Cosmopolitanism and Place

by Jessica Wahman (Editor), José M. Medina (Editor), John J. Stuhr (Editor)

Overview

Addressing perspectives about who "we" are, the importance of place and home, and the many differences that still separate individuals, this volume reimagines cosmopolitanism in light of our differences, including the different places we all inhabit and the many places where we do not feel at home. Beginning with the two-part recognition that the world is a smaller place and that it is indeed many worlds, Cosmopolitanism and Place critically explores what it means to assert that all people are citizens of the world, everywhere in the world, as well as persons bounded by a universal and shared morality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253030337
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	08/28/2017
Series:	American Philosophy
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	321
Sales rank:	80,178
File size:	915 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jessica Wahman is Visiting Research Scholar at Cornell University.

José M. Medina is Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

John J. Stuhr is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and American Studies at Emory University.

Vincent Colapietro is Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy and African American Studies at Penn State University. His publications include Fateful Shapes of Human Freedom: John William Miller&the Crises of Modernity.

Josep E. Corbi is a philosophy professor in the Department of Metaphysics and Theory of Knowledge at the University of Valencia. His most recent book is Morality, Self-Knowledge, and Human Suffering: An Essay on the Loss of the World.

Megan Craig is a painter and Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Master's Program in philosophy and art at Stony Brook University. She is author of Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology (IUP, 2010).

Jeff Edmonds is Academic Dean and Dean of the Freshman and Senior Classes at the University School of Nashville. He is the author of The Logic of Long Distance: Connecting Running and Philosophy.

Cynthia Gayman is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Philosophy at Murray State University.

Jennifer L. Hansen is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of the First Year at St. Lawrence University.

Robert E. Innis is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. His publications include Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense: Language, Perception, Technics.

Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at California State University, Bakersfield. Her most recent book is Josiah Royce: In Focus (IUP, 2008).

William S. Lewis is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Skidmore College. His publications include Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism.

John Lysaker is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Emory University. He is author of After Emerson (IUP, 2017).

Noëlle McAfee is Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. Her most recent book is Democracy and the Political Unconscious.

Jose M. Medina is Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. His books include The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations.

Juan Carlos Pereda Failache is Professor of Philosophy at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico Instituto de Investigaciones Filosoficas.

John J. Stuhr is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and American Studies at Emory University. His most recent book is Pragmatic Fashions: Pluralism, Democracy, Relativism, and the Absurd (IUP, 2015).

Erin C. Tarver is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Oxford College of Emory University. Her publications include (co-edited with Shannon Sullivan) Feminist Interpretations of William James.

Nancy Tuana is the Class of 1949 Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Penn State University. Her publications include Women and the History of Philosophy.

Jessica Wahman is currently Visiting Research Scholar at Cornell University. She is author of Narrative Naturalism: An Alternative Framework for Philosophy of Mind.

Jessica Wahman is Visiting Research Scholar at Cornell University.

José M. Medina is Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.

John J. Stuhr is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and American Studies at Emory University.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Déjà Vu All Over Again?

The Challenge of Cosmopolitanism

John Lysaker

At one time, let's say 1990, it seemed as if relational ontologies marked a significant advance for those trying to think past the limits of liberal political theory and the more general posture of the modern subject. Appreciating the interconnectedness of all things, and thus the dependency of any given thing, was taken to have more or less clear ethical-political implications, the kind that should lead to a less violent, even a more cooperative, world. The thought was that reified ideologies lead liberal automata to operate in ahistorical silos, producing power and accumulating capital without a feel for the karmic havoc they wreaked on others, the planet, future generations, and eventually themselves. While I was and remain a proponent of such ontologies, even then I felt déjà vu all over again. How often will we reinterpret the world in order to change it? Yes, the world is a web of relations, but violence and exploitation and not really giving a shit are all relations, and no less so than a kiss, a loan, or a high five (all of which can go awry, by the way).

Now, I don't think the problem — of how to relate — goes away if we realize that our being-in-the-world is oriented by more than propositional attitudes, that is, if we do not only think about our relations in terms of beliefs and their assertoric content but also acknowledge how affect, the unconscious, cultural semiosis, ecology, what have you impacts those relations. Those sites render our relations more determinate, and thus inquiry into them enriches self-knowledge, but multiplying and deepening the number and manner of our relations, and developing insights into their currents, still requires us to sort, evaluate, and commit to particular ways of being-in-the-relating. Said even less temperately, relate all you want, and in whatever way you want, (a) such insights won't transform us into relational beings since relations already go all the way down, and thus (b) there is no eluding questions concerning which kinds of relations merit our allegiance, which our meliorating power, and which our aversion, even our active resistance.

Not that the character of our relations might not change, thus generating anew the question of how best to empower or meliorate those relations in their specificity. I suppose that at certain times it was meaningful, possibly even prudent, to think of one's politics and economics as outside global orders. House, village, valley, from sea to shining sea, multiple eco-geo-political forces help shape our polities and delimit their horizons, including those that concern us and them, namely, who we mean when we say we. But that seems like a long time ago. Global culture is ubiquitous. Markets as well as the rule (and misrule) of law are full of objects and events, even persons, that can easily serve as symbols of how what once was far is now next door and how the shirt on my back has traveled the world. And as most everyone knows who wants to know, the planet, at an ecosystemic level, is caught in (and impacting) the currents of what we might term such eco-political orders, thereby indicating that we always should think about our "houses" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), and production more generally, at the intersection of economies and ecologies.

But how does one order such a web of nested relations? Because lack of charity also should begin at home, "the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people," namely, the United States (to recall a line from Washington's inaugural address), still struggles to facilitate life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, particularly if one sets the United States into a global context. As Habermas has observed, the unilateral invasion of Iraq made it difficult to regard the United States as a "guarantor of international rights" or as a leading proponent of the rule of law in international arenas. One has to wonder, however, whether the invasion of Iraq was the decisive blow. Since World War II, the United States repeatedly underwrote coups of democratically elected governments, including Iran in 1953, the Dominican Republic in 1963, and Chile in 1973, to name relatively uncontroversial examples.

Domestically the United States continues to face intensified objections to a perceived usurpation of civil society and the rule of law by corporate wealth and interests. One didn't need to be a part of the Occupy Movement to appreciate the disparity currently between 99 percent of the nation and the so-called 1 Percent, who, according to research summarized by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, took in two-thirds of the "nation's total income gains from 2002 to 2007," and enjoyed a "larger share of income [also in 2007] ... than at any time since 1928." But appreciate is the wrong word. Such concentrations are troubling. For one, concentrations of wealth, particularly when they persist across generations, threaten equality of opportunity given that greater socioeconomic status (which, while not reducible to wealth, is nevertheless heavily influenced by wealth) correlates with greater access to education, medical, and legal resources, as well as greater freedom from crime and pollution. Moreover, profound disparities in wealth allow the 1 Percent to wield enormous political influence. Super PACs, for example (political action committees), can bankroll candidates with potentially unlimited funds, thereby rendering the "one person one vote" conception of democratic law formation a de facto empty slogan in a time of media-driven will formation. In short, if one considers domestic and international arenas, the United States no longer appears to embody the kind of regime that might orient those seeking to create, maintain, or reconstruct democratic legal orders.

These are disorienting times. And one doesn't find much footing if one imagines a political future based on the nation-state, even though, at the level of political structure, the nation-state remains the principal arena where positive law is debated, written, executed, and reviewed. But, while the nation-state remains a legal, economic, and militarized form that influences the fate of billions of persons, concentrations of global capital likewise influence the fate of billions, and in ways that are irreducible to the policies of nation-states even as these concentrations profoundly shape the policies of nation-states. Moreover, global economies generate a host of externalities, such as global warming, that impact far more than contracted partners. To gain a feel for the scope of global capital, consider that there are well over two thousand multinational US corporations, each of which "holds at least a 10% direct ownership stake in at least one foreign business enterprise." There are also numerous other companies that simply set up shop around the world, either directly or through subcontracted labor. Procter & Gamble, for example, the world's largest consumer products maker, has operations in more than 90 countries and sales in more than 150.

Note that global capital does not only flow out of the United States. Foreign corporations now own companies once inseparable from America's global image. InBev, a company formed in 2004 when the Belgian company Interbrew merged with the Brazilian company AmBev, bought Anheuser-Busch in 2008. The current company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, is the home of brands like Budweiser, Stella Artois, Becks, and Bass. Even in so-called first-world countries, one cannot presume, therefore, that the commercial forces constituting a nation's economic infrastructure are thoroughly or even principally beholden to that nation's legal structure or to its prevailing cultural self-understanding.

I underscore the porous, malleable nature of nation-states because our political present is uncertain at levels that exceed de facto political orders. The flow of capital profoundly influences global fates, and its migrations are difficult if not, at least for the present, impossible to fathom. It is not only our political imagination on the ropes, therefore. Those processes by which material needs are met (and often generated) have also fallen into question. It seems plain as day, I think, that we find ourselves lacking a concrete feel for vital political futures.

In such a bewildering context, one can understand the desire to champion cosmopolitanism. The world of nation-states (as well as those peoples and persons without states) is enmeshed in a dynamic economic system that binds the fates of agents who live at great geographical and cultural distances from one another. A basic commitment to democracy (which underwrites the concerns just expressed) should lead one, therefore, to something like the following: all lives that are subjects in and subject to the emerging global order should have some say in the formation of that order. "No globalization without representation!" the pamphlet might begin. If this intuition is sound, it seems that the present needs a workable conception of the "citizen of the world" that articulates rights, duties, and obligations shared by all who are caught up in collective actions that deny representation to so many directly and profoundly affected by those actions.

I feel the intuitive tug of cosmopolitan discourse, but I have my worries as well. I thus want to consider, in a general and preliminary way, some of the challenges that face cosmopolitan efforts to provide something like a conception of global citizenship, if not an outright global political order. Of course, such approaches are multiform. For some, cosmopolitanism entails a commitment to global justice pursuable through manifold means. Believing that the fate of persons hinges in large measure on their place in global relations whose character derives from more than nation-state legislation, and/or sharing the Rawls-inspired belief that "country of origin" is morally irrelevant with regard to principles of distributive justice, many seek principles and institutions that secure global access to primary goods and protections: for example, Anthony Appiah, Charles Beitz, Simon Caney, and Martha Nussbaum. Other cosmopolitans like Jürgen Habermas, inspired by the European Union and Kant's conception of perpetual peace, seek a constitutionally based, international legal order authorized to regulate how nation-states engage one another and other international actors like multinational corporations and NGOs. Convinced that the rule of law never fulfills its aims, others such as Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida seek an interruptive sense of hospitality toward the purportedly strange or alien, one that draws us past legal compliance into a sociality of shared alterity or vulnerability in that very sharing. Finally, a fourth group containing the likes of Jeremy Waldron conceives of cosmopolitanism as an ethos committed to proactive engagements with a wide range of cultural norms in the thought that each may very well enrich lives conceived as ongoing experiments in personal and collective identity.

I am not surprised to encounter a vast range of views under the figure of a citizen of the world. And yet, despite these differences, certain historical sources, phrases, and concepts recur among cosmopolitans: (a) Diogenes the Cynic and his Stoic heirs, each of whom identifies as a "citizen of the cosmos"; (b) Kant and the "right of hospitality"; and (c) Terrence's The Self-Tormentor, which sometimes functions, at least rhetorically, to establish continuity among classical and mod- ern cosmopolitanism.

In what follows, I reflect on (a) and (c). Although both derive from classical cosmopolitanism, the Cynic-Stoic roots of cosmopolitanism remain instructive for a politics hoping to address and inform global political phenomena beyond the figure of the nation-state. They are instructive because they bear with them certain topoi of concern that I cannot imagine any version of cosmopolitanism not addressing. And yet, those topoi seem conspicuously absent in much of the discourses of contemporary cosmopolitanism. I wish to recall them, therefore (classical discussions and their topoi), to clarify what I take to be some challenges facing contemporary cosmopolitanism. Whether it can meet those challenges is a matter I do not pursue here, but I go as far as to argue that these challenges cannot be met if cosmopolitanism maintains a Rawlsian disregard for social theory.

In identifying as a kosmopolitês, a "citizen of the cosmos," Diogenes and Aurelius situate themselves within a cosmic order that purportedly governs nature in its manifold appearing. On their view, rational laws, divine in origin, regulate nature, and thus each of us is a "citizen" in virtue of living under these laws. (This is why, at least when referring to classical cosmopolitanism, we should speak of the "citizen of the cosmos" and not the "citizen of the world.") Cynic and Stoic cosmopolitans are able, therefore, to conceive of a morally thick, universal human community. The thought runs something like this. Humans are human through their access to the logos, what we might term rational speech or the ability to give an account of oneself and one's world. Importantly, having logos involves more than having learned speech-making techniques. It involves some access to the genuine order of things, including the soul, the city, and a world of cities, as well as a grasp of one's obligation to live in accord with those orders, which is why I offer the phrase rational speech as a nonliteral translation for logos. But "access" and "grasp" probably say too little. What is really required is the concrete capacity to learn about, articulate, and act on one's obligations, a set of capacities that, at least in classical philosophy, one associates with ethos or character.

Because logos is divine, all beings who access it share in divinity and thereby merit a certain degree and kind of respect and concern that local custom or rule cannot negate. That said, the concrete commitments of cosmic concern may move in multiple directions. But wherever it leads, it runs through the logos and thus through rational speech. And this is nowhere more evident than in Terence's The Self-Tormentor (§139–40). Chremes, a noble, comes upon another noble, Menedemus, who is toiling in the latter's own field. Chremes finds this astounding and asks why. Menedemus replies, peevishly: "Have you so much leisure, Chremes, from your own affairs, that you can attend to those of others — those which don't concern you?" Chremes then delivers a thought that has captivated cosmopolitans of many stripes: "I am a man, and nothing that concerns a man do I deem a matter of indifference to me." I have employed the Project Guttenberg translation because it clarifies, I think, what it means to say, "nothing human is alien to me," which is a common gloss. The claim is not simply that one human can recognize another as "human," but that each is bound in a community of mutual concern, that the affairs of another are one's own, and vice versa. But we should not forget that such concern is bound to the logos, which is why Chremes continues: "Suppose that I wish either to advise you in this matter, or to be informed myself: if what you do is right, that I may do the same; if it is not, then that I may dissuade you." Chremes's opening question is thus not improper, as one might infer from Menedemus's reply, which effectively says, "Mind your business." In fact, it is the most proper, for it inquires after the good, and thus fulfills an obligation that Chremes has to himself and to Menedemus: to discover what natural law requires of human beings at every turn.

In a way, the manner in which Chremes engages Menedemus embodies the political ethos of classical cosmopolitanism. Divine law operates at each corner of the cosmos, thus offering a sense of the whole — the law-governed cosmos — as well as an anthropology by way of the category "citizen," which locates us in the cosmic order. Humans purportedly share in divine reason and thus stand closer to the gods than do other animals. Moreover, all persons share this location, and thus humans share a certain nature or "humanity," that is, we are anthropoi. But the designation is not merely descriptive; the divinity of the logos instantiates a moral psychology (or ethics) — the soul should be governed by logos, by the best accounts that can be given for those activities that are voluntary.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Section I: Reconstructing Cosmopolitan Ideals
Introduction / Jessica Wahman
1. Déjà Vu All Over Again?: The Challenge of Cosmopolitanism / John Lysaker
2. Home, Hospitality, and the Cosmopolitan Address / Noëlle McAfee
3. Cultural Heritages and Universal Principles / Juan Carlos Pereda Failache
4. Not Black or White but Chocolate Brown: Reframing Issues / Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley
5. Pragmatism and the Challenge of a Cosmopolitan Aesthetics: Framing the Issues / Robert E. Innis

Section II: Taking Place Seriously
Introduction / José Medina
6. Toward a Politics of Co-Habitation: "Dwelling" in the Manner of Wayfarers / Vincent Colapietro
7. Cosmopolitan Ignorance and "Not Knowing Your Place" / José Medina
8. America and Cosmopolitan Responsibility: Some Thoughts on an Itinerant Duty / Jeff Edmonds
9. Loss of Place / Megan Craig
10. The Loss of Confidence in the World / Josep E. Corbí
11. Climate Change and Place: Delimiting Cosmopolitanism / Nancy Tuana

Section III: Reimaging Home and World
Introduction / John J. Stuhr
12. Citizen or Guest?: Cosmopolitanism as Homelessness / Jessica Wahman
13. Cosmopolitan Hope / Jennifer L. Hansen
14. Hospitality or Generosity?: Cosmopolitan Transactions / Cynthia Gayman
15. On Cosmopolitan Publics and Online Communities / Erin C. Tarver
16. A New "International of Decent Feelings"?: Cosmopolitanism and the Erasure of Class / William S. Lewis
17. Somewhere, Dreaming of Cosmopolitanism / John J. Stuhr

Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Eduardo Mendieta

"These essays offer many beautiful, eloquent, incisive, generative, and moving analyses of place, home, and world. They introduce some new and extremely useful terminologies: cosmopolitan hope, cosmopolitan ignorance, cosmopolitan dreaming, cosmopolitan publics, and cosmopolitan cohabitation."

editor of Bound by the City: Greek Tragedy, Sexual Difference, and the Formation of the Polis - Emily Zakin

"The essays in this rich volume challenge many of the standard cultural, moral, and political meanings of cosmopolitanism, especially those of universalism, world citizenship, and global justice."