Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was a Polish and British philosopher and sociologist.
He was the author of the concept liquid modernity which expresses that we are living in times of instability and volatility.
Biography
Zygmunt Bauman was born in Poland on November 19, 1925, into a Jewish family.
They fled to the Soviet Union in 1939 in the face of the Nazi invasion of the country. He allied with the army and participated in two battles. After the end of World War II, he would be an officer in the division that would fight the Ukrainian nationalists.
He returned to Poland where he taught at the University of Warsaw until he was persecuted and expelled from the Communist Party. At this point, Bauman was beginning to distance himself from the more orthodox currents of Marxism.
Due to the censorship of his works and the political purge that took place in 1968, he decided to immigrate to Israel. For this he had to renounce his Polish nationality.
In Israel, he teaches at Tel Aviv University where he encounters resistance because of his positions against Zionism. Bauman accused certain groups of Jews of using the Holocaust as justification for committing their own crimes.
However, it was at the University of Leeds, England, that he developed his main concepts such as "liquid modernity". This idea would make him a respected sociologist and philosopher around the world.
His views on modernity and his critique of the capitalist world found echo in anti-globalization and anti-capitalist movements.
He married writer Janina Lewinson-Bauman (1926-2009) with whom he had three daughters. He died on January 9, 2017.
net modernity
To understand the concept of liquid modernity, we need to remember what the properties of liquids are. These are characterized by instability, lack of cohesion and a defined form.
Liquid modernity, therefore, is characterized by a society and a time where everything is volatile and adaptable. It is opposed to the previous decade, solid modernity, where society was ordered, cohesive, stable and predictable.
Nothing is fixed, stationary or unchanged in liquid modernity. It is mutating and unstable or in other words chaotic. Everything can be adaptable, be it the profession, relationships, religion, etc.
What would have caused this change? Bauman points out some reasons:
- Businesses are increasingly powerful, even more so than governments. Large transnationals have the power to change laws, economy, the environment, etc.
- The speed of technological change ever faster with the Internet.
- The migration of people who move quickly, abruptly impacting the places where they settle and generating cultural and socio-economic impacts.
net love
If every aspect of our lives has been affected by consumer society and technology, so have relationships.
In the so-called solid society, marriage normally lasted forever. Anchored in the ideal of romantic love, the belief was created that human beings were only capable of falling in love once.
However, with the advent of technologies, connecting with people is very easy. On the other hand, disconnecting from these same people is just as easy.
Thus, the relationships, instead of being lasting, become serialized and constitute an accumulation of experiences. What would count is quantity and satisfaction, just like what happens in the products we consume.
Bauman's Works
- Modernity and Holocaust
- In Search of Policy
- Modernity and Ambivalence
- Globalization: the human consequences
- net modernity
- net love
- liquid fear
- Life for Consumption
- Strangers at our Door
Bauman's Phrases
- "How can you fight the odds of fate alone, without the help of faithful and devoted friends, without a life partner, ready to share the ups and downs?"
- “The concern with the administration of life seems to distance the human being from moral reflection”.
- "Three decades of consumer orgy have resulted in an endless sense of urgency."
- "The end of this trust engenders, on the other hand, an environment in which 'no one takes control', in which state affairs and its subjects are in free fall, and predicting with some certainty which path to follow, not to mention controlling the course of events, transcends individual and collective human capacity”.
- "The inability to choose between attraction and repulsion, between hopes and fears, results in an inability to act."
- "In the information age, invisibility is equivalent to death."
- "Life is much greater than the sum of its moments."
- “Crazy are just the unshared meanings. Madness is not madness when shared”.
- "Living among a multitude of competing values, norms and lifestyles without a firm and credible guarantee that we are right is dangerous and takes a high psychological toll."
read more:
- Postmodernism
- What is Philosophy?
- Contemporary Philosophy
- Marxism
- What is Sociology?
- Brazilian Philosophers You Need to Know
- What is Ideology?
- Sociology in Enem: what to study
