Cosmopolitanism and the circle of reason

Political Theory

Volumn 28, Issue 5, 2000, Pages 619-639

  Mehta, Pratap Bhanu ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0034340761     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591700028005003     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1979), 382.
2. One irony is that the two great cosmopolitans that Martha Nussbaum celebrates, Seneca and Kant, had rather surprising views on the matter. For Seneca, to be echoed by Pascal later, "The greatest contribution to human peace would be for the seas to be closed of." Quoted in James Romm, The Edges of Earth in Ancient Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Kant, following Pufendorf, argued that the Chinese were perfectly within their rights to close off contacts with Europeans. For interesting and critical reflections on a range of cosmopolitanisms, see Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
3. One irony is that the two great cosmopolitans that Martha Nussbaum celebrates, Seneca and Kant, had rather surprising views on the matter. For Seneca, to be echoed by Pascal later, "The greatest contribution to human peace would be for the seas to be closed of." Quoted in James Romm, The Edges of Earth in Ancient Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Kant, following Pufendorf, argued that the Chinese were perfectly within their rights to close off contacts with Europeans. For interesting and critical reflections on a range of cosmopolitanisms, see Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
4. Roger Scruton, A Dictionary of Political Thought (London: Macmillan, 1980), 100.
5. Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man (London: Unwin, 1961).
6. Two examples of cosmopolitanism as a way of being in the world - rather than an account of our moral obligations - are Jeremy Waldron, "Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative, "in The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. Will Kymlicka (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 93-122; Anthony Appiah, "Cosmopolitan Patriots, "in Cosmopolitics, ed. Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 98-117. The latter is strikingly panglossian in that it conveys no sense of the conflicts between special attachments and cosmopolitan obligations.
7. Two examples of cosmopolitanism as a way of being in the world - rather than an account of our moral obligations - are Jeremy Waldron, "Minority Cultures and the Cosmopolitan Alternative, "in The Rights of Minority Cultures, ed. Will Kymlicka (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1995), 93-122; Anthony Appiah, "Cosmopolitan Patriots, "in Cosmopolitics, ed. Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 98-117. The latter is strikingly panglossian in that it conveys no sense of the conflicts between special attachments and cosmopolitan obligations.
8. Martha Nussbaum, in "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism, "in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston: Beacon, 1996), is the most radical recent example.
9. Immanuel Kant, "On the Common Saying: This May be True in Theory but Does Not Apply in Practice, '" in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
10. This characterization is based on a large number of sources: the principal ones are David Hollinger, Post Ethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and many of the pieces contained in Cosmopolitics. I have obviously not done justice to subtle differences of nuance among these writers.
11. This characterization is based on a large number of sources: the principal ones are David Hollinger, Post Ethnic America (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and many of the pieces contained in Cosmopolitics. I have obviously not done justice to subtle differences of nuance among these writers.
12. Hollinger, Post Ethnic America, 84.
13. The differences between the new cosmopolitanism and universalism are well articulated along the lines suggested here in Amanda Anderson, "Cosmopolitanism, Universalism and the Divided Legacies of Modernity, "in Cosmopolitics, 265-90.
14. Arjun Appadurai, "Citizens and Citizenship, "Public Culture 8 (1996): 187-204.
15. Clifford Geertz, "The Uses of Diversity, "Michigan Quarterly 25, no. 1 (1987): 112.
16. Hollinger, Post Ethnic America, 44. Hollinger writes, "The national community of the United States mediates more directly than most other national communities do between the species and the ethno-racial varieties of mankind."
17. It is no accident that writers like Hollinger who prefer the label cosmopolitan endorse Seyla Benhabib's model of interactive universalism. Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self (New York: Routledge, 1992): Interactive universalism acknowledges the plurality of modes of being human, and differences amongst humans, without endorsing all these pluralities and differences as morally and politically valid. While agreeing that normative disputes can be settled rationally, and that fairness, reciprocity and some procedure of universalizability are constituents, that is necessary conditions of the moral standpoint, interactive universalism regards difference as the staring point for reflection and action. (p. 153) The crucial indeterminacy in this ideal is who withholds endorsement in the case of disagreement.
18. Michel de Montaigne, "Of Cripples, "in Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971), 784.
19. Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1981), 342-43.
20. See most accessibly, Waldron, "Minority Cultures."
21. The unintelligibility issue vexed British anthropology and philosophy a good deal. Two prominent collections that give a flavor of the debate are Bryan Wilson, ed., Rationality (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1972); and Steven Lukes and Martin Hollis, eds. Rationality and Relativism (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1985).
22. The unintelligibility issue vexed British anthropology and philosophy a good deal. Two prominent collections that give a flavor of the debate are Bryan Wilson, ed., Rationality (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1972); and Steven Lukes and Martin Hollis, eds. Rationality and Relativism (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1985).
23. I should perhaps clarify that these two examples will not argue a case for what laws should be. What should be enacted as law requires more complex considerations than can be given here. The consideration for marriage given here by itself may not, even on its own terms, be sufficient to underwrite a legal position. This interpretation might be supplemented with the realization that human beings are in a fallen state and in that state are liable to extract an inordinately high cost from those with whom they live in close proximity if their more mundane expectations are not fulfilled. To prevent conditions from arising in which this cost - in the form of enduing abuse, for example - becomes more likely, the conditions of exit might be made less restrictive. This might allow for more liberal divorce laws but one whose rationale is not to place iterative choice as a central value of that institution. For an argument in the same spirit, see also Samuel Fleischakev, An Ethics of Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
24. For an accessible account of this practice, see C. K. Chapple, Nonviolence to Animals, Earth and Self in Asian Traditions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), chap. 6.
25. Paul Ricouer, History and Truth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 278.
26. Waldron, "Minority Cultures, "108. Todorov's (no enemy of cosmopolitanism) reflections might be appropriate here. In Conquest of America (New York: Harper Row, 1985), he writes, Exile is fruitful if one belongs to both cultures at once, without identifying itself with either; but if a whole society consists of exiles, the dialogue of culture ceases: it is replaced by eclecticism and comparitivism, by the capacity to love everything a little, of flaccidly sympathizing with each option without embracing any. Heterology, which makes the difference of voices heard in necessary; polylogy in insipid. (p. 250)
27. Waldron, "Minority Cultures, "108. Todorov's (no enemy of cosmopolitanism) reflections might be appropriate here. In Conquest of America (New York: Harper Row, 1985), he writes, Exile is fruitful if one belongs to both cultures at once, without identifying itself with either; but if a whole society consists of exiles, the dialogue of culture ceases: it is replaced by eclecticism and comparitivism, by the capacity to love everything a little, of flaccidly sympathizing with each option without embracing any. Heterology, which makes the difference of voices heard in necessary; polylogy in insipid. (p. 250)
28. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, The Gandhi-Tagore Controversy (Ahmadabad, India: Navjivan, 1953), 27.
29. Jurgen Habermas, "Remarks on Legitimation, "Philosophy and Social Criticism 24, no. 2/3 (1998): 162. This thought can be frequently encountered not just in the writings of Habermas but in many others and may still be part of the West's self-perception.
30. Claude Levi-Strauss, "Cosmopolitanism and Schizophrenia, "in The View from Afar (New York: Basic Books, 1974).
31. I am aware, thanks in part to Bernard Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), of the pitfalls of using "epochal" terms like the "Enlightenment." But I hope the complications of that term have no bearing on the matter being discussed here.
32. The key thought here is the following passage from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp-Smith (London: Macmillan, 1932): Reason must in all its undertakings subject itself to criticism; should it limit freedom of criticism by any prohibitions, it must harm itself, drawing upon itself a damaging suspicion. Nothing is so important through its usefulness, nothing so sacred, that it may be exempt from this searching examination, which knows no respect for persons. For reason has no dictatorial authority; its verdict is simply the agreement of free citizens. (A739/B767)
33. Albrecht Wellmer had suggested a similar objection to Habermas in his The Persistence of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).
34. I am not here taking a position that there could be no reasons that are not universally shared. McIntyre seems sometimes almost to suggest that a reason could not be a reason if it were universally shared. Here, I am interested in only those reasons that are not. For only these pose a challenge for the cosmopolitan call to be attentive to difference.
35. For a characteristically cogent reminder of how this works, see Charles Taylor, "Leading a Life, "in Incommensurability, Incomparability and Practical Reason, ed. Ruth Chang (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 173.
36. Bruce Robbins, Secular Vocation (London: Verso, 1993), 211.
37. Perhaps I should clarify what I mean through some examples. For instance, Hindu nationalism, in its contemporary incarnation, has almost nothing to say about a distinctive Hindu way of life, about Hinduism as a site of alternative universalities or ethical traditions, and so forth. It simply has an obsession with "unity, "which is in the service of the modern nation-state and the claim, following the venerable pedigree of John Stuart Mill, that nation-states need a common culture. Most "identity" politics so-called, especially those not dealing with issues of gender and sexuality, also do not defend an alternative way of life. It is difficult to think of Québécois or Serb nationalism and doing that. Movements like the Taliban, on the face of it, are defending a way of life. But it is not clear that what they defend is an ongoing way of life of the Afghan people rather than something invented for purposes of doctrinal purity.
38. E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies: Chapters in the Anthropography of Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 202.
39. Cornelius Castoriadis, quoted in M. V. Moses, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3.
40. For a sampling of the debate on this, see Frederick Buell's very useful National Culture and the New Global System (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), chaps. 7-12; Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections (London: Routledge, 1996).
41. For a sampling of the debate on this, see Frederick Buell's very useful National Culture and the New Global System (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), chaps. 7-12; Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections (London: Routledge, 1996).
42. Geertz, "The Uses of Diversity."