the center of a wheel) for the self-showing of God (Kirchliche Dogmatik, 1/2:969). This open place is only provisionally filled and always subject to change. The presupposition, made in Barth’s dogmatics, that God shows the divine self in the word of God, is the concrete representation of this theonomous element, which is as different from autonomy as it is from heteronomy. “Autonomy should not be understood, any more than heteronomy, as in opposition to theonomy but as in correspondence and correlation to theonomy” (1/2:958). All other presuppositions are at best provisional and can be corrected as warranted. Barth’s use of autonomy, heteronomy, and theonomy differs from the type represented by Tillich in two ways. Unlike Tillich, but like Kant, Barth’s type includes in the legitimate structure of being or reason both an autonomous and a heteronomous element—so that both autonomy and heteronomy can answer to and be related to theonomy. Thus, the assertion of the self-revealing of God in the word of God as an absolute presupposition is intended to be neither autonomous nor heteronomous. In Tillich’s type, such an absolute presupposition would have to be regarded as heteronomous because it is a rational assertion—an assertion about something by someone—but it is treated as though it cannot be rationally judged.

The third type, placed somewhere between Tillich and Barth, is represented by Bultmann, in whose view there is no intermediate position between autonomy and theonomy. Theonomy is either autonomy or heteronomy; but if autonomy is understood in a genuine sense, then autonomy is theonomy. This view resembles the Barthian type in seeing autonomy and heteronomy as the alternative, but it differs from Barth in allying theonomy with autonomy and not with heteronomy. It differs from Tillich because it operates with a polarity of self and other (self-world, subject-object) but not with a polarity of structure and depth (or form and Gehalt).

As the typology of uses indicates, the concept of autonomy cannot be understood in isolation from its related terms. When understood in relation to them, its valuation changes depending on whether theonomy is compatible with heteronomy as well as with autonomy or only with autonomy or only with heteronomy.

ROBERT P. SCHARLEMANN