"Until now, neither the distinction between “worthy, since durable” and “vain, since transient,” nor the unbridgeable abyss separating the two, has disappeared for a moment from reflections on human happiness. Nonentity, the demeaning and humiliating insignificance of the individual bodily presence in the world by comparison with the unperturbed eternity of the world itself, has haunted philosophers (and non-philosophers, during their brief spells of falling into and staying in a philosophical mood) for more than two millennia. In the Middle Ages it was raised to the rank of the highest purpose and supreme concern of mortals, and deployed to promote spiritual values over the pleasures of the flesh—as well as to explain (and, hopefully argue away) the pain and misery of the brief earthly existence as a necessary and therefore welcome prelude to the endless bliss of the afterlife. It returned with the advent of the modern era in a new garb: that of the futility of individual interests and concerns, shown to be abominably short-lived, fleeting and vagrant when juxtaposed with the interests of “the social whole”—the nation, the state, the cause."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
p. 31.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zygmunt_Bauman
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Zygmunt Bauman
Zygmunt Bauman (19 November 1925 – 9 January 2017) was a Polish sociologist and philosopher born in Poznan. Bauman was a social theorist, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity. He was forced to renounce his Polish citizenship by Poland's government in 1968, and to leave the country, and lived in the United Kingdom from the early 1970s.
21 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Zygmunt Bauman →
Related Quotes
"Our vulnerability [to ressentiment], is unavoidable (and probably incurable) in a kind of society in which re…"
"[Referring to his father] In fact, we almost lost our lives because of his honesty. In 1939, we were running away fro…"
"[Following the second world war] If you looked at the political spectrum in Poland at that time, the Communist party …"
"[After an article by Bogdan Musiał was published in Poland alleging Bauman had worked for the Polish secret service] …"
"[Asked "Did counter-espionage mean informing on people who were fighting against the communist project?"] That's what…"
"[Asked "What did that involve, exactly?"] Well, it's counter-espionage. Every good citizen should participate in coun…"
"[G]radually, like so many others in my position, I came to the conclusion that there was a yawning gap between the of…"
"A good society is a society which believes that it is not good enough; that it is the task of the collectivity to ins…"
"Once governments exclude people you can stop them from being protected. Societies begin to manipulate fears about gro…"
"The task for sociology is to come to the help of the individual. We have to be in service of freedom. It is something…"