Chapter 5 The Attack on Alterity

Schmiedel, Ulrich

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-40832-3_6

Ulrich Schmiedel⁴

Part of the book series: Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue ((PEID))

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Abstract

This chapter applies Ernst Troeltsch’s typology to contemporary sociology. Ulrich Schmiedel argues that Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology of community offers a fully fledged parallel to Troeltsch’s typology. Bauman exposes Troeltsch’s ecclesiasticism as a chimera. His accounts of the anthropoemic and the anthropophagic neutralizations of alterity mirror Troeltsch’s sectarianism and Troeltsch’s mysticism respectively. However, Schmiedel argues that Bauman’s sociology might help to survey but not to solve the problem of individualization because he neglects the resources religion might offer for the construction of ‘communities of concern.’

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Notes

1.
Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and its Discontents (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 165–185. Kees de Groot, ‘Three Types of Liquid Religion,’ Implicit Religion 11/3 (2008), 279, criticizes that Bauman has not or not yet offered ‘a systematic account of religion.’
2.
Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Survival as a Social Construct,’ Theory, Culture and Society 9/1 (1992), 13–14. See also the interview with Bauman conducted by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Michael C. Kear, ‘Liquid Immortality – An Interview with Zygmunt Bauman,’ Mortality: Promoting the Interdisciplinary Study of Death and Dying 19/3 (2014), 303–317.
3.
Bauman, Postmodernity, 168–170.
4.
Ibid., 197.
5.
De Groot, ‘Three Types,’ 277. In the interview conducted by Jacobsen and Kear, ‘Liquid Immortality,’ 311, Bauman refers to secularization as a much used and abused concept. See also Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Postmodern Religion,’ in Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. Paul Heelas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 55–78.
6.
See esp. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
7.
Terminologically, Bauman tends to substitute the distinction between modernity and postmodernity by the distinction between ‘solid modernity’ and ‘liquid modernity’ since the publication of Liquid Modernity. For a short summary of the considerations which led him to this substitution, see Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 96–98.
8.
Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 2–5.
9.
Ibid., 37.
10.
Ibid., 39. See Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Seeking Shelter in Pandora’s Box,’ City 9/2 (2005), 161–168.
11.
Michael Hviid Jacobson and Sophia Marshman, ‘Bauman on Metaphors – A Harbinger of Humanistic Hybrid Sociology,’ in The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman: Challenges and Critique, ed. Michael Hviid Jacobson and Paul Poder (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 24.
12.
See Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 72–73. See also Jacobson and Marshman, ‘Bauman on Metaphors,’ 30.
13.
Jacobson and Marshman, ‘Bauman on Metaphors,’ 21–22.
14.
Ibid., 22.
15.
Ibid., 23.
16.
See esp. Zygmunt Bauman, Alone Again: Ethics after Certainty (London: Demos, 1994). Bauman’s analysis of community is summarized in Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).
17.
See the preface to the 2012 edition of Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Liquid Modernity Revisited,’ Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), esp. vii–xix.
18.
Fred Alford, ‘Bauman and Levinas: Levinas cannot be used,’ Journal for Cultural Research 18/3 (2014), 251.
19.
Bauman, Community, 3.
20.
Ibid., 5.
21.
Zygmunt Bauman, Socialism: The Active Utopia (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976), 13–16. See Michael Hviid Jacobson, ‘Bauman on Utopia – Welcome to the Hunting Zone,’ in The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman, 214.
22.
Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie (Berlin: Karl Curtius, 1922), ET: Community and Civil Society, trans. Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For issues connected to the translation of Tönnies’s study, see the translators’ account in ibid., xxxviii–xl. In order to avoid confusion, I stick to Bauman’s translation of ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ with ‘community’ and ‘society.’
23.
Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 8–81. (ET: 22–91). Accordingly, Tönnies argues that ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ are ‘Grundbegriffe’—fundamental or foundational concepts—for sociology. For a succinct summary of Tönnies’s argument, see Delanty, Community, 21–23.
24.
Bauman, Community, 9–12.
25.
Ibid., 10.
26.
Accordingly, Bauman accepts ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ as ‘Grundbegriffe.’ But while he concurs with Tönnies’s theoretical argument, he criticizes Tönnies’s empirical argument about the supersession of community by society.
27.
Zygmunt Bauman, Culture as Praxis: New Edition (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), xxii.
28.
Ibid., xxiv.
29.
Ibid., xxix.
30.
Ibid., xxiii.
31.
Ibid., xxx.
32.
Bauman, Community, 15.
33.
Ibid., 16.
34.
Ibid., 17.
35.
Ibid., 14.
36.
FV, 181.
37.
FV, 181–182.
38.
FV, 182. See also FV, 186–187.
39.
SL, 113, 179.
40.
According to Pearson, Beyond Essence, 138–140, Troeltsch conceives of the types as both (factual) entities in the course of history and (fictional) entities in the historian’s interpretation of the course of history.
41.
Bauman, Community, 114–117.
42.
Ibid., 116.
43.
Ibid., 117.
44.
Ibid., 115.
45.
Ibid., 141–142.
46.
Ibid., 142.
47.
Ibid., 141.
48.
Ibid., 141–142. According to Bauman, the ghetto(ized) community is the core concept of communitarianism. Criticizing Charles Taylor, Bauman repeatedly refers to the tacit totalitarianism in communitarian concepts of community. See esp. Bauman, Culture as Praxis, xxxvi–xlv. Here, I cannot trace whether Bauman’s critique is correct for points and phases in the development of Taylor’s thought (for Bauman’s critique of communitarianism, see Delanty, Community, 86–87, 91–91). Yet, the critique certainly misses Taylor’s account of the cohabitation of persons with religious and non-religious worldviews. Here, Taylor stresses the significance of the ‘overlapping consensus’ in ‘diverse democracies,’ a consensus which is to be negotiated and renegotiated. See Charles Taylor, ‘Why We Need a Radical Redefinition of Secularism,’ in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 48.
49.
See de Groot, ‘Three Types,’ 280. Mannion’s critique of what he calls ‘neo-exclusivism’ points to sectarianism. See Mannion, Ecclesiology and Postmodernity, 43–74.
50.
Bauman, Postmodernity, 182–183.
51.
Ibid., 184.
52.
Bauman, Community, 72.
53.
Ibid., 64.
54.
Ibid., 70
55.
Ibid.
56.
Ibid., 71.
57.
Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 199–201.
58.
Bauman, Community, 71.
59.
Ibid., 72.
60.
Ibid., 71.
61.
See de Groot, ‘Three Types,’ 280.
62.
Bauman, Postmodernity, 179–180.
63.
Ibid., 179–180. See also de Groot, ‘Three Types,’ 279.
64.
Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 101–102. See also his Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1992), 131–132.
65.
Such totalitarianism has led to criticism—even abandonment—of the concept of community in ecclesiology. See Watson, Introducing Feminist Ecclesiology, 48–52.
66.
Bauman, Postmodernity, 185.
67.
De Groot, ‘Three Types,’ 281.
68.
Ibid.
69.
Bauman, Community, 149–150.
70.
Ibid., 220.
71.
See Jacobson, ‘Bauman on Utopia,’ 221.
72.
Ibid., 224.
73.
Ibid., 226–227.
74.
Bauman, Culture, 104–112. See Niclas Månsson, ‘Bauman on Strangers – Unwanted Peculiarities,’ in The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman, 155–174.
75.
Bauman, Culture, 104–105.
76.
Månsson, ‘Bauman on Strangers,’ 159.
77.
Ibid., 162–163. See Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust: With a New Afterword by the Author (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
78.
Ibid.
79.
See Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 114–180.
80.
Judith Butler, ‘Is Judaism Zionism?,’ in The Power of Religion, 70–91 (a reworked version of which appeared in Butler, Parting Ways, 114–150). See also her ‘The Charge of Anti-Semitism,’ in Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 101–127.
81.
Butler, ‘Is Judaism Zionism?,’ 83.
82.
See Butler’s insightful interpretation of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 2006) in the chapter, ‘Quandaries of the Plural,’ in Parting Ways, 151–180. According to Butler, Arendt’s point is that Adolf Eichmann claimed to be entitled to choose with whom to cohabit and with whom not to cohabit. The choice of cohabitation, the claim to have a say in who is and who is not one’s neighbor, has genocidal consequences—potentially and actually.
83.
Månsson, ‘Bauman on Strangers,’ 167–170.
84.
Bauman, Culture, xlviii.
85.
Ibid.
86.
Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 207.
87.
Ibid.
88.
Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the translation between religious and non-religious languages assumes that religious language tends to be private while non-religious language tends to be public. See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Religion in the Public Sphere,’ in Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 127–150. Accordingly, the secular sphere fulfills a function like the language of Esperanto. See Habermas’s comments in ‘Concluding Discussion,’ in The Power of Religion, 109–117. However, Charles Taylor asked: ‘Were Martin Luther King’s secular compatriots unable to understand what he was arguing for when he put the case for equality in biblical terms?’ (Charles Taylor, ‘Why We Need a Radical Redefinition of Secularism,’ 58n. 13). The example of Martin Luther King’s speeches runs through their discussion, pointing out how controversial and contested the boundaries between religious and non-religious ‘language’ are.
89.
Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 216.
90.
Bauman, Culture, xlvii.
91.
Ibid.
92.
Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Towards an Interreligious Hermeneutics of Love,’ in Interreligious Hermeneutics, ed. Catherine Cornille and Christopher Conway (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010), 49.
93.
Ibid., 48–50.
94.
Ibid., 50.
95.
Ibid. See also Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Interkulturalität und Interreligiösität: Die Notwendigkeit einer Hermeneutik der Liebe,’ in Kontextualität und Universalität: Die Vielfalt der Glaubenskontexte und der Universalitätsanspruch des Evangeliums, ed. Thomas Schreijäck and Knut Wenzel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2012), 156–173.
96.
Bauman, Culture, xlv.
97.
Månsson, ‘Bauman on Strangers,’ 170. Alford, ‘Bauman and Levinas,’ 249–262, argues that Bauman fails to account for the religious roots of Emmanuel Levinas’s concept of the other when he uses it in his sociology.
98.
See Chaps. 7, 8, 9.

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Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Munich, Germany
Ulrich Schmiedel

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Schmiedel, U. (2017). Chapter 5 The Attack on Alterity. In: Elasticized Ecclesiology. Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40832-3_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40832-3_6
Published: 20 January 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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