When Zygmunt Bauman received the Prince of Asturias Award together with Alain Touraine in 2010, a debate between the two took place in Oviedo, which I was lucky enough to moderate.
The topic was the public role of intellectuals.
The agreements were many and less interesting than the disagreements.
Touraine insisted on the need to elaborate a theory if one wanted to contribute something really significant for the understanding of the current world;
Bauman was more interested in a metaphor powerfully capturing people's attention and feeling expressed in it the meaning or nonsense of things, of life and of their own experiences.
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Zygmunt Bauman, the hectic life of the thinker of liquid modernity
There is a long tradition of formulas that have tried to explain in a single expression very complex circumstances of social reality, such as the idea of a "disciplinary society" (Foucault), "colonization of the world of life" (Habermas) or "bureaucratization". of charisma” (Weber).
They are expressions in which it is made clear that good theory bears a certain resemblance to poetic invention, to the vocabularies that they invent and discover, in which an interpretation is contained that makes new aspects of reality visible.
The idea of "liquid society" is the great metaphor that Bauman introduced into the public debate and that allowed many to understand and understand each other in the midst of so much confusion.
Liquidity could explain the new situation of capitalism, love or knowledge.
The problem with successful formulations is twofold:
that its author tends to explain with it beyond its possibilities, applying it to the most disparate realities, and that its public acceptance ends up trivializing them.
If its inventor can self-limit to avoid the first risk, trivial popularization is not something you can protect yourself from.
There is a greatness in Bauman that goes unnoticed behind his simple way of approaching issues and telling them.
When someone is so concerned with making themselves understood to the point of dispensing with all academic artifice, they run the risk of not being taken too seriously.
Bauman's great stature is not achieved by increasing the distance between the intellectual and the reading public, but rather by striving hard to reduce that distance as much as possible.
Being understandable is a democratic requirement that does not have to be at odds with the depth of what is meant.
It is a way of acting as a public intellectual, always assuming the exposure to being contradicted by recipients who sometimes contradict beyond their means.
It is a balance that is not always easy and sometimes one can choose to be more public than intellectual, as in my opinion was the case with Bauman, more popular than undisputed authority.
As an intellectual, he preferred to explain than to command.
Who knows if, in the end, the authority of someone who is accessible ends up being greater than the prestige gained by explaining little and poorly.
If we organize the republic of intellectuals more horizontally and democratically, the first principle should be that whoever does not know how to say it is that he does not know it.
Daniel Innerarity
is a professor of Political Philosophy, an Ikerbasque researcher at the University of the Basque Country and a professor at the European Institute in Florence.
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