Autonomy - Ontonomy - Heteronomy

Quest for freedom, emancipation, self-greatness, non-limitation of one’s capacities… the semantic field of the concept “autonomy” opens the way to a multitude of horizons to be defined in order to establish ways of being or ways of living together.
Autonomy thus refers to the possibility and the capacity to establish “the” normativity to which an individual, a group, an organization, a community or a society wants to conform. This free field of possibilities implies a prior operation consisting in rejecting what appeared to be imposed from outside oneself. From an exterior perceived as an obligation to live something non-conforming with one’s conception of being. The obliged is conqueror. It is represented under the features of “heteronomy”. By what is dictated of the outside to oneself.
The binomial “autonomy — heteronomy” combines inevitably under the features of a Being confronted with a double reality : the presence of an autonomous self and pertaining to the self-determination which must compose with a heteronomous self, fruit of a hetero-determination. This double reality can hardly be other than conflictual and dialectical.

Conflictual : because of the unavoidable aspiration to Be otherwise than by what defined us. Conflictuality associated also to the fact that an autonomy, once defined, imposes itself to the self and prevents this self from living a situation of perpetual autonomy, not stabilized and not instituted.
Dialectic : because of the evolutionary movement allowed by the process of “imposition — liberation” that represents a heteronomous self in incapacity not to seek to emancipate itself from the iron cage of its heteronomy. The heteronomous being cannot exist without seeking to remodel the heteronomy that dresses it. The autonomous being can be accomplished only by having succeeded in imposing a normality which can appear only carrying heteronomy for others.
The presence of the conflict and the dialectical process which results from it finds a haven of peace in the concept of ontonomy.
Ontonomy (from nomos, law, and on, being) is neither autonomy where external laws are rejected, each being his own law, nor heteronomy where each sphere of existence would depend on a superior sphere. It refers to the “internal regularity of any being in its constitutive relation to the whole (of the Real) of which it is a member“¹.
Ontonomy represents a kind of symbiotic crossroads where the presence of the instituted “heteronomy” and the instituting “autonomy” are combined. A point of junction and balance between what is (1) external to us, (2) what is proper to us, and (3) the way in which the two combine to constitute a being essentially fruit of a shaping of transitory relations between the hetero and the auto. Ontology refers, by the very fact of the entanglement it symbolizes, to an “original position and not a simple compromise or middle ground between heteronomy and autonomy. Each person or culture is perceived as existing insofar as it participates in the Whole and allows it to express itself through it” Ibid.
The ontonomy testifies to the extremely imbricated state of the constitutive substance of any being. From the atom, to the virus, to the civilization while passing by the cyborg… the self is the fruit of a combination of put in relations, of a mutuelism between the components of the constitutive real of our realities.
This imbrication is currently denied by the epistemology of the modern globality. The world, as this epistemology represents it, is divided between the heteronomous, the universe of institutions, and the autonomous, the world of the instituting, which is situated at the margin of the instituted. This representation thus conceives heteronomy as a “naturalized or completed order” and autonomy, as an adaptive function to the latter. It takes the form of a positive autonomy, when it contributes to the improvement of the dominant order, and negative, when it harms its “good functioning” or its “good transformation”.
The Awakening Manifesto invites us to reconnect with the integrative and mutualistic dimension of ontonomy.
We speak of reconnecting because the first peoples have bequeathed to us an integrated representation of the binomial “heteronomy — autonomy”, based, among other representations, on juridicality or the symbolism of the “circle” or even the yin and yang.
The symbolism of the circle connects beings from a network of non-hierarchical relationships to form a “community of kinship” for Christoph Eberhard² a “community of begetting” in the terms of Bruno Latour³, or a “biotic community” in the eyes of Aldo Leopold⁴.

Notes

1
Eberhard, Christoph. “The Circle as an Opening for Peace. Detour par des visions amérindienne et tibétaine du Droit”, Revue interdisciplinaire d’études juridiques, vol. 49, no. 2, 2002, pp. 303 – 346, page 323.
2
Op. cit.
3
Miranda, Carolina (2019). “Trouble in begetting : An interview on the politics to come”. Crier Review, 14, 60 – 73. https://doi.org/10.3917/crieu.014.0060.
4
Aldo Leopold (1949 [2000]). Almanach d’un comté des sables, Paris, Flammarion.