On each occasion, the coffee table was overloaded with croissants and biscuits, canapés and fruit tarts, cookies and crab mousse, accompanied by hot and cold drinks, juices and Polish ‘kompot’. While my host shared his thoughts with me, he also never forgot to remind me to help myself to all the delights that had been set out in front of me.
Zygmunt Bauman talked about life and the attempts to shape it that are consistently thwarted by fate; he spoke also about the effort to remain, amid all this, someone who can look at himself in the mirror. His hope for me, he said, grasping both my hands as he bade me farewell, was that I would live to be as old as him, because every age, despite all its tribulations, has its beauty.
Zygmunt Bauman died on 9 January 2017 at his home in Leeds.
These final conversations with Bauman will, I hope, be taken up and continued by the reader with other people and in other places.
Peter Haffner, January 2017
Note
1 1 Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London: Orion Books, 1992), p. 3.
Love and Gender Choosing a partner: why we are losing the capacity to love
Let us begin with the most important thing: love. You say that we are losing the capacity to love. What brings you to that conclusion?
The trend of looking for partners on the internet follows the trend towards internet shopping. I myself do not like to go to shops; most things, such as books, films, clothes, I buy online. If you want a new jacket, the website of the online shop shows you a catalogue. If you are looking for a new partner, the dating website also shows you a catalogue. The pattern of relationships between customer and commodity becomes the pattern of relationships between human beings.
How is this different from earlier times, when you met your future life companion at the village fete or, if you lived in a city, at a ball? There were personal preferences involved in that as well, weren’t there?
For people who are shy, the internet is certainly helpful. They do not have to worry about blushing when they approach a woman. It is easier for them to make a connection; they are less inhibited. But online dating is about attempting to define the partner’s properties in accordance with one’s own desires. The partner is chosen according to hair colour, height, build, chest measurement, age, and their interests, hobbies, preferences and aversions. This is based on the idea that the object of love can be assembled out of a number of measurable physical and social properties. We lose sight of the decisive factor: the human person.
But even if one defines one’s ‘type’ in this way, isn’t it the case that everything changes as soon as one meets the actual person? That person, after all, is much more than the sum of such external properties.
The danger is that the form of human relationships assumes the form of the relationship one has towards the objects of daily use. I do not vow to be faithful to a chair – why should I vow that I shall keep this as my chair until my dying day? If I do not like it any longer, I buy a new one. This is not a conscious process, but we learn to see the world and human beings in this way. What happens when we meet someone who is more attractive? It is like the case of the Barbie doll: once a new version is on the market, the old one is exchanged for it.
You mean, we separate prematurely?
We enter into a relationship because we expect satisfaction from it. If we feel that another person will give us more satisfaction, we end the current relationship and begin a new one. The beginning of a relationship requires an agreement between two people; ending it only takes one person. This means that both partners live in constant fear of being abandoned, of being discarded like a jacket that has fallen out of fashion.
Well, that is part of the nature of any agreement.
Sure. But in earlier times it was almost impossible to break off a relationship, even if it was not satisfying. Divorce was difficult, and alternatives to marriage practically non-existent. You suffered, yet you stayed together.
And why would the freedom to separate be worse than the compulsion to stay together and be unhappy?
You gain something but also lose something. You have more freedom, but you suffer from the fact that your partner also has more freedom. This leads to a life in which relationships and partnerships are formed on the model of hire purchase. Someone who can leave ties behind does not need to make an effort to preserve them. Human beings are only considered valuable as long as they provide satisfaction. This is based on the belief that lasting ties get in the way of the quest for happiness.
And that, as you say in Liquid Love, your book on friendship and relationships, is erroneous.
It is the problem of ‘liquid love’. In turbulent times, you need friends and partners who do not let you down, who are there for you when you need them. The desire for stability is important in life. The 16-billion-dollar valuation for Facebook is based on that need not to be alone. But, at the same time, we dread the commitment of becoming involved with someone and getting tied down. The fear is that of missing out on something. You want a safe harbour, but at the same time you want to have a free hand.
For sixty-one years you were married to Janina Lewinson, who died in 2009. In her memoir, A Dream of Belonging, she writes that, after your first encounter, you never left her side. Each time, you exclaimed ‘what a happy coincidence’ it was that you had to go where she wanted to go! And when she told you that she was pregnant, you danced in the street and kissed her – while wearing your Polish Army captain’s uniform, which caused something of a stir. Even after decades of marriage, Janina writes, you still sent her love letters. What constitutes true love?
When I saw Janina, I knew at once that I did not need to look further. It was love at first sight. Within nine days I had proposed to her. True love is that elusive but overwhelming joy of the ‘I and thou’, being there for one another, becoming one, the joy of making a difference in something that is important not only to you. To be needed, or even perhaps irreplaceable, is an exhilarating feeling. It is difficult to achieve. And it is unattainable if you remain in the solitude of the egotist who is only interested in himself.
Love demands sacrifice, then.
If the nature of love consists in the inclination always to stand by the object of your love, to support it, to encourage and praise it, then a lover must be prepared to put self-interest in second place, behind the loved one – must be prepared to consider his or her own happiness as a side-issue, a side-effect of the happiness of the other. To use the Greek poet Lucian’s words, the beloved is the one to whom one ‘pledges one’s fate’. Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, within a loving relationship, altruism and egotism are not irreconcilable opposites. They unite, amalgamate and finally can no longer be distinguished or separated from each other.
The American writer Colette Dowling dubbed women’s fear of independence the ‘Cinderella complex’. She calls the yearning for security, warmth and being-cared-for a ‘dangerous emotion’ and urges her fellow women not to deprive themselves of their freedom. Where do you disagree with this admonition?
Dowling warned against the impulse to care for others and thus to lose the possibility of jumping, at will, on the latest bandwagon. It is typical of the private