The Ethics Of Caress--Discourse On Zygmunt Bauman' Ethics From His Research Of Love

Love is a basic category of moral relationship, which fully embodies the relationship between I and the other. The ambivalence of love is that, love lives on alterity which love wishes to break, but the being of love is just the process of breaking the alterity. In love relationships, modern society and postmodern sociey take ambivalence as a disease, and try to cure it through the strategies of fixing and floating, but eventually lead love to death. Through social application of Levinas'philosophy of the Other, Bauman develops his own ethics of caress which assigns the priority to the Other and recognizes the absolute alterity of the Other in love relationship. In the framework of modernity and postmodernity, from a microcosmic view or taking Bauman'research on love as an entrance, the paper tries to systematically analyse Bauman'ethical thinking. The paper has four parts.The First Part:Introduction.The Second Part:First, interpreting the modern ethical dilemma whoes main characteristics are the loss of individual's autonomy and the indifference to the Other under the rule of reason; Besides, analysing especially the Holocaust as a representation of the modern ethical dilemma; Next, describing the moral state of postmodern society:individual facing the moral dilemmas and the aesthetic tendency of postmodern moral space; Finally, generally orienting Bauman's ethics:standing in the position of postmodern ethics, Bauman puts the Other at the center of moral self, and gives the supreme priority to the Other.The Third Part:describing the internal mechanism of Bauman'ethics of caress in detail. First, analysing the asymmetric relationship in which the Other is so much prior to me; Second, we could find the prototype of such an asymmetric relationship in Levinas'phenomenonal analysis on "Eros" and "caress". In the moral metaphor of, I and the Other is a whole, while the Other maintainis his alterity and mystery; Finally, we analyze Bauman' interpretation of the two plights of love:the ambivalence of love, the dialectics of love and domination.The Tourth Part:First, analysing the two solutions to the plight of love (fixation and floation) and their social consequences by the modern and postmodern society, which is reciprocal to the Second Part of the modern ethical dilemma and the postmodern moral state; Then, analysing Bauman's own position on the solution about the plight of love and his political aspirations; Finally, giving a general assessment to Bauman' ethics:Bauman' advocation for the concern to the Other does not necessarily herald the arrival of a better world, but at least provide opportunities for the arrival of a better world.