Cosmopolitanism is an epochal challenge of our times in thought and practice. But the current discourses of it, like many discourses of our times, are primarily Euro-American and parochial. In this context, Beyond Cosmopolitanism: Towards Planetary Transformations presents us probably for the first time a globally embracing view of cosmopolitanism building upon multiple traditions of humanity. It goes beyond the dominant Eurocentric conception of cosmopolitanism which traces its roots to Greek Stoic and Kantian heritages as citizen of the world and engages itself with multiple trajectories and conceptions of being cosmopolitan in our world such as in the Indic traditions where to be cosmopolitan is to realize oneself as a member of the family of Earth—Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam and in the Chinese tradition being one and all under heaven—Tian Xia. Beyond Cosmopolitanism: Towards Planetary Transformations goes beyond East and West, North and South and offers planetary conversations about cosmopolitization, bringing together the thoughts of Confucius, Buddha, Kant, Steiner, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Habermas, Nussbaum and many others. It also presents a complex history of cosmopolitanism and its entanglement with colonialism and contemporary structures of inequality.
The volume has three parts. Part I, “Cosmopolitanism and Beyond: Alternative Pathways of Explorations and Experimentations”, begins with the chapter “Cosmopolitanism and Beyond: Towards Planetary Realizations” by Ananta Kumar Giri in which he discusses the limits of contemporary dominant conceptions of cosmopolitanism coming from scholars such as K. Anthony Appiah and Martha Nussbaum. He traces this to their confinement within a narrow lineage of cosmopolitanism starting from the Greek stoics such as Diogenes to modern and contemporary thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and Jurgen Habermas. Giri discusses multiple traditions of cosmopolitanism in histories and contemporary thinking. He discusses about the need to bring the notion of cosmopolitanism as citizen of the world and member of the family of Mother Earth together in creative, critical and transformative ways. This also finds a resonance in the contribution of Vittorio Cotesta, who presents us the perspective of Chinese thinker Tingyang for bringing the Greek concept of agora and the Confucian concept of Tian Xia—“all under sky”—together. As Cotesta tells us in this volume, “[t]he merging of these two cultural traditions may lead to institutions capable of giving peace and harmony to the world.” Bringing these three traditions—Chinese, Indian and Greek—we can simultaneously cultivate agora, all under sky and Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the whole world is a family) for realization of an expanding and concentric circle of cosmopolitanism.
In his contribution, Giri also points to the need to understand global justice movements as bearers of cosmopolitan responsibility—a theme which resonates in many other contributions of the volume. Along with the need for cultivating dialogues across borders, cultures and civilizations, and cultivating planetary conversations, Giri also urges us to realize the spiritual dimension in cosmopolitanism. The subsequent contribution of John Clammer, “Cosmopolitanism Beyond Anthropocentrism: The Ecological Self and Transcivilizational Dialogues,” resonates with this urge to go beyond the dominant conception of cosmopolitanism, especially anthropocentrism. For this, Clammer presents ecological self as a bearer of cosmopolitanism. This ecological self is based upon the realization that
it is possible and indeed imperative to formulate a notion of human identity that is based not on ‘difference’ (a notion that has pervaded much of social theory in the recent past), but on the continuity between humans and nature, a continuity that is shared by all human beings regardless of culture or nationality, and hence of a sense of planetary identity both in the sense of human existential unity and of communion with the rest of nature, with the other bioforms and other geographical, geological and atmospheric circumstances which are the context and requirements of our lives and are essential not only to our physical survival (that should be fairly obvious), but also to our psychic, aesthetic, and moral survival.
Clammer argues that the ecological self goes beyond the subject-object dichotomy of modernist self and is non-subjectivist which “creates a communal, even cosmic, sense of identity and interconnectedness that transcends the limits of language and its endless discursive formations in favour of experience which while not entirely unmediated, certainly produces a sense of non-duality rarely available through cognitive and linguistic processes.”
Clammer’s chapter is followed by Gina Brock’s “Nonlinear Belonging as a Creative Companion to Cosmopolitan Realisation: Creative Memory Work and Reimagining the Relationship Between Xenia and Hestia,” in which Brock brings us to roots of cosmopolitanism in the vision and practice of hestia which promoted open cosmopolitan belonging as different from xenia. In her words, “A hestia-centric mentality shifts the understanding of self as ‘a citizen of the world’ to a realisation of self as a member of the human family and promotes cooperation and compassion over competition and domination.” With these creative memory works and journey across traditions, we are ready to walk with the insightful reflections on cosmopolitanism offered by Piet Strydom, a deeply insightful thinker and theorist of our times. In his chapter, “Cosmopolitanism, the Cognitive Order of Modernity, and Conflicting Models of World Openness: On the Prospects of Collective Learning,” Strydom tells us: “Whereas the development of society is the objective multilevel process of the opening up and globalisation of the economic, political, social, legal and cultural forms of society, cosmopolitanism is the internally experienced sense of the openness of social relations and society which is carried by collective learning processes. However, learning depends on competition, contestation and conflict between social actors who take for granted and share the cognitive order, including the idea of cosmopolitanism, but interpret it according to different values, act upon it in terms of different norms and therefore try to realise it in contrary ways.”
Strydom insightfully charts new paths of cosmopolitanism as paths of creative learning and brings a critical social science perspective to this. Boike Rehbein, a fellow creative sociologist and philosopher, also follows this lead in the subsequent chapter, “Cosmopolitanism and Understanding in the Social Sciences.” Rehbein here strives to cultivate a new path of understanding which is required to live creatively and meaningfully in our contemporary world, what he calls existential understanding. For Rehbein, “[t]he object of existential understanding is an aspect of another human being’s life” and this “should form the core of any cosmopolitanism.” Existential understanding combines both hermeneutic understanding, where understanding deals with texts and is primarily textual, and practical understanding. Such an existential understanding involves a new hermeneutics of self, culture and the world what can be called multi-topial hermeneutics. In multi-topial hermeneutics, one moves across multiple topoi, terrains and traditions of thinking.1 The following chapters by Pohl and Röss reflect such an existential understanding and multi-topial hermeneutics as it involves border-crossing walk and mediation across traditions. Rehbein’s chapter is followed by the contribution of Karl-Heinz Pohl on the Confucian tradition of cosmopolitan ethics. For Pohl,
Confucianism has some traits that are by its very nature ‘cosmopolitan’: First of all, the Confucian concern is for ‘all under Heaven’ (tian-xia), that is, ‘to take everything under Heaven as one’s responsibility.’ This is its all inclusive scope. Second, the ‘authentic’ person, the one who has realized his or her ‘great self’ through self-cultivation, ‘can assist the transforming and nourishing powers of Heaven and Earth,’ leading to global peace—one could muse about the positive effects this teaching could have on the leaders of today’s world super-powers. And lastly, the notion of the ‘unity of Heaven and man’—interpreted by the Boston Confucianists (Tu Weiming, for example) in a contemporary way as an ecological ‘unity of nature and man’—would have far reaching implications if it could be put into political currency. Seen from this perspective, we have here a vision of a united mankind that should not make us feel uneasy anymore. One could truly call it an ethics of cosmopolitanism—not by force but by choice.
Pohl’s journey with Confucianism finds a resonance in Ulrich Röss’s walking and meditation with Rudolf Steiner and Mahatma Gandhi in search of new horizons of cosmopolitanism, spirituality and social action. In his chapter, “Cosmopolitanism, Spirituality and Social Action: Mahatma Gandhi and Rudolf Steiner,” Röss tells us how both Steiner and Gandhi bring spirituality and social action together in their works, which shows us new ways of cosmopolitan engagement with the world.
These reflections on these diverse trajectories of cosmopolitanism are followed by three other contributions which present us other enriching sources for rethinking cosmopolitanism. In his chapter, “Tolstoy and Cosmopolitanism,” Christian Bartolf presents us a litany of cosmopolitan ideas in Tolstoy’s writings. This is followed by Liz Sutherland’s chapter, “The Divergent Cosmopolitanism of Hannah Arendt,” in which she tells us about the insights we can gather by walking and meditating with Hannah Arendt, especially her concept of “A New Law on Earth.” This is then followed by Scott Schaffer’s chapter, “Cosmopolitanism and an Ethics of Sacrifice” in which Schaffer tells us how, to be truly cosmopolitan, we, especially those coming from the privileged Euro-American world, need to sacrifice ego, epistemic pride and privilege. As Schaffer tells us, “only by sacrificing Northern epistemological hegemony in our theorising of cosmopolitanism and engaging in the material sacrifice of wealth in the name of distributive justice that we can truly begin to develop not only a truly cosmopolitan cosmopolitanism, but also create the social-structural conditions in which this is not just a theoretical, but rather a resistant practical and ethical, exercise.”
These chapters in Part I are followed by wide-ranging critical chapters in Part II, “Cosmopolitanism and Beyond: Complex Histories, Inadequate Theories and Challenges of Transformation,” which deal with complex histories and anthropologies of cosmopolitanism. In his chapter, “Cosmopolitanism and Reconciliation in a Postcolonial World,” Reinhardt Kössler discusses about the need to address the issues of colonial violence and reconciliation in cosmopolitan practice today. For Kössler,
If cosmopolitanism is to rest on the mutual recognition of participants in the project (or eventually even on the rather utopian sounding adherence of all living members of humankind), the colonial heritage marks a definite burden and potentially, a deep cleavage. If we set out towards a credible perspective in cosmopolitanism, we cannot evade addressing this cleavage. What is at stake is not individual guilt on account of past wrongs, but historic responsibility as well as responsibility towards the present and the future. Such responsibility resides, in the first instance, in representative institutions and particularly in states. States also represent institutional continuity with colonialism […] Again, it is incumbent on individuals and civil society actors to ensure that such responsibility is taken seriously. This applies in particular to serious and credible forms of reconciliation that go beyond mere formal and often token acts of state.
Kössler’s chapter on cosmopolitanism and reconciliation is followed by the chapter on “Corporealizing Cosmopolitanism: The Right of Desire” by Anjana Raghavan and Jyotirmaya Tripathi, who challenge us to other domains of neglect in the present discourse of cosmopolitanism, that is, body and desire. In their chapter, they use the concept of critical cosmopolitanism originally developed by Paul Rabinow to draw our attention to critical issues in “an ethos of macro-dependencies” entailed in cosmopolitan relations and further cultivated by scholars such as Gerard Delanty and Walter Mingnolo. While for Delanty, critical cosmopolitanism involves a realization of relationality between cultures, not only their differences, for Mingnolo, recognizing the fact of colonial difference, especially colonial violence, in cosmopolitanism is an urgent task. Raghavan and Tripathi build upon both Delanty and Mingnolo and also bring the critical transformative insights of Judith Butler, especially her work of grief and mourning, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, to interrogate and transform the existing discourse and practice of cosmopolitanism. With this wide-ranging theoretical engagement, they then present the work of gay rights and lesbian movements in India as an aspect of transformative cosmopolitanism of desire.
These challenges of inadequate theories and complex violations in societies, histories and theories are followed by two anthropologically engaged chapters which tell us about alternative trajectories of cosmopolitanism and new possibilities. In her chapter, “Old and Emerging Cosmopolitan Traditions at the Malabar Coast of Kerala, South India,” Barbara Reidel tells us: “Cosmopolitanism at work is and has been an ongoing process of circulation and of entanglements of people, goods, knowledge and ideas. Cosmopolitanism at work is not confined to global cities and global dimensions. It takes place also at ‘peripherical’ areas of this world like in Malabar or Kozhikode and in small scale everyday situations as in Rafeeq’s and his friends’ lives and it is locally rooted.” In the subsequent chapter on vernacular cosmopolitanism, Pnina Werbner presents us critical and ethical dimensions of this locally emerging cosmopolitanism which she calls vernacular cosmopolitanism and how it is cultivated at the local level in myriad ways. She presents the work of a Sufi saint from Pakistan and the strike in Botswana as bearers of vernacular cosmopolitanism struggling with ethics. For Werbner, “cosmopolitanism is not about travel but about some ethical dispositions.”
These chapters then bring us to Part III of our book, “Cosmopolitanism and the Calling Planetary Realizations.” It begins with the chapter of Hauke Brunkhorst, “Some Conceptual and Structural Problems of Global Cosmopolitanism,” which presents us a new genealogy of cosmopolitanism in modernity. This is then followed by the chapter by Vittorio Cotesta on “Human Rights, Universalism and Cosmopolitanism.” Cotesta challenges us to broaden our foundational assumptions of human rights and cosmopolitanism and he presents us critiques and reconstructions from African and Chinese perspectives. As to the African perspective, Cotesta writes: “The edifice of western society is based on individuals and on individual rights. The African perspective, on the contrary, places the system of family ties at the heart of society. The contrast between a society of individuals and a society of groups becomes manifest in relation to all sorts of vital problems.” As to the Chinese perspective and its potential for reordering the current global order, he writes: “The alternative is to build global institutions according to the Confucian model. In fact, the Western conception of society is centred on the principle of cooperation, yet this principle is necessary but not sufficient for the government of the world. In fact, it is based on a live-and-let-live attitude. To the principle of cooperation must be added that of improvement, which works along the line of improve-oneself-and-let-oneself-be-improved, leading to a mutual improvement of the Confucian model. In fact, the principle of rational dialogue among individuals, as envisioned by Habermas’ theory of communicative action, can lead to understanding but not to an acceptance.”
Cotesta talks about the need for acceptance in our cosmopolitan world, which calls for a new mode of mutual acceptance and co-legitimation. This calls for the creation of a cosmopolitan public sphere, and in the subsequent chapter, “The Hermeneutic Foundations of a Cosmopolitan Public Sphere,” Hans-Herbert Kögler tells us how we can create this with cognitive openness and hermeneutic skills. Kögler creatively cultivates vision and pathways of a “hermeneutically grounded cosmopolitanism,” which bring together “value-orientations and normative commitments remain grounded in cultural background contexts” while maintaining “a reflexive sense of one’s own position in the cosmopolitan concert of multiple viewpoints.” Such a hermeneutically grounded cosmopolitanism promotes reflexive and reciprocal dialogues, and it can be further deepened by the vision and practice of multi-topial hermeneutics discussed earlier in this text. Kögler’s chapter is followed by Vincenzo Cichelli and Sylvie Octobre’s chapter, “From Shahrukh Khan to Shakira: Reflections on Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism among young French People,” in which they tell us about the process of aesthetic cosmopolitanism among young French people in which they adopt and assimilate cultural styles in food, music and so on from other cultures. Cichelli and Octobre employ “the concept of aesthetic cosmopolitanism to analyse globalisation as a tra...