Postmodern social theory and modern moral philosophy

In the opening passages of A Short History of Ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre (2002: 1) remarks that ‘moral philosophy is often written as if the history of the subject were only of secondary and incidental importance’. If the history of moral philosophy has remained a more or less incidental matter, in comparison to first-order theory construction, grappling with the fundamental historicity of moral philosophy has, generally speaking, been relegated to an even lower level of concern. This is not to say, however, that there are no exceptions; on the contrary, the self-reflective historicisation of modern ethics can be traced back at least to the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, reaching its dramatic climax in social theoretical and philosophical postmodernism. Sidgwick (1981: 105), for example, characterised modern theory as articulating an imperative conception of ethics. To this, he contrasted the attractive conception of ethics developed by the ancients. By the 1950s, analytically trained philosophers had begun to unearth and reconstruct the deep incongruencies that had emerged between the imperative conception of ethics and the cultural conditions of Western modernity. These incongruencies had rendered, it was claimed, our inherited moral language incoherent and our moral lives deeply impoverished. At the cusp of the new millennium, from an altogether different set of conceptual presuppositions and commitments, critical social theorists, among them Zygmunt Bauman and Agnes Heller (1988, 1990, 1996), had reached a similar set of conclusions. This shared diagnosis notwithstanding, opinions differed as to the appropriate remedy. Whilst Anscombe (2005) and MacIntyre (2007) argued for the recovery of Aristotelian virtue ethics, the Central Europeans embraced the demise of the once dominant framework by attempting to come to terms with the conditions of ethical life created by the advent of the postmodern condition.

Bauman's contribution to this constellation of historicist thinking is extensive. From Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989) to Moral Blindness (Bauman and Donskis, 2013), ethical life has been a central and recurring theme in Bauman's critical social theory. Speaking especially to his middle period, it has been persuasively suggested that it is Bauman's focus on problems of morality and ethics that represents his most original contribution to the debates surrounding the postmodern condition (Bauman and Tester, 2007: 22). In this present context, anything close to a general assessment of this contribution is not possible. Rather, the present essay aims at a modest contribution to this still-to-be-completed work by elaborating on Bauman's guiding contentions that: a) attendant to the project of nation building, Western modernity gives rise to a historically determinate and historically specific form of moral discourse; b) the moral framework characteristic of Western modernity has been rendered problematic by the social, cultural and political developments associated with postmodernity; and c) in light of these developments, the demands of the day require a renewal of ethical thinking, if we are not to succumb to the contemporary dangers of atomisation, and the never-ending imperatives of hedonistic individualism and egocentric self-fulfilment.

The will to order as the spirit of modernity

‘Existence is modern’, writes Bauman (1991: 7), ‘in as far as it is sustained by design, manipulation, management, engineering’ (Italics in original). According to Bauman, the threshold of modernity is crossed with the emergence of a modality of social power that is expressed as the will to order. Within the pre-modern social arrangement, the reproduction of society was treated as a largely autopoietic affair. Left to its own devices, society could be counted on to stably reproduce itself year after year, generation after generation, guided by the time-worn and authoritative traditions of the past. By contrast, the spirit of modernity conceives social reproduction as something to be made, not simply something that is done. The crucial shift here is ‘the redefinition of social order as a product of human convention, as something not “absolute” and beyond human control’ (Bauman, 1987: 53). The goal towards which modern existence tends is the erasure of all ambivalence. In pursuance of this goal, modern existence found a ready affirmation in the cultural ideals of a human reason emancipated from the limitations and crystallised authority of tradition. For Bauman, modern rulers and intellectuals, those constituent agents of the ‘knowledge/power syndrome’ (Bauman, 1987: 2) are best cast in the mould of the legislator. In the political sphere, legislating against ambivalence meant, inter alia, de-legitimising any ‘merely’ local, customary or folk authorities, ties and associations. The nation-state, the modern form of political organisation par excellence, had little use for inherited sources of identity such as kin, guild or parish; its subjects were to be rendered as citizens. The citizen was he, as Bauman explains, who was

not necessarily unaffected by the communally inspired particularisms, yet capable of cutting himself loose from communal roots and loyalties; of lifting himself, so to speak, onto a higher plane and taking from there a long, detached and critical view of communal demands and pressures (Bauman, 1993: 39).

The modern state is then, according to Bauman, a fundamentally coercive system that operates according to a universalising logic that is productive of homogeneity and the effacement of difference. As such, Bauman discerns a deep synergy – eine Wahlverwandschaft – between the rationalising, disciplining and deracinating logic of political modernity and the dominant forms of modern moral philosophy. As Bauman (1991: 20) himself remarks: ‘Throughout the modern era the legislative reason of philosophers chimes in well with the all-too-material practices of the states’. The chief proponents of this legislative reason are, not surprisingly, Kant and Descartes. Of particular note is the latter's self-conception of the philosopher as lawgiver, of philosophy as a legislative power. In the first instance, the legislative power of philosophy is expressed as a project to raise knowledge above the level of ‘common understanding’. Only the right kind of epistemology, grounded in the right kind of metaphysics, can secure knowledge and overcome the spectres of mere opinion. Philosophers, the guardians of both, are thus called upon to cultivate the perfection of human thinking. In completing the culture of humanity, the philosophers are integral in the promotion of order, harmony and wellbeing. Bauman perceives in this a kind of elitism, or paternalism, whose modus operandi is control and the establishment of relationships of sub- and superordination:

Whatever 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 (Bauman, 1991: 22).

The alliance between philosophy and the state is, according to Bauman, the hidden logic behind Kant's extensive use of metaphors drawn from the vocabulary of power – the ‘tribunal’ of reason, and the royal dignity of metaphysics as the ‘queen’ of the sciences are perhaps the most well-known. What this suggests, for Bauman, is that the ideal of a legislating reason was, from the start, a project directed towards a specific audience – that being the ruling elite, the government of the day. Importantly, however, this need not be seen as a self-concerned attempt to gain entrance to the corridors of power and prestige. There is a ‘genuine affinity’ between philosophy as a rational legislating power and the nation-building intentions of the modern state and a ‘genuine symmetry’ between philosophy's bid to bring an end to the ‘strife of the schools’ and establish itself on the sure footing of science and the modern state's uprooting and suppression of local identities and attachments, which could alone establish its sovereignty (Bauman, 1991: 23). The goal to which both tend is the extirpation of all ambivalence; the philosopher qua legislator, every bit as much as the legislator proper, legislates against ambivalence.

Modern moral philosophy and the aporias of modernity

If, from one perspective, modern moral philosophy is an agent in the processes of modernisation, it is also, from another perspective, subject to the processes of change that usher in die Neuzeit. Indeed, the very subject matter of modern moral philosophy itself – moral action and valuation, action and valuation that is sui generis and distinct from instrumental or strategic-type action on the one hand, and aesthetic and utilitarian-type valuation on the other – is in large part an outcome of processes of European modernisation (Bauman, 1993: 4). As Anscombe (2005: 184–185) in particular has shown, the idea of the specifically morally good or the morally obligatory that comes to occupy modern thinking is in no way synonymous with the classical sense of ἠθικὴ (i.e. ethical) inherited from Aristotle. In his most sustained and significant account of the exhaustion of the modern moral imaginary, Bauman develops an account of the sociological transformations that accompany such linguistic and conceptual revolutions. With the deconstruction of the pre-modern social arrangement and the dis-embedding or emancipation of men and women from the networks of traditional surveillance and communal management of behaviour, modernity engenders the existential predicament of individuality. The modern individual is no longer a cypher for a productive social function. Rather, identity is underdetermined, something to be constructed on the basis of choice (Bauman, 1993: 4–5). Herein one encounters the deeply ambiguous nature of the existential condition of individuality. Choice entails evaluation, evaluation entails standards. But which standards to choose? Western modernisation is equally a process characterised by the fragmentation of cultural value spheres:

The once unitary and indivisible ‘right way’ begins to be split into ‘economically sensible’, ‘aesthetically pleasing’, ‘morally proper’. Actions may be right in one sense, wrong in another. Which action ought to be measured by what criteria? And if a number of criteria apply, which is to be given priority? (Bauman, 1993: 5).

At the same time, under the star of what Weber (1978) termed innerweltliche Askese, the entirety of everyday life is subject to specifically moral evaluation.

Like Weber, Bauman discerns a fateful connection between the fragmentation of value spheres and the tendency of modern life towards secularisation. As the latter explains:

It is because modern developments forced men and women into the condition of individuals, who found their lives fragmented, split into many loosely related aims and functions, each to be pursued in a different context and according to a different pragmatics – that an ‘all-comprising’ idea promoting a unitary vision of the world was unlikely to serve their tasks well and thus capture their imagination (Bauman, 1993: 6).

For the paradigmatic thinkers of modernity, morality could no longer appear as a natural, intrinsic and invariable trait of human life (Bauman, 1993: 6). On the contrary, morality needed to be constructed, designed and projected; like the citizen, the moral subject henceforth becomes a problem of social engineering, the object of the modern will to order:

Morality, like the rest of social life, must be founded on Law, and there must be an ethical code behind morality, consisting of prescriptions and prohibitions. Teaching or coercing people to be moral means making them obey that ethical code’ (Bauman, 1994: 4).

What faith was purportedly no longer able to accomplish, reason would realise. In consequence, modernity gave rise to the proliferation of attempts to forge an immanently grounded morality, one that could be normative for any and all rational beings. The juridical counterpart of which was the project to establish the rational bases of human co-habitation. Again, Kant (2006: 90–91) can be seen as representative:

Establishing a state, as difficult as it may sound, is a problem that can be solved even for a nation of devils (if only they possess understanding). The problem is as follows: To form a group of rational beings, which, as a group, require universal laws for their preservation, of which each member is, however, secretly inclined to make an exception of himself, and to organize them and arrange a constitution for them in such a way that, although they strive against each other in their private intentions, the latter check each other in such a way that the result in their public conduct is just as if they had no such evil intentions.

Herein, however, Bauman discerns the fundamental aporia that determines the ongoing development of the legislating aspirations of modernity. On the one hand, modern legislators – philosophical, political, and legal – tended towards the valorisation of the freedom of the rational individual. On the other, they tended equally towards the presumption that actually existing individuals would invariably employ both freedom and reason towards self-serving, anti-social ends. One can do little better to exemplify this aporia than recalling those decisive reflections of the professor from Königsberg: ‘If it is asked, then, whether we live in an enlightened age then the answer is: no, but we do live in an age of enlightenment’ (Kant, 2006: 22). In present circumstances, the great mass of individuals cannot, should not, be put in the position of making reliable, ‘confident and good’ (Kant, 2006: 22), use of their own reason. However, these same circumstances are such as to have opened the up the possibility of working towards this goal – the goal of universal enlightenment, of emancipation from self-incurred tutelage.

How to achieve such enlightenment? According to Bauman the historical march towards emancipation from the snares of immaturity was carried out under the twin banners of universalism and foundationalism. In the practice of nation building and statecraft, universalism signified the suppression of the exception and the establishment and maintenance of a single legal apparatus for the territory over which sovereignty extended. So understood, universalism was the necessary condition for the emergence of the modern state as that agency that, as Weber (2009) characterised it, claims for itself the legitimate use of force within a given territory. In the theory of modern philosophers, universalism signified that ‘feature of ethical prescriptions which compelled every human creature, just for the fact of being a human creature, to recognize it as right and thus to accept it as obligatory’ (Bauman, 1993: 8). Whilst clearly rejecting any straightforward causal determination of the latter by the former, Bauman does suggest a relationship of dependence between the two. The coercive practices of the state towards uniformity constitute the ‘epistemological ground’ (Bauman, 1993: 8), which makes possible the atomistic, logocentric conception of the moral subject. In turn, this conception has the consequence of not only naturalising the uprooted, dis-embedded and deracinated subject, but also casting it as the ‘embodiment and epitome of human destiny’ (Bauman, 1993: 8). In the practice of nation building and statecraft, foundationalism signified the grounding of legal strictures in the sovereign authority of the state. In the theory of the philosophers, foundationalism signified the attempt to legitimate moral imperatives as just, right and good. Taken together, universalism and foundationalism represent, for Bauman, major vehicles in what Hans Blumenberg (1983) termed the self-assertion of modernity. That is, the historical project to re-establish knowledge, order, and action on the premises of human reason alone.

Ethics in a postmodern key

Postmodernism, no less than its cognates, is, to be sure, an irreducibly polyvalent term. Not even the most threadbare genealogy of its emergence in art theory and subsequent transmission to philosophy and the social sciences and from there its permeation of contemporary culture can be attempted here. According to Bauman (1992), the postmodern is perhaps, more than anything else, a state of mind or cultural mood whose most characteristic feature is an all-encompassing destructiveness. The principal targets of postmodern incredulity are well known, as are the consequences. The postmodern assault on essentialist and transcendental conceptions of the human being; the rejection of notions of homogeneity, totality and identity; the refusal of any substantive account of the Real and the True leads to a celebration of relativism, perspectivism and a deep suspicion of all normativity as inherently oppressive (Squires, 1993). For its more ardent defenders, the postmodern condition was experienced as liberation – the dissolution of the bonds keeping individual emancipation in check, and the emergence of conditions that would support the full expression of individual desires and the quest for individual self-fulfilment (cf. Lipovetsky, 2005). By contrast, Bauman (1992: xxii) sees an epochal paradox at play here, for any such ‘liberation’ takes place amidst a culture that simultaneously deprives individuals of ‘the comfort of the universal guidance that modern self-confidence once promised’. Moral challenges, dilemmas and demands, many of them unprecedented, proliferate whilst the socially produced and culturally codified resources for responding to them wither. In contemporary ethical life ‘moral responsibility comes together with the loneliness of moral choice’ (Bauman, 1992: xxii).

Against the backdrop of this Zeitdiagnose, Bauman turns to the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas in order to elaborate an ethics of proximity whose fundamental norm is that of responsibility. The first premise of this ethics is the fundamental ambivalence of the moral situation. Following Levinas, Bauman argues that the human face-to-face, the encounter with the face of the Other in its irreducible alterity, represents the primary scene of ethics. Levinas (1985: 86) himself captures this ambivalence as follows: ‘The face is exposed, menaced, as if inviting us to an act of violence. At the same time, the face is what forbids us to kill’. No ethical code, no rationally founded order, no reconditioning of human motives and values can efface or expunge the moral relation of this fundamental ambivalence. This means, in effect, accepting and learning to live with moral choices as they are – that is, as choices – and moral dilemmas as dilemmas. Divesting ourselves of the characteristically modern conviction that ‘Mankind … inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve’ (Marx, 1977: 21) precipitates the recognition that moral life is messy and ambiguous, utterly shot through with uncertainty and risk. Moral phenomena are, then, in Bauman's conception, non-rational: ‘They are not regular, repetitive, monotonous and predictable in a way that would allow them to be represented as rule-guided’ (Bauman, 1993: 11). Whilst Bauman frankly rejects the notion that the moral scene of the face-to-face encounter can ever be codified in a set of universally binding and rationally transparent imperatives, he equally rejects the notion that the only alternative to such a codification is the ‘anything goes’ attitude of facile relativism that has come to characterise much of contemporary Western culture. In opposition to both, Bauman returns the Levinasian ethics of proximity, the ethics of the concrete face-to-face encounter with a particular Other in a particular, concrete situation. Herein, the ethical is not articulated through reference to duty before the law, but through responsibility before the Other. Within the ethical, so understood, the Other confronts the moral self in the form of infinite responsibility; a responsibility that individuates both I and Thou and, precisely as a moral demand, resists all attempts at universalisation.

Continuing the conversation …

Whatever else may be said of them, Bauman's analyses of the paradoxes of postmodern morality represent a powerful intellectual synthesis. From these foundational reflections on the historicity of modern moral philosophy and the imperatives of the postmodern condition, his later writings comprise a voluminous hermeneutic engagement with many of the defining moral dilemmas of our time – from consumerism to migration, from health, fitness and the politics of the body to the poor, the marginalised and wasted lives produced by neoliberal globalisation – all read through the lens of the fundamental norm of responsibility and the all-too-often neglected art of humane dialogue and personal conversation. In ways only minimally indicated here, Bauman's work offers a substantive critique of the recent resurgence of communitarianism in practical philosophy; one grounded radical defence of individual autonomy that nevertheless avoids many of the shortcomings of philosophical liberalism. Perhaps, above all, the perfectionist demand of assuming infinite responsibility speaks forcefully against our tendency towards moral complacency, and cautions against comforting ourselves in the belief that, despite the continued, indeed proliferating, suffering of others, we may nevertheless sit comfortably in our self-assured moral rectitude.

In these and many more ways, Bauman's ethical writings command attention. Yet, I contend that they cannot be taken up uncritically or without reservation. The first set of problems pertains to Bauman's essentialising and totalising conception of modernity – a problem that has often been raised in the critical literature. According to Birgit Rommelspacher (2014), for example, Bauman's conception of modernity as a coercive system that succumbs to its own totalitarian vision of control is monolithic and problematically one-dimensional. Douglas Kellner (1998: 76) makes explicit precisely what is at stake here: Bauman's ‘rather uniform conception of modernity’ fails to grapple with modernity as an essentially ‘contested terrain’. True, there are aspects of Bauman's conception that do, in some sense, militate against this conclusion. Amongst the most central and elusive concepts in Bauman's middle works is what he terms the ‘hate-love relation between modern existence and modern culture’ (Bauman, 1991: 9). In the ‘dialectic of modernity’, (Beilharz, 2000) culture both affirms and undermines the status quo. This seems to suggest that for Bauman, as for, say, George Márkus (2011), modern culture is essentially a culture of critique. However, for Bauman, there is a symbiotic element here that renders the critical culture of modernity complementary to, rather than antagonistic with, the apparatuses of power. Thus, whilst Bauman acknowledges, in some sense, the ‘field of tensions’ that characterise modernity as an essentially ‘contested domain’, such acknowledgement does little to diminish the one-dimensional, totalising conception of modernity found in his work.

Ultimately, the problem stems from the abstract nature of Bauman's equation of modernity with the will to order. A common refrain in the literature is the sense that Bauman's understanding of modernity lacks appreciation of the ‘positive gains in democratic participation, rights, associations and socio-political contestation’ (Kellner, 1998: 77; Rommelspacher, 2014: 329). It is less frequently observed that Bauman's conception not only obscures the competing political logics constitutive of modernity, but also the antagonistic and conflictual dynamics that propel modern culture. For Bauman, both modernity and modernism are monolithic. By contrast, it has been persuasively argued that ‘the culture of modernity is imprinted and defined by the irreconcilable coexistence’ of two competing cultural processes and projects (Márkus, 2011: 634): ‘two modernisms’, usually conceptualised as Enlightenment and Romanticism (Murphy and Roberts, 2004). Enlightenment roughly corresponds to the conception of modern culture presented by Bauman. It is rationalistic, foundationalist and universalising. It sees history as the progressive emancipation of reason from the snares of unreason. Romanticism, a cultural logic effectively ignored by Bauman, on the other hand, celebrates those ‘others of reason’, the authentic expression of singular human genius in works of creative illumination. To the ‘grandeur’ of Enlightenment universality, Romanticism responds with the ‘profundity’ of depth (Rorty, 2007); to history as the forward march of reason, Romanticism responds with ‘an image of the future in which the future is a creation anew of a mythical past of organic harmony, aesthetic gods, heroes and geniuses’ (Murphy and Roberts, 2004: x).

It would be absurd to suggest that Bauman was not cognisant of the romantic dimension of cultural modernity, or, for that matter, democracy, as central drivers in the dynamic reproduction of modernity. How then might one account for their relative neglect within his work? Presumably, Bauman would want to argue that, despite their apparent differences, Enlightenment and Romanticism – much like democracy and absolutism – are driven by that quintessentially modern will to order, the quintessentially modern abhorrence of chaos. Perhaps there is some value in this kind of abstraction; however, what is clear is that all relevant differences between the conflicting manifestations of modernity are completely obscured. For even if all aspects of modernity can be subsumed under the will to order, it remains certain that this will is expressed in different, irreconcilable, antagonistic forms. Such forms, I contend, matter. It matters whether order is attained through authoritarian centralisation or democratic de-centralisation; it matters whether we find the guiding light of culture in the Quest for Truth or the Quest for Authenticity. To deny this is not only theoretically problematic, but also runs contrary to the humanistic and emancipatory interests and convictions that otherwise motivate Bauman's work as an intellectual.

The second challenge that confronts any attempt to work with, develop and expand upon Bauman's ethical writings is the implicit historical framework within which they unfold. To clarify: Bauman's account of the early modern state as a disciplinary force bent on constructing a rationally ordered form of life upon the ruins of absolutist regimes is heavily indebted to the historical studies of Michel Foucault. Consequently, it inherits a range of contentious issues pertaining to the conditions and mechanisms of continuity, disruption and change from both social order and systems of thought. Most significantly, there exists in Bauman a marked emphasis on the synchronic organisation of modern moral discourse, to the real neglect of the diachronic transformations characteristic of said discourse (cf. Jay, 1982). Subsequently, Bauman is led to construct or, at best, imply, a deep caesura between the modern and the pre-modern worlds. In emphasising the aspect of discontinuity, this approach obscures the ways in which processes of modernisation often engender the re-making of pre-modern traditions and their cultural refraction through the prisms of sui generis modern imperatives and concerns. As social theorists such as SN Eisenstadt (1973) have persuasively argued, modernisation does not so much signify a break with localised or regional traditions as precipitates their novel articulation. Empirical work in comparative civilisational analysis tends to confirm such conjectures; so too does the work of historically orientated philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Alasdair MacIntyre. As the latter has demonstrated, it is not an insignificant fact that, despite often fundamental disagreement about the nature of morality and the methods of rational justification, the leading figures in the ‘Enlightenment project’ tended towards consensus when it came to the ‘content and character of the precepts which constitute genuine morality. Marriage and the family are au fond as unquestioned by Diderot's rationalist philosophe as they are Kierkegaard's Judge Willhelm; promise-keeping and justice are as inviolable for Hume as they are for Kant' (MacIntyre, 2007: 51). The source of these precepts is, of course, the shared tradition of Christianity. The relatively conservative nature of such precepts in the thought of otherwise quite radical thinkers not only attests to the enduring power of traditions; further, they reveal the deficiencies and limitations of a conception of history orientated solely to moments of rupture and discontinuity. That the universalism and foundationalism that Bauman associates with modern moral philosophy have their sources in Christian theology and moral doctrine is, to my mind, beyond dispute.

Finally, and perhaps most problematic of all, Bauman's conception of moral phenomena as inherently ‘non-rational’ raises questions that threaten to render his entire project incoherent. According to Bauman (1993: 11), morality and the moral scene of the face-to-face encounter are non-rational to the extent that they ‘precede the consideration of purpose and the calculation of gains and losses’, and for this reason ‘do not fit the “means-end” scheme’. The implication here is that instrumental rationality is to be taken as synonymous with rationality as such. Evidently this is a highly problematic assumption. Aside from the litany of frequently sophisticated conceptions of rationality that claim otherwise, Bauman's equation of instrumental rationality with rationality as such, opens his own work up to the aporias of a rationally grounded critique of reason. In too readily, and unreflectively, accepting the postmodern critique of logocentrism, Bauman, like similar thinkers, is unable to account for the rationality of his own perspective.

In many ways, Bauman is an unconventional postmodernist. His resolute unwillingness to assent to relativism, his resistance to dissolve ethics into the aesthetics of self-cultivation, and his persistent aspiration to new forms of collective solidarity mark him as an independent and unique thinker. By the same token, his project for a postmodern ethics bears some of the most distinctive hallmarks of the postmodern moment – a totalising conception of modernity, a singular focus on historical discontinuity and an aporetic conception of reason, chief amongst them. It is, then, perhaps not an exaggeration to say that the limitations of this project reflect, in a particularly perspicuous fashion, less the limitations of a singular thinker's vision, than those of the intellectual culture in which this vision was realised. For this, however, one can scarcely be condemned. Niemand kann über seinen eigenen Schatten springen.