Modernity and Ambivalence

Zygmunt Bauman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745612423
  9780745605739
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745638119
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Modern civilization, Bauman argues, promised to make our lives understandable and open to our control. This has not happened and today we no longer believe it ever will. In this book, now available in paperback, Bauman argues that our postmodern age is the time for reconciliation with ambivalence, we must learn how to live in an incurably ambiguous world.

1
The Scandal of Ambivalence

The danger of disaster attending the Baconian ideal of power over nature through scientific technology arises not so much from the shortcomings of its performance as from the magnitude of its success.

Hans Jonas

In the course of my study of the available interpretations of the Holocaust (much as other cases of modern genocide),¹ I was struck by the evidence that the theoretical consequences which would follow from the scrupulous investigation of the case are seldom followed to the end and hardly ever accepted without resistance: too drastic and far-reaching seems the revision which they force upon the self-consciousness of our civilization. Resistance to accept the lesson the episode of the Holocaust contains manifests itself primarily in the manifold attempts to exoticize or marginalize the Holocaust as a one-off historical episode. The most common among such attempts is the interpretation of the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish affair: as the culmination of the long history of Judaeophobia reaching far into antiquity, and at best as the outcome of its modern form, antisemitism in its racist variety. This interpretation overlooks an essential disconuity between even the most violent outbursts of pre-modern Judaeophobia and the meticulously planned and executed operation called the Holocaust; it also glosses over the fact that – as Hannah Arendt pointed out long ago – only the choice of the victims, not the nature of the . crime, can be derived (if at all) from the history of antisemitism; indeed, it collapses the crucial issues of the nature of crime into the question of unique features of Jews or Jewish–Gentile relations.

‘Exoticization’ is also achieved through deployment of another strategy: an attempt to interpret the Holocaust as a specifically German affair (at best, also an affair of some other nations, still more distant and bizarre, whose concealed yet innate murderous tendencies had been released and set loose by the German overlords). One hears of the unfinished business of civilization, of the liberalizing process that went awry, of a particularly morbid brand of national philosophy that poisoned the minds of citizens, of the frustrating vicissitudes of recent history, even of the peculiar perfidy and shrewdness of a bunch of conspirators; hardly ever, though, of what made the editors of The Times, Le Figaro and other most respected organs of enlightened opinion wax lyrical when they wistfully described the Germany of the 1930s as the paragon of the civilized state, of prosperity, of social peace, of obedient and co-operative workers’ unions, of law and order. Indeed, as an example for the wan European democracies to follow for its rapidly falling rate of crime, almost total removal of violence from the street (barring the brief excesses of the Nazi honeymoon period and, of course, the Kristallnacht episode), industrial peace, safety and security of daily life.

The paramount strategy aimed at, simultaneously marginalizing the crime and exonerating modernity, is the interpretation of the Holocaust as a singular eruption of pre-modern (barbaric, irrational) forces, as yet insufficiently tamed or ineffectively supressed by (presumably weak or faulty) German modernization. One would expect this strategy to be modernity’s favourite form of self-defence: after all, it obliquely reaffirms and reinforces the etiological myth of modern civilization as a triumph of reason over passions, as well as its corollary: the belief that this triumph has marked an unambiguously progressive step in the historical development of public morality. This strategy is also easy to pursue. It falls in with the well-established habit (forcefully supported by modern scientific culture, but rooted primarily in the protracted military, economic and political domination of the modern part of the globe over the rest) to define automatically all alternative modes of life, and particularly all critique of the modern virtues, as stemming from pre-modern, irrational, barbaric positions and hence unworthy of serious consideration: as a specimen of the selfsame class of phenomena which modern civilization swore to confine and exterminate. As Ernst Gellner put it twenty years ago with his usual brevity and straightforwardness, ‘if a doctrine conflicts with the acceptance of the superiority of scientific-industrial societies over others, then it really is out’.²

The dream of legislative reason

Throughout the modern era, the legislative reason of philosophers chimed in well with the all-too-material practices of the states. The modern state has been born as a crusading, missionary, proselytizing force, bent on subjecting the dominated populations to a thorough once-over in order to transform them into an orderly society, akin to the precepts of reason. Rationally designed society was the declared causa finalis of the modern state. The modern state was a gardening state. Its stance was a gardening stance. It delegitimized the present (wild, uncultivated) condition of the population and dismantled the extant mechanisms of reproduction and self-balancing. It put in their place purposefully built mechanisms meant to point the change in the direction of the rational design. The design, presumed to be dictated by the supreme and unquestionable authority of Reason, supplied the criteria to evaluate present-day reality. These criteria split the population into useful plants to be encouraged and tenderly propagated, and weeds – to be removed or rooted out. They put a premium on the needs of the useful plants (as determined by the gardener’s design) and disendowed the needs of those declared to be weeds. They cast both categories as objects of action and denied to both the rights of self-determining agents.

The philosopher, Kant³ insisted in the Critique of Pure Reason, ‘is not merely an artist – who occupies himself with conceptions, but a law-giver – legislating for human reason’. The task of reason for which the philosopher acts as the supreme spokesman is ‘to establish a tribunal, which may secure it in its well-grounded claims, while it pronounces against all baseless assumptions and pretensions, not in an arbitrary manner, but according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws’. The idea of philosopher’s ‘legislative power resides in the mind of every man, and it alone teaches us what kind of systematic unity philosophy demands in view of the ultimate aims of reason’ (teleologia rationis bumanae).

Philosophy cannot but be a legislative power; it is the task of good philosophy, of the right type of metaphysic to serve the men who require ‘that knowledge which concerns all men should transcend the common understanding’. ‘Reason cannot permit our knowledge to remain in an unconnected and rhapsodistic state, but requires that the sum of our cognitions should constitute a system.’ The kind of knowledge that may indeed transcend the common understanding, composed of mere opinions and beliefs (opinion: judgement insufficient both subjectively and objectively; belief: the most perfidious sort of judgement, one ‘recognized as being objectively insufficient’, yet subjectively accepted as convincing), could and should only ‘be revealed to you by philosophers’. In performing this task, metaphysics would be ‘the completion of the culture of human reason’; it will raise that reason from the raw and disorderly state in which it is naturally given, to the level of orderly system. Metaphysics is called upon to cultivate harmonious perfection of thought.

The supreme office of censor which it occupies, assures to it the highest authority and importance. This office it administers for the purpose of securing order, harmony, and well-being to science, and of directing its noble and fruitful labours to the highest possible aim – the happiness of all mankind.

Adjudicating on the matters of human happiness is the philosopher’s prerogative, and his duty. Here Kant merely restates the centuries-long tradition of the sages, originating at least with Plato. In the seventh book of Plato’s Republic⁴ Socrates advised Glaucon that once he had visited the realm of ‘true philosophy’, and thus ascended ‘into real being’ (’turning of a soul round from a day which is like night to a true day’), he must return to those who did not follow him on his expedition. (Sages who never return from their escapade to the world of eternal truths are as wrong as the ordinary men and women who never embarked on the journey; in addition, they are guilty of the crime of lost opportunity and unfulfilled duty.) Then he ‘will see a thousand times better than those who live there’ – and this advantage will give him the right and the obligation to pass judgements and enforce obedience to truth. One needs to proclaim the philosopher’s duty – ‘the care and guardianship of other people’.

Then it is the task of us founders ... to compel the best natures to attain the learning which we said was the greatest, both to see the good, and to ascend that ascent; and when they have ascended and properly seen, we must never allow them what is allowed now.

‘It is more likely that the truth would have been discovered by few than ny many’ – declared Descartes⁵ in the third rule of the Rules for the Direction of the Mind. Knowing the truth, knowing it with such certainty as can withstand the cross-currents of vulgar experience and stay immune to the temptations of narrow and partial interests, is exactly the quality that sets the few apart from the many – and stands them above the crowd. To legislate and to enforce the laws of reason is the burden of those few, the knowers of truth, the philosophers. They are called to perform the task without which the happiness of the many will never be attained. The task would require sometimes a benign and clement teacher; at some other time it would demand the firm hand of a stern and unyielding guardian. Whatever the acts the philosopher may be forced to perform, one element will remain – cannot but remain – constant: the philosopher’s unchallenged prerogative to decide between true and false, good and evil, right and wrong; and thus his licence to judge and authority to enforce obedience to the judgement. Kant had little doubt as to the nature of the task; to explain it he drew his metaphors profusely from the vocabulary of power. Metaphysics was ‘the queen’, whose ‘government’ could ‘under administration’ of dogmatists turn into despotism, but still remain indispensable to hold in check ‘nomadic tribes, who hate permanent habitation and settled mode of living’ and hence attack ‘from time to time those who had organized themselves into civil communities’. The specific service metaphysics is called upon to render is criticism of reason:

To deny the positive advantage of the service which this criticism renders us, would be as absurd as to maintain that the system of police is productive of no positive benefit, since its main business is to prevent the violence which citizen has to apprehend from citizen, that so each may pursue his vocation in peace and security.

One may easily be tempted to play down these or similar tropes drawn from the rhetoric of power as a predictable part of all protreptics – the habitual laudatory preambula to philosophical treatises meant to ingratiate the subject with the prospective readers, and particularly with the powerful and resourceful among them. Yet the case for legislative reason was addressed to a special kind of reader, and thus the language in which the bid for attention and favours was couched was one familiar to such a reader and resonant with his concerns. This reader was first and foremost the government of the day, the despot approached with an offer of enlightenment – of a means to do more effectively the very thing he declared himself to be after. Like the earthly rulers, critical philosophy braced itself to ‘strike a blow’ ‘at the root’. The enemies such philosophy was particularly apt to transfix and overpower were those of the ‘dogmatic schools’ of Materialism, Fatalism, Atheism, Free-thinking, Fanaticism and Superstition ‘which are universally injurious’. It had to be shown then that these adversaries threaten mundane and intellectual orders alike; that their annihilation is attuned to the interest of the powers that be in the same measure as it conforms to those of critical philosophy; that therefore the task of royal legislators overlaps with the aim of legislative reason.

If governments think proper to interfere with the affairs of the learned, it would be more consistent with a wise regard for the interest of science, as well as for those of society, to favour a criticism of this kind, by which alone the labours of reason can be established on a firm basis, than to support the ridiculous despotism of the schools, which raise a loud cry of danger to the public over the destruction of cobwebs, of which the public has never taken any notice, and the loss of which, therefore, it can never feel.

Yet there was more to Kant’s choice of metaphors than consideration of expediency in the bid for royal sponsorship. There was a genuine affinity between legislating ambitions of critical philosophy and the designing intentions of the rising modern state; just as there was a genuine symmetry between the tangle of traditional parochialisms the modern state had to uproot to establish its own supreme and uncontested sovereignty, and the cacophony of ‘dogmatic schools’ that had to be silenced so that the voice of universal and eternal (and hence one and uncontested: ‘nothing will be left to future generations except the task of illustrating and applying it didactically’) reason could be heard and its ‘apodeictic certitude’ could be appreciated. Modern rulers and modern philosophers were first and foremost legislators; they found chaos, and set out to tame it and replace it with order. The orders they wished to introduce were by definition artificial, and as such had to rest on designs appealing to the laws that claimed the sole endorsement of reason, and by the same token delegitimized all opposition to themselves. Designing ambitions of modern rulers and modern philosophers were meant for each other and, for better or worse, were doomed to stay together, whether in love or in war. As all marriages between similar rather than complementary spouses, this one was destined to sample delights of passionate mutual desire alongside the torments of all-stops-pulled rivalry.

Securing supremacy for a designed, artificial order is a two-pronged task. It demands unity and integrity of the realm and security of its borders. Both sides of the tasks converge on one effort – that of separating the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside’. Nothing left inside may be irrelevant to the total design or preserve autonomy vis-à-vis the exceptionless rulings of the order (‘valid for every rational being’). ‘For pure speculative reason is an organic structure in which there is nothing isolated or independent, but every single part is essential to all the rest; and hence, the slightest imperfection, whether defect or positive error, could not fail to betray itself in use’ – just as in the case of political reason of the state. In the intellectual and political realms alike, the order must be both exclusive and comprehensive. Hence the two-pronged task merges into one: that of making the boundary of the ‘organic structure’ sharp and clearly marked, which means ‘excluding the middle’, suppressing or exterminating everything ambiguous, everything that sits astride the barricade and thus compromises the vital distinction between inside and outside. Building and keeping order means making friends and fighting enemies. First and foremost, however, it means purging ambivalence.

In the political realm, purging ambivalence means segregating or deporting strangers, sanctioning some local powers and delegalizing the unsanctioned ones, filling the ‘gaps in the law’. In the intellectual realm, purging ambivalence means above all delegitimizing all grounds of knowledge that are philosophically uncontrolled or uncontrollable. More than anything else, it means decrying and invalidating ‘common sense’ – be it ‘mere beliefs’, ‘prejudices’, ‘superstitions’ or sheer manifestations of ‘ignorance’. It was Kant’s crowning argument in his devastating case against extant dogmatical metaphysics that ‘this so-called queen could not refer her descent to any higher source than...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Quest for Order
• 1 The Scandal of Ambivalence
• 2 The Social Construction of Ambivalence
• 3 The Self-construction of Ambivalence
• 4 A Case Study in the Sociology of Assimilation I: Trapped in Ambivalence
• 5 A Case Study in the Sociology of Assimilation II: The Revenge of Ambivalence
• 6 The Privatization of Ambivalence
• 7 Postmodernity, or Living with Ambivalence
• Index
• Back Page