Alternatives to the Culture of Consumerism, or the Charm of Skeptical Solitude

Abstract

The paper focuses on the elaboration of an opposition to the consumer commodity market which is recognised as a sovereign by British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. For Bauman, consumerism is an archetype of loneliness, and besides the question of alternative to consumerism, there shows up the question of communication. Odo Marquard insists that a modern man experiences inauthentic loneliness and, in fact, he lost an ability to be alone in a positive sense. Loneliness gives us a perfect distance for a sober evaluation of reality and ourselves. In this article skeptical loneliness, among other forms of positive loneliness, is considered as freedom from all dogmas and the wishes of consumers, and as an opposition to a sovereign in the form of the consumer commodity market.