Page - 14 - in Reflective Cosmopolitanism - Educating towards inclusive communities through Philosophical Enquiry

14 REfLECTIvE COsMOPOLITANIsM The concept of cosmopolitanism: The development of cosmopolitanism as an idea. Cosmopolitanism has a long history dating back to Antiquity. The word itself comes from the Greek Kosmopolites, attributed to Diogenes of Sinope who described himself as a ‘citizen of the cosmos’. In this early Western context, cosmopolitanism was associated with two aspects – a claim of freedom (free from the shackles of local cultural and political allegiances) and the embracing of a world beyond one’s local sphere of engagement. Both these dimensions have remained as strands in the Western tradition of cosmopolitanism. One hundred years later, in the 3rd century BCE, the Stoics developed a form of cosmopolitanism that was essentially po- litical. Rather than focusing only on the rejection of one’s attachment to community, the Stoics emphasized our moral obligation to reconstruct community according to cosmopolitan prin- ciples – a reconstruction of community based not on local traditions and allegiances, but on moral virtues and a love of humanity.1 Here, the emphasis was on what lies in common across all of humanity. This aspect of cosmopolitanism blossomed during the Enlightenment, taking the form of universalism and including the 1789 “Declaration of Human Rights” and Kant’s idea of a ‘league of Nations’.2 According to the enlightenment version of cosmopolitanism, we have obligations to a global community beyond our local allegiances, because we are all human and our lives are inter-connected in multiple ways. In the words of Voltaire: “Fed by the products of their soil, dressed in their fabrics… why would we neglect to understand the mind of these nations, among whom European traders have travelled ever since they could find a way to get to them?”.3 18th century cosmopolitanism took seriously: “the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitans know, and there is much to learn from the differences”.4 Over this long history and leading up to today, different versions of cosmopolitanism have distinguished between the sheer recognition of human difference and our moral obligation toward the other in different ways. With the linguistic turn, and its critique of universalism, new ways of constructing the relationship between local and global, particular and universal, emerged. These methods sought to start from the recognition of diversity and situatedness. New conceptions of cosmopolitanism began to emerge that sought to focus on how we might construct a moral social sphere (local and global community) that gave full recognition to human distinctiveness and diversity. Moving beyond a multicultural conception of cosmopolitanism expressed as a hermeneutic attentiveness to the Other (one that emphasizes dialogue between cultures, empathetic under- standing of the Other and recognition of a human condition shared across cultures), contem- porary forms of critical cosmopolitanism emphasize the way in which the self is transformed through an encounter with the Other. The moral obligation to embrace human difference because it leads to an ‘enrichment’ of our understanding of the human (multiculturalism as hermeneutic attentiveness) now becomes entwined with the idea that we have a moral obligation to engage in a reflective critique of the self, and that this is made possible through our encounter with the Other. This also introduces an essentially evaluative component to cosmopolitan thinking. 1 See Gerald Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 20- 21 and Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition, 2001. 2 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York, W. W. Norton & Com- pany, 2006, p. xiv. 3 Quoted in Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, p. xv. 4 Ibid