“Dynamic theorizing” of Z. Bauman: critical optics or search of vital strategy?

Abstract

Achievements of modern science strike with the scope and opportunities which open prospects of transformation of human civilization in a new social and technological way. However the scientific gains which are enormously expanding the possibilities of human at the same time put humanity in the face of risks and threats that have not existed before. Designing of complete system of views about the general properties of the world surrounding society started the restructuring of science connected with integrating natural, social and humanitarian sciences, having strengthened positions of a social and humanitarian discourse. It becomes more and more obvious that social and humanitarian knowledge is the peculiar navigator helping to be guided with social reality: they are capable to offer an explanation, or, at least, to design model for the best organization of the separate facts and phenomena, for their further interpretation. However the concepts designed today by the scientists reflecting on modern society with it's paradoxes, gaps and synthesis are in difficult relations among themselves, competing for domination as the types of social and philosophical theorizing and thinking. Do the scientific discussions satisfy only the cognitive needs of the scientists that lead to such model of the scientific research that works only for itself and that, using the trope of H.Hesse, can be called “The Glass Bead Game”? Or is this a new stage of vision into the essence of the social processes when the theoretical models that answer the requirements of the expert scientific theories and including the prognostic function are made? An attempt to solve this elaborate question is made by the authors on the basis of the research on the relations between theoretical and methodological guidelines embedded in the main principles of postmodernism as a mentality, a reflexive postmodern, and the views of professor Z. Bauman. Zigmund Bauman is one of the most distinguished thinkers of the present who has accumulated in his works the key changes that happened to the society in the last decades, and who has in the peculiar interlacement of metaphors and meanings created the concepts with image names like “individualized society”, “liquid modernity”, “collateral damage”. Through the optics of theoretical heritage of professor Z. Bauman one can see the origins of the formation of the new standards of scientific thinking that differ greatly from those that are connected with the social and cultural practices of the postmodern epoch. Bauman attempts in his works to solve one of the most important problems of the modern science – to work out the life strategy of the society development the potential of which can provide the design of the social reality of the future.