Practices of Selfhood

Zygmunt Bauman, Rein Raud

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780745690179, 9780745690162
• eBook ISBN: 9780745690209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Contemporary understanding of human subjectivity has come a long way since the Cartesian 'thinking thing' or Freud's view of the self struggling with its unconscious. We no longer think of ourselves as stable and indivisible units or combinations thereof - instead, we see the self as constantly reinvented and reorganised in interaction with others and with its social and cultural environments. But the world in which we live today is one of uncertainty where nothing can be taken for granted. Coping with change is a challenge but it also presents new opportunities.

Uncertainty can be both liberating and oppressive. How does an individual understand her or his position in the world? Are we as human beings determined by our genetic heritage, social circumstances and cultural preferences, or are we free in our choices? How does selfhood emerge? Does it follow the same pattern of development in all people, all cultures, all ages? Or is it a socio-cultural construction that cannot be understood outside its historical context? Are the patterns of selfhood fundamentally changing in the present world? Does new technology allow us more autonomy or does it tempt us to give up the freedoms we have?

These are the questions that Zygmunt Bauman and Rein Raud explore in their engaging and wide-ranging dialogue, combining their competences in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory to look at how selfhood is produced in social practice, through language, efforts of self-presentation and self-realisation as well as interaction with others. An indispensable text for understanding the complexities of selfhood in our contemporary liquid-modern world.

1
Starting Out

Rein Raud In a sense, it could perhaps be said that the history of modernity is also a history of a certain type of self: the basically rational individual, the singular person in control of and answerable for her/his actions, capable of associating her-/himself with, or disassociating her-/himself from, larger communities and causes. But, for most of the time, modernity has also cherished a view of truth we might call scientific – that there must necessarily be a single, universal and objective truth out there – and therefore this view of human selfhood, too, has presented a claim to universality, a claim to characterize the way how people are and have been everywhere and throughout history. The variability of the idea of the self through time and between cultures of different types is a topic I'd like to come back to at a later moment. For now, could we perhaps try to diagnose the position of the self in the present world? Since Freud and Nietzsche, Western thought has also come a long way in abandoning the idea of a single, indivisible, self-contained and self-controlled individual. At least in theory. In our social practice, the view of what we are still seems to conform to a rather more simplistic concept of the individual as a political, economic and cultural subject. The word ‘crisis’ has obviously gone through a rather steep inflation, so I'm not going to talk about a ‘crisis’ of selfhood. But, at the same time, it still seems quite clear that under the circumstances of ‘liquid modernity’, to use your term, this inherited view of selfhood is no longer either adequate or functional.

Zygmunt Bauman No disagreement here: indeed, the ‘history of modernity’ is also a history of ‘a certain type of self’. But what kind of self? Or, rather, of what kind of its ‘existential modality’? It is, in my view, the latter that changed radically with the advent of modernity.

I'd suggest that its modality underwent three seminal alterations, or in other words acquired three new, essentially modern, qualities. First, it became an object of attention, scrutiny and contemplation. Second, it has been set apart, as a subject, from the rest of perceived entities, which by the same token were cast as its objects. Third, it has simultaneously been promoted to the status of the primary, privileged object of that newly construed subject. Let us note that all those three properties, defining between themselves the ‘modern self’, were brought together and blended in Pico della Mirandola's 1486 manifesto recorded under the trail-blazing title of the ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’ and destined to turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The ‘dignity’ in that title has been unpacked in the ‘Oration’ as a status bringing to mind a sort of remarkable – and thoroughly unique – ‘three in one, one in three’ merger/union of a violinist, a violin, and the recipient and judge of the quality of pleasurable sounds which the violinist extracts from the violin.

The first new (modern) quality was, to deploy Martin Heidegger's distinction, a result of recasting the ‘self’ from the modality of Zuhanden into that of Vorhanden; from something given, too obvious to be paid any attention, indeed ‘hidden in the light’ of its obviousness, unnoticed and unproblematic – into a task: a challenge calling for close examination and needing to be studied in depth in order to be fully comprehended, tackled, dealt with, acted upon, revised, improved on; in short, as thoroughly and perpetually, endemically, problematic.

The second new quality found its seminal articulation in the Cartesian duo of subject and object. As a sensing, thinking, designing and acting subject, the ‘self’ transforms the rest of the world into an aggregate of passive objects of its sensations, thoughts, designs and actions. Descartes' cogito was more, much more than a short shrift to neo-Pyrrhonians, a declaration of self-confidence as well a legitimation of the self's truth-seeking ambitions; in a somewhat oblique yet no less resolute way, it was also an act of self's coronation: of perching the self at the peak of creation, endowed with the double prerogative of the supreme tribunal and the legislator-in-chief of truth – not only an artist capable of painting a faithful likeness of the world, but potentially also the chief engineer of the world whose truth is sought, explored and decreed. The cogito was calculated to lift the ‘self’ from its existential uncertainty, placate its existential anxiety, and to reverse the relation of mastery and dependence between the self as cognizing subject and the world, the object of its cognition.

The third novelty is the duty of the self's self-concern, self-creation, self-scrutiny and self-control. The subject itself has joined the ranks of the objects of the self's cognitive zeal, care and creative intervention. The supreme maker of things doubles in the role of the primary object of its making/remaking concerns. Socrates astonished, puzzled, nonplussed and embarrassed his fellow Athenians when suggesting that they ought to take care of their πνεύμα (pneuma). They found this demand oxymoronic – but that contradiction in terms turned in the modern era into a no longer questioned life truth.

It was Cicero who coined, metaphorically, the concept of cultura animi. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century his idea was resurrected in France and, alongside English ‘refinement’ and German Bildung, entered into the core, canonical vocabulary of modern discourse, fast losing the memory of its metaphorical origins. What that concept conveyed was the message of the incompleteness of nature's work: humans are not born human, but made – in the incessant self-formation, self-assertion and self-improvement effort – all of them guided, directed, aided and abetted by the human community which they entered at birth.

RR I'd like to add a fourth characteristic to the status of the modern self – its relation to time. The medieval self had had to project itself against the background of eternity, as it were, and to be guided by considerations about the fate of the immortal soul. The modern self, while not immediately abandoning these concerns, still started to operate with a totally different timeframe. Perhaps we can say this happened as if in a film, when the focus shifts from the background to the hazy object in the foreground, and we start to see it clearly, but the background fades. Or, to use another, maybe more appropriate simile: the shutter speed changed. In a medieval painting, which depicts the life of a saint, we find it perfectly natural to see the same man in different places, because the painting represents his whole lifetime, still a mere moment compared to eternity. Not so in the modern painting from the Renaissance onwards, which is able to catch its actors in a momentary scene. Of course the self became more important if the coordinates that delimited its existence changed from eternity to something shorter, such as the lifespan of a single human being. What happened during that span acquired much more weight. But this also increased individual responsibility, and made the ideal of human dignity possible. Or Bildung. The ideal life of the previous period had been emulation, the repetition or enactment of a pre-existing matrix, something akin to Thomas à Kempis' Imitation of Christ (c.1427) – now, little by little, self-formation became the responsibility of the individual human being, something unrepeatable, totally her own. And it has stayed so to this day, even though the way selves are built has changed. I suppose this is a corollary of the idea of freedom, if we think of freedom as a state that characterizes one's being in society, and not just within one's mind.

ZB When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after – as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day (Wisdom V. 15.) – the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of space of which I know nothing and which knows nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there, now rather than then. (Pascal 1966: 48)

So complained great Pascal in the name of his contemporaries. And he added: ‘Man's greatness comes from knowing he is wretched, but there is greatness in knowing one is wretched.’ ‘Knowing, unlike any other living being, that we are mortal – and knowing it from the early moments of our lives’, we are bound to live in the shadow of that knowledge. Living in its shadow, being aware of the laughable brevity of the life-span when compared with the eternity of the universe, and of the miserable minuteness of the place to which life will be confined if compared with the infinity of space, means knowing that ‘there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then’. ‘No reason’ equals ‘no meaning’. But meaninglessness for a Homo sapiens is an unbearable condition. Human life is therefore an incessant effort to fill the appalling void, to render life meaningful; or – alternatively – either to forget life's existential meaninglessness or to suppress it, to declare it irrelevant, to play it down or to shift it onto a side burner and keep it there for the duration; in a nutshell, to make life-with-awareness-of-one's-own-mortality bear­able – indeed, livable. That incessant effort we call culture. ‘Culture’ is another name for that greatness which Pascal spotted in our shared wretchedness.

You are right of course when pointing out that a new relation to time should be added as the fourth characteristic of the modern self – because we, moderns, have found a remedy for the suffering which Pascal lamented. I would even say, to strengthen your point, that seeking such remedies and finding them or deeming to have found them is the modern self's foremost trait – in as far as designing the ways of making life livable despite the awareness of mortality was, is, and probably will forever remain the main engine of culture and the common thread of its history. Modern ways of tackling that problem are indeed starkly distinct from the pre-modern.

I believe that the Christian solution was the most radical and indeed egalitarian of all alternative suggestions I can think of: according to Christianity, everyone had the prospect of eternity both guaranteed and inescapable (even if only in a spiritual form – as soul, not the body), but whether this immortality of soul would prove to be a blessing or a curse depended on the way the corporeal life was lived. This solution assigned to the brief episode of life-on-earth enormous significance of the only, not-to-be-repeated chance of influencing the quality of the eternal duration. (The pressure to do good and to avoid doing evil was in addition formidably strengthened by the concept of a hereditary original sin that set the stakes a priori in Hell's favour – everyone having been born already burdened with guilt; unless great effort was made to outweigh the awesome burden of original sin in the course of the earthly life, the chances of ending up in Hell outweighed those of reaching the Paradise.) The eternal fate of the immortal, indestructible soul could be influenced only during its captivity in the fleshy body – and would be decided there and then, once and for all. Once it lost its bodily carapace, there would be no chance to renegotiate its status and fate.

RR There is certainly a connection between the Judaic immortal soul, accountable before a sole god, and the Western cultural gravitation towards individuality. But I wonder whether Christianity is really as radical as this. Of the three religions of the Book, perhaps Islam has developed this line of thought into a much more clear-cut, rational and non-negotiable version. As it is said in the Qur'ān: ‘And among mankind is he who worshippeth God upon a narrow marge so that if good befalleth him he is content therewith, but if a trial befalleth him, he falleth away utterly. He loseth both the world and the Hereafter. That is the sheer loss’ (22.11). The fall from grace, when it happens, is absolute, there is no way back, no matter how much one might then regret one's evil deed.

The achievement of Christianity, in my opinion, is exactly the opposite: it allows the individual basically to fail in everything, and still does not condemn the soul to eternal torture if it is really, really sorry for the bad it has done (and the good it has not done). Of course, there is a difference of opinion between, say, the strictness of Calvin and the humanism of Chesterton or Dostoevsky, but isn't the central idea precisely that the givenness of sin can be overcome by divine grace, should you accept it? The theological subtleties of whether salvation of the individual is predetermined need not concern us here, since they probably didn't matter for the average lay believer either, except in times of great sectarian turbulence. Still, it was not by the acts of the individual that the goal was achieved, but by one's submission to the higher authority, or, should we prefer to be cynical about it, ideological allegiance.

However, in Indian religions, for example, the starting point is radically different: eternity is what we already have, even though nothing in it is constant. The transmigrating soul of the Hindu goes through incarnation after incarnation, and there is no single divine authority to decide its fate, which is always determined by its own deeds and choices. The Buddhists take this one step further in claiming this soul is itself the illusory extension of fundamental stupidity and lust, without a nature of its own, a creation of circumstances that have themselves to be overcome. Simplifying introductions to Buddhist thought claim that it characterizes these circumstances as ‘suffering’. This is not quite correct, because ‘suffering’ would be a condition that is opposed, within the same paradigm, to ‘happiness’ or some such, while for Buddhists ‘happiness’ and ‘suffering’ are at a smaller distance from each other than we would normally think. They are no more than different forms of the same basically unsatisfactory form of being to which we are condemned. For example, if we take an example of any supreme happiness or physical bliss, it is always possible precisely because of its opposition to some other state of the body or mind. Modern drugs might be able to prolong the duration of the human orgasm, for example. But what if an orgasm were to go on for a couple of hours? Two weeks? Would one rather be experiencing something else? What about six months? Would it still be physical bliss or rather a form of intolerable torture?

So the solution, from the Buddhist point of view, is not to work for and eventually ‘earn’ paradise, which is comparatively simple, but to get out of the works completely. Because paradise is always temporary. It is like a vacation, in the sense that it is nice while it lasts but must, and will, eventually be over. All Buddhists agree that the human condition is actually the ideal place for solving one's problems, because a human being is intelligent enough to understand what these problems are and free enough to act on that understanding, no matter how humble her/his circumstances may be. And it is not so free from care that no one can be bothered to try. Moreover, as Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy argues, there is no salvation to be found anywhere else except in the very setting we are in: t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• 1: Starting Out
• 2: Selves in Language
• 3: Performing Selves
• 4: Self-Realization
• 5: Connected Selves
• 6: The Composition of Selves
• Afterword – ZB
• Afterword – RR
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement