The exercise of autonomy has as its trajectory the realization, the appearance of the will. Discovering oneself capable of realizing plans, dreams, and purposes creates a firmness that establishes availability and determination. In the context of autonomy, rigidity and firmness allow flexibility, as there is around what to revolve. The will is an instrument of change, of liberation. This is how Fichte, in the late 1770s and early 1780s, caused a considerable transformation in humanity: no longer the “cogito, ergo sum,” but the “volo, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am” - “I want, therefore I am”). At this point, we can state that through romantic ideals, humans regained their place at the center of the world with their will. This new idea explodes in the arts, literature, in poetry and philosophy. Nietzsche shows the dancing gods and announces the death of God. It is the “human, all-too-human” that asserts itself.

Remnants of this will - of the exercise of the will as a way of facing its annihilators - are found today in psychology. The search for individualization and the exercise of therapeutic issues (individual questioning in therapy set) promotes the withdrawal of the human being from alienation and submission. It is a romantic ideal in the sense of exercising availability, of non-commitment to what alienates. Humans cease to be a cog, individualize themselves and reestablish their centrality in the world. Realizing transcendental desires transform needs into possibilities, gives the human being the condition of a propelling dynamo of infinite variables. Thus, the individual is not exhausted in its organic limits, it does not remain contained by social constructions. This non-submission creates freedom and makes creativity and imagination exercise themselves and in this way literature, art and poetry pave their trajectory.

This possibility of saying no, according to Albert Camus the only true freedom, is what makes the antithesis, is what structures change, is what makes humans the center of the world and rebuild it. The world is what humans make of it, it is no longer what is received as given, as natural. The dichotomy between natural and created is transformed: everything is natural, everything is constructed, what matters is the confrontation and what matters is the dialogue with the existing, with the other. Transform, change and maintain are the questions answered for individualized solutions, without the permeation of rules by definition outdated and oppressive.

Questioning and overcoming limits are fortifiers of the determination chosen as the antithesis to what alienates. This romantic ideal - as well as broader issues of Fichte, Herder, and Kant's romanticism - translates the new dimensions of the human into contemporaneity, generating the perception of individuality and allowing the construction of autonomy, availability, and freedom. The golden fruits of these attitudes are found profusely in literature and art in general. Unfortunately, this phenomenon was not universal. The expansion carried out by colonialism in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in the colonies, with its economic exploitations, transformed its inhabitants into a mass of maneuver, into raw material for industry and agriculture, into cannonballs; consequently, little left of the human being to create autonomy, availability, and freedom that could result in literature, art, and science not modeled by the colonizers.

Currently, horizons of alienation, of massification are the residues of the human trajectory. The will is rare, only structured as a response to contingent demands, to market demands. Despite this, many seeds are planted, germinating new questions and consequent changes.