The Individualized Society

Zygmunt Bauman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745657035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

We are spurred into action by our troubles and fears; but all too often our action fails to address the true causes of our worries. When trying to make sense of our lives, we tend to blame our own failings and weaknesses for our discomforts and defeats. And in doing so, we make things worse rather than better. Reasonable beings that we are, how does this happen and why does it go on happening?

These are the questions addressed in this new book by Zygmunt Bauman - one of the most original and perceptive social thinkers writing today. For Bauman, the task of sociology is not to censor or correct the stories we tell of our lives, but to show that there are more ways in which our life stories can be told. By bringing into view the many complex dependencies invisible from the vantage point of private experience, sociology can help us to link our individual decisions and actions to the deeper causes of our troubles and fears - to the ways we live, to the conditions under which we act, to the socially drawn limits of our imagination and ambition. Sociology can help us to understand the processes that have shaped the society in which we live today, a society in which individualization has become our fate. And sociology can also help us to see that if our individual but shared anxieties are to be effectively tackled, they need to be addressed collectively, true to their social, not individual, nature.

The Individualized Society will be of great interest to students of sociology, politics and the social sciences and humanities generally. It will also appeal to a broader range of readers who are interested in the changing nature of our social and political life today.

The Way We Act

___________

13

Does love need reason?

Love fears reason; reason fears love. Each tries hard to do without the other. But whenever they do, trouble is in store. This is, in its briefest rendition possible, the quandary of love. And of reason.

Their separation spells disaster. But negotiations, if they happen, seldom produce a tolerable modus vivendi. Reason and love speak different languages which do not easily translate; verbal exchanges produce more mutual incomprehension and suspicion than true understanding and sympathy. Reason and love do not really converse – more often than not they shout each other down.

Reason is a better talker than love, and so love finds it excruciatingly difficult, nay impossible, to redeem itself in discourse. Verbal duels end as a rule with reason triumphant and love wounded. Argument is not love’s forte. Called on to make a case which reason would recognize as valid, love would make sounds which reason would find incoherent; at best it would choose to stay silent. Jonathan Rutherford has composed a concise summary of the long record of love’s lost skirmishes: ‘Love teeters on the edge of the unknown beyond which it becomes almost impossible to speak. It moves us beyond words.’ When pressed to speak of love, we ‘fumble for words’, but ‘the words just buckle and fold and disappear.’ ‘While I may have everything to say, I say nothing or I say very little.’¹ We all know what love is – until we try to say it loud and clear. Love would not recognize itself in words: words seem to be reason’s property and a foreign and hostile territory for love.

As a defendant at the tribunal of reason, love is bound to lose its case. The case was lost before the trial started. Like the hero of Kafka’s Trial, love is guilty of being accused; and if one may acquit oneself of the crimes one has been accused of committing, there is no defence against the charge of standing accused. This kind of guilt does not derive from ‘the facts of the matter’, but depends on who is in charge of the courts, who has the right to pass judgment and who must surrender to the verdicts. When reason sits in judgment, writes the rules of the judicial procedure and appoints the judges, love is guilty even before the prosecutor has risen to make his case.

And yet, as Blaise Pascal famously observed, ‘le coeur a ses raisons.’ The emphasis in this phrase, as Max Scheler pointed out, falls on two words: ‘ses’ and ‘raisons’. ‘The heart has its reasons, “its”, of which the understanding knows nothing and can never know anything; and it has reasons – that is, objective and evident insights into matters to which every understanding is blind – as “blind” as a blind man is to colour or a deaf man is to tone.’² I see someone as ‘blind’ if he does not see what I see so clearly. And the charge of blindness works both ways. The heart, Scheler insists, has nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to apologize for. It can easily measure up to the standards which reason declares itself proud of. Though reason would not recognize them for what they are, there is an ordre du coeur, a logique du coeur, even a mathématique du coeur – every bit as coherent and elegant as those that reason lists proudly as its title to superiority. The point is, though, that the orders, the logics, the mathematics of, respectively, heart and understanding, or of love and reason, do not address the same aspects of experience and do not pursue the same objectives. This is why reason and love would not listen to each other and if they did they would hardly grasp meaning in the voice. The articulate speech of one sounds like incoherent jabber to the other.

I would suggest that there are at least three converging reasons why their communication will fail.

To start with, love is about value, while reason is about use. The world as seen by love is a collection of values; the world as seen by reason is a collection of useful objects. The two qualities – of ‘value’ and of ‘use’ – are notorious for being confounded and confused: is not a thing valuable because it is useful? This is, to be sure, reason speaking – and it has been speaking this way since its ancient awakening in Plato’s dialogues. Since then reason has tried hard, and goes on trying, to annex ‘value’ and dump anything left over that resists annexation; to enlist ‘value’ in the service of ‘use’; to make value into a handmaiden or a spin-off of use.

But value is the quality of a thing, while usefulness is an attribute of the thing’s users. It is the incompleteness of the user, the dearth which makes the user suffer, the user’s urge to fill the gap, which makes a thing useful. To ‘use’ means to improve the condition of the user, to repair a shortcoming; ‘using’ means to be concerned with the welfare of the user.

In Plato’s Symposium Aristophanes links love to the desire for a completeness thus far missing: ‘the desire for the whole and the pursuit of it is named Love,’ he says. Socrates, as always, strives to lift mere description to the rank of the law of logic, to put ‘necessary’ for ‘likely’: ‘isn’t it necessary that the desiring desires what it lacks, or else does not desire if it does not lack?’ So that no room be left for guessing and errors of judgement, Socrates sums up: everyone ‘who desires, desires what is not in his possession and not there, what he has not, and what he is not himself and what he lacks.’ This is, he insists, what we call ‘desire’; this is what desire must be, unless it is something other than desire. But is this desire what we mean by ‘love’, as Aristophanes would imply? Socrates quotes at length the words he heard uttered by the wise woman Diotima of Mantinea (W. H. D. Rouse suggests that the English equivalent of that name would be ‘Fearthelord from Prophetville’). Diotima points out that Love was conceived at Aphrodite’s birthday party from the sexual union of Plenty and Poverty, and so Love was born neither rich nor poor, or rather poor but with ‘designs upon beautiful and good’; Love was neither mortal nor immortal, or rather was a mortal with designs upon immortality. Love, in other words, ‘is not in want and wealth’; love ‘is not for the beautiful’ – ‘it is for begetting and birth in the beautiful’, and this is so ‘because begetting is, for the mortal, something everlasting and immortal’. ‘It is necessary then from this argument that love is for immortality also.’³

What you desire, you want to use; more precisely, to ‘use up’, to strip from its otherness, make your possession or ingest – make it a part of your body, an extension of yourself. To use is to annihilate the other for the sake of the self. To love, on the contrary, means to value the other for its otherness, to wish to reinforce it in its otherness, to protect that otherness and make it bloom and thrive, and to be ready to sacrifice one’s own comfort, including one’s own mortal existence, if this is what is needed to fulfil that intention. ‘Use’ means a gain for the self; ‘value’ augurs its self-denial. To use is to take, to value is to give.

Use- and value-orientations set reason and love on separate and diverging tracks. But once on their proper tracks, reason and love also have radically different horizons. Those of love are infinite, never to be reached, constantly receding as the love progresses. Love is no more immortal than the lovers and may stop well short of infinity, but it is not love if it does not take infinity of time and boundlessness of space as its only acceptable limits. The one who loves would agree with Lucan, Seneca’s nephew: ‘I have a wife, I have sons: all of them hostages given to fate’; accept that the fate is forever open-ended and knows no limits, and concede that to love is to consent that this must be so. The intention of reason is, however, exactly the opposite: not to open the gate into infinity, but to shut it down, and securely. The act of use is an event in time, and an event which fulfils and exhausts itself in a limited time: things tend to lose their usefulness during the act of their use. Use may achieve duration only through repetition, not self-fulfilment; fulfilment would lead to its demise (it is in this sense that we may say of the kind of desire for ‘useful objects’ which tends to be beefed up by our consumer society that it desires to desire, not to be satisfied).

Let me quote Max Scheler again: ‘Love loves and in loving always looks beyond what it has in hand and possesses. The Triebimpuls which arouses it may tire out; love itself does not tire.’ Love, Scheler insists, is by its essence infinite; it ‘demands for its satisfaction an infinite good’.⁴ Taking a finite good or a finite state for the fulfilment of the love drive signals infatuation, a grave though common ‘destruction and confusion’ of ordo amoris. Love worthy of its name never stops and is never satisfied; one may recognize true love by the lover’s suspicion that it has not yet reached the heights it should climb – not by his confidence that it has gone far enough, and even less by his complaint that it has gone too far.

What is the glory of love is also its misfortune. The infinite is also indefinite. It can’t be pinned down, circumscribed, measured.

It resists definitions, explodes frames and trespasses on borders. Being its own self-transgression, love is constantly ahead of any, even the most instantaneous of snapshots; love may be told only as history, and that history is outdated the moment the story is told. From the point of view of reason, fond as it is of faithful copies and legible diagrams, love is burdened with the original sin of formlessness. And since reason wants to arrest or channel the unruly flows, tame the wild and domesticate the elemental, love stands also accused on account of its evasiveness, waywardness and intractability. Reason, that pursuit of the useful, cuts infinity to the measure of the finite self. Love, being the pursuit of value, expands the finite self towards infinity. Understanding cannot venture that far and so it leaves the track in mid-run. Its inability to catch up and the abandoning of the chase that follows is mistaken for the proof of love’s and value’s vagueness, ‘subjectivity’, wrong-headedness, lack of sense and imprudence; and so, altogether, of its uselessness.

Finally, there is a third opposition which sets reason and love apart. Reason, one may say, prompts loyalty to the self. Love, on the other hand, calls for solidarity with the Other, and so implies subordination of the self to something endowed with greater importance and value.

In the advertising copy of reason, freedom figures most prominently, and what is promised in that copy is freedom to pursue and attain ends, whatever the ends deemed to be worthy of pursuit may be now or in the future; such freedom casts the ‘outside’ of the self, things and persons alike, as a collection of potential obstacles to action and of vehicles of action, or rather of obstacles that need to be remade into vehicles. It is the self’s objectives which lend meaning to the elements of the ‘outside’. No other grounds for meaning allocation can be acknowledged if reason is to stay true to itself and deliver on its promise. Any sign of autonomy and self-determination in the things or persons can be perceived and articulated only as a mark of their extant ‘resistance power’. If that power is too great to be overcome, it needs to be ‘reckoned with’, and negotiation and compromise may then be a more prudent choice than outright assault – but, again, this will be in the name of the ‘well-understood interest’ of the self. If reason wishes to advise the actors in their capacity as moral selves, it can use no other language but that of the calculation of gains and losses, costs and effects – as it did through the ‘categorical imperative’ of Immanuel Kant.

By this reckoning, love is guilty of being deaf to reason’s promptings. In the act of love, Max Scheler points out, a being ‘abandons itself, in order to share and participate in another being as ens intentionale’. In and through the act of love a being ‘joins the other object in affirming its tendency toward its proper perfection that he is active in assisting it, promoting it, blessing it’.⁵ Reason offers the self the skill to convert the self’s own intentions into the objectives guiding the conduct of others; love, on the contrary, inspires the self to accept the intentions of the other as its own objective. Reason at its ethical best agrees magnanimously to be tolerant of the Other. Love would not stoop to mere tolerance; it wants solidarity instead – and solidarity may mean self-denial and self-abnegation, the sort of attitude which reason would be hard put to justify.

But there is more to love than the unconditional acceptance of the otherness of the other and of the other’s right to its otherness; more even than the consent to serve – to assist, promote, bless – the cause of that otherness. Love means signing a blank cheque: in as far as the other’s right to otherness has been fully and truly agreed to, there is no knowing what that otherness might consist of now, let alone later. Emmanuel Levinas compares the Other of the Eros with the future – on account of the future’s refusal ‘to be grasped in any way’, of its habit of ‘falling upon us and taking hold of us’ instead. ‘I do not define the Other by the future,’ explains Levinas, ‘but the future by the Other’; ‘the total alterity of the Other’ is so complete and invincible that it may serve as the empirical reference needed to visualize the alterity of the future or of death... Love means entering into a relation with a mystery and acceding to its unsolvability. Love does not mean, nor does it lead to, ‘grasping’, ‘possessing’, ‘getting to know’, let alone getting mastery over the object of love or getting it under control. Love means consent to a mystery of the other which is akin to the mystery of the future: to something ‘which in the world where everything is, never is’; something ‘which can not be there while everything is’.⁶ Future is always elsewhere, and so is the Other of love.

You may have noted that we have not made any reference to the feelings and passions normally associated with ‘being in love’ or ‘falling in love’. If ‘l’amour a ses raisons’, as Pascal wanted, or has its laws, logic and mathematics, as Scheler suggested, if it is at all amenable to description in interpersonally valid language, it is only as a specific ‘casting’ of the self and of the Other, as a specific modality of the Other’s presence and so also of the constitution of the Self. This having been noted, we can conceive of love as a mould for the ethical self and moral relationship. While reason bewares of stepping over the boundary of the ontological, love points towards the domain of the ethical. Ethics, we may say, is made in the likeness of love. Whatever has been said here of love applies in equal measure to ethics.

Before he is an ens cogitans or an ens volens, man is an ens amans, says Scheler, and adds: it can’t be otherwise, since it is in the net woven of love and hate that humans catch the world which they later subject – as Schopenhauer would have said – to will and representation. Take love and hate away, and there would be no net and so no catch either. Levinas would concur with Scheler’s assertion of the priority of ethics, though not necessarily with the argument advanced in support of its veridicality. As I understand it, Levinas’s famous dictum ‘ethics is before ontology’, unlike Scheler’s assertion, claims no empirical/ontological status. It conveys instead two propositions, one phenomenological, the other ethical. First: to grasp the meaning of the ethical, all previous knowledge of the ontological needs to be suspended on the ground of its irrelevance. Second: it is not the ethics which needs to justify itself in terms of being – but the other way round: onus probandi lies on the being, it is the being that must demonstrate its agreement with ethics. In other words, you cannot derive the ‘ought’ from the ‘is’; but then you should not be worried by that, since it is the ‘is’ which should worry about its connection with the ‘ought’. The assertion ‘ethics is before ontology’ needs to be read in ethical terms: what it says is that ‘ethics is better than ontology.’

‘The face of a neighbour’, writes Levinas, ‘signifies for me an exceptional responsibility, preceding every free consent, every pact, every contract.’⁷ I was responsible before I entered any commitment which society knows how to petrify into a rule or legal obligation. But because no rule had yet been written down, while responsibility had already acquired force with the first sighting of the Other, that responsibility is empty of content: it says nothing about what is to be done – it only says that from now on all that is done will feel right or wrong depending on what its effects are on the Other. A remarkable thing about Levinas, a deeply religious thinker and keen Talmudic scholar, is that while using the concept of commandments profusely he spells out but one of them: ‘thou shalt not kill.’ That commandment suffices to ground the whole edifice of morality, since it requires assent to the perpetual company of the Other, to living together – with all its, unknown and unpredictable, consequences. It commands that we share lives, interact and talk; all the rest remains unspecified – a blank cheque yet to be filled in by our actions. And it is this unspecificity which ushers us into the land of the ethical.

Another great religious thinker and ethical philosopher of our century, Knud Løgstrup, is even more specific about the vexing yet blessed unspecificity of ethical demand: ‘The demand gives no directions whatever about how the life of the person thus delivered [to our care] is to be taken care of. It specifies nothing in this respect but leaves it entirely to the individual. To be sure, the other person is to be served by word and action, but precisely which word and which action we must ourselves decide in each situation.’⁸ Knowing that we are under command but not knowing what the command commands us to do means being sentenced to lifelong uncertainty. But, says Løgstrup, this is precisely what ‘to be moral’ means: certainty breeds irresponsibility, and absolute certainty is the same as absolute irresponsibility. Were we told exactly what to do, ‘the wisdom, insight, and love with which we are to act’ would ‘no longer be our own’; the command would not be a call to humanity, imagination and insight – but to obedience; Christian ethics, in particular, would be ‘ossified into ideology’, and so we would all surrender to the temptation to ‘absolutize the standpoints which presently prevail in contemporary laws, morality, and convention’.⁹

What exactly the status is of Levinas’s ‘unconditional responsibility’ and Løgstrup’s ‘unspoken command’ is a notoriously moot question. Answers steer uneasily between the two polarized standpoints taken in ethical philosophy: between the belief in Divine, prerational origins of ethics, and the conception of ethics as the codified ‘will of society’, a product of convention sedimented from human historical experience and arrived at through trial and error, even if guided on its way by rational consideration of the prerequisites of human cohabitation. Levinas and Løgstrup strive to reconcile the extremes and to show that, far from contradicting each other, the prerational presence of ethical demand, and human responsibility for making the unspoken word flesh, condition and propel each other. In Levinas’s and Løgstrup’s visions of ethics, there is room for both – and the presence of both is, moreover, indispensable.

But the combined message of the two great thinkers does not stop at the attempt to resolve the most vexing antinomy of ethical philosophy. The most important part of the message is the refutation of the outspoken or tacit assumption of all, or almost all, ethical thinking to date: that the cause of ethics suffers under conditions of uncertainty and gains from the self-confidence offered by the unambiguous letter of law – and so that ‘to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Lives told and stories lived: an overture
• The Way We Are
• The Way We Think
• The Way We Act
• Notes
• Back Cover