The Ways Intellectual Autonomy Is Universally Accessible

Almost everyone has a very vague, disjointed, selective grasp of the fact that intellectual autonomy is a necessity to some extent.  Acter all, many people admit--or at least pretend to understand--that not "thinking for yourself," as they so often word it, is dangerous in many ways.  They just probably will not understand the exact lines distinguishing purely logical truths that anyone could reason out on their own without any social of sensory input (whether the most foundational ones or very esoteric ones) from something like unprovable scientific claims or logical truths that anyone could access but only after some sort of experiential prompting, what makes some truths knowable from rational reflection alone, or the full scope of the need for autonomy.

There are actually many ways to practice or savor autonomy in philosophical thought, especially since no matter one's circumstances, the laws of logic are omnipresent and accessible and one's thoughts are inescapable: we carry our thoughts with us and all awareness hinges metaphysically and epistemologically on reason to begin with.  This means that it autonomy is universally important and universally accessible.  It is not an intellectual luxury available only to a select few because of qualities they never personally chose!  There are many different ways someone might express their capacity for autonomy within their own thoughts.

Even having someone say something that triggers a specific new discovery does not mean a person lacks intelligence or autonomy, in part because they did not even decide that the other person would say such a thing--and in part because they could have also discovered that exact thing later on purely on their own, and with certain things, they would have done so if they are thorough thinkers concerned with truth.  For example, no one who both cares about truth and is consistently thorough would be able to overlook the basic self-verifying nature of deductive reasoning for long, with or without any social prompting.  They would inevitably recognize it in a very direct way at some point, just as they might also identify the various ways autonomy could be lived out in light of reason in a very natural way as they rationalistically think over time--beyond just thinking of purely logical truths without outside help or discovering certain ideas just by personal reflection without conversations or reading.

Forgetting something and rediscovering it on one's own is just one such expression.  There could also be moments where someone realizes they would have thought of something for the first time at that given instant if they had not already thought or heard of it.  Similarly, one could think of various ideas first encountered from others without caring for how they were first thought of, which ironically is a type of autonomy that is always possible no matter what one has heard or remembered from others.  Remembering an encounter with the idea from others and yet not being influenced by it at all as one looks directly to reason and the idea is an option no matter how many things a person thought of completely on their own or with the intentional or unintentional help of others.

At times, even shallow thinkers might brush up against some of these logical facts apart from an intentional, systematic analysis of reality in the light of the laws of logic.  It is just that they will probably not put them all together because they will very likely not even understand more than one of them at once.  It is putting them all together and embracing them because they are logically provable truths, not because of what one may have heard or wants to be true, that grants a person a complete awareness of the autonomy rationality allows for.  Even if there were no new truths or ideas to personally discover or nothing that had not already been known by some other human beforehand, deep, extensive intellectual autonomy is still universally accessible.