Abstract
Personal autonomy can be understood either in morally neutral terms as the capacity of individual self-determination, or in the more Kantian terms as the free self-legislation, a person being autonomous only if he or she is subject to the laws established or accepted by him or herself. The paper does not deal with autonomy in this latter, moral sense, but only in the sense of the individual's capacity to decide and to act accordingly.
This capacity was considered by Ricoeur to be an important expression of human activity both in his early phenomenological work "Freedom and Nature" and in his hermeneutic monograph "Oneself as Another". Ricoeur repeatedly underlines the largely dependent character of human decision and agency, but at the same time, he discards the existentialist emphasis on the experience of anxiety, dizziness, and indecisive hesitation as a "castration of an initial willing." This might suggest that his account of autonomy is voluntaristic in a sense.
The paper examines the link between autonomy and will, as we find it in Ricoeur's early phenomenology, and between autonomy and interpretation, developed in Ricoeur's hermeneutics of human agency. The author questions the identification of freedom with the will in the early work and shows that the later, hermeneutic theory of personal autonomy moves away from this identification.
While the late theory is inspiring in the way it transcends the will paradigm in thinking about individual autonomy, the early theory retains relevance for the contemporary analysis of autonomy in media. The online media's "battle for attention" represents a threat to personal autonomy.
This threat can be grasped phenomenologically through Ricoeur's analysis of the relationship between attention and autonomy.