J.M. Coetzee and the Limits of Cosmopolitanism

K. Hallemeier

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137346537
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Drawing on postcolonial and gender studies, as well as affect theory, the book interrogates cosmopolitan philosophies. Through analysis of J.M. Coetzee's later fiction, Hallemeier invites the re-imagining of cosmopolitanism, particularly as it is performed through the reading of literature.

Chapter 1

Sympathy and Cosmopolitanism

Does reading literature enhance the sympathetic imagination? If so, might the study of literature foster a cosmopolitan practice that establishes equitable relations premised on mutual sympathy? These questions may easily be decried as naïvely and sentimentally utopian. They may be decried as naïve because they envision diverse readerships that are homogenously affected by a course of literary study. They may be decried as sentimental because they suggest a correlation between sympathy and equality. Yet contemporary cosmopolitan thinkers have repeatedly affirmed the potential of reading literature for the development of the sympathetic imagination and the increased capacity to feel for other human beings, howsoever distant and different. Such affirmations foreground both a desire for a universal human sympathy and a faith in the humane effects of sympathy persisting within contemporary cosmopolitan theory, even though contemporary cosmopolitan discourse actively refutes accusations of naïveté and sentimentality. This chapter and the two following endeavor to articulate the ways in which discrete understandings of sympathy come to dictate and reify cosmopolitan practices.

In the first part of this chapter, I delineate the relation between cosmopolitanism and sympathy with reference to two particular strains of cosmopolitan thought. Specifically, I contextualize contemporary cosmopolitan theory within a brief historical genealogy of the connections between sympathy, cosmopolitanism, and the novel in works by Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. These thinkers are touchstones for contemporary debates that ask if and how reading constitutes a sound basis for cosmopolitan practice. I go on to argue that even discussions of cosmopolitanism that do not center on the literary often invoke sympathy, and its cultivation, as central to cosmopolitan practice. In the second part of the chapter, I distinguish my approach to sympathy in J. M. Coetzee’s fiction from previous scholarship that has argued for that fiction’s potential to broaden the scope of readers’ sympathies. In charting the evolution of the representation of sympathy across Coetzee’s oeuvre, I justify the project of examining the limits of cosmopolitan sympathy in Coetzee’s later work.

The Novel and Cosmopolitan Sympathy: A Historical Genealogy

Since the novel’s popularization in the eighteenth century, novel reading has been associated with the cultivation of an ethically or politically efficacious sympathy. Theories of the relation between novels and sympathy have not always been amenable, however, to the cultivation of a particularly cosmopolitan perspective. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith articulates an idea of sympathy that is concomitant with a “sense of propriety” that both marks individual virtue and ensures the fulfillment of public duties (137). This idea of sympathy, however, is explicitly pitted against “[t]he stoical apathy” that characterizes classical cosmopolitan thought (Smith 137). In the philosophy of Zeno, the cosmo-polites, the “citizen of the world,” is detached from the feelings of the polis, while in communion with the wise and virtuous, through divine logos (Douzinas 152). The apatheia of the Stoic stands in contrast to the sympatheia of the united demos: “The Greek verb sympascho and the noun sym-patheia mean to suffer with others, to feel with and for others, to be affected by the same thing and to link emotions in public” (Douzinas 75–76). Smith argues against the Stoics, stating that we must relinquish the idea that “we should view ourselves, not in the light in which our own selfish passions are apt to place us, but in the light in which any other citizen of the world would view us” (136). In place of such stoical efforts, Smith advocates the cultivation of “that extraordinary sensibility, which we naturally feel for the misfortunes of our nearest connections” (137), and suggests that such proper sensibility is better cultivated through the study of literature than through the “metaphysical sophisms” of classical philosophy: “The poets and romance writers, who best paint the refinements and delicacies of love and friendship, and of all other private and domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire, Richardson, Marivaux, and Riccoboni, are, in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno, Chrysippus, or Epictetus” (137). Smith prescribes the sentimental, epistolary novel precisely because it does not portend the instruction of universalistic, cosmopolitan philosophy, with its attendant insistence on the suppression of “selfish passions.”

Smith’s rejection of cosmopolitan philosophy hinges upon his understanding of sympathy as that which is dictated by extant relationships and obligations. Duties and sympathies alike, he suggests, materially end with “country”: “The state or sovereignty in which we have been born and educated, and under the protection of which we continue to live, is, in ordinary cases, the greatest society upon whose happiness or misery our good or bad conduct can have much influence” (229). The state that protects the individual is also the state that the individual can affect. Smith dismisses attempts to sympathize on a cosmopolitan scale because he understands sympathy to be dependent on such mutual “influence”: only if you can claim universal influence, his logic would propose, can you go on to claim universal sympathy. Otherwise, he argues against the idea that we must feel “extreme sympathy with misfortunes which we know nothing about” (Smith 135). “The care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings,” proclaims Smith, “is the business of God” (238). “To man is allotted a much humbler department,” he concludes: “the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, and his country” (238). For Smith, God may love “the citizen of the world,” but between “one citizen of the world” and another, there is no relationship worthy of the name and so no basis for substantive sympathetic engagement.

This is not to say that, for Smith, sympathies are indelibly fixed in the domestic and national spheres. In fact, Smith avers that sympathies change with habit. He understands this potential for change, however, not as an opportunity for extending sympathy but as a circumstance that might disrupt proper social order. Consequently, for those seeking “domestic happiness,” he recommends against an education that takes members of the family very far from home (223). “The education of boys at distant great schools, of young men at distant colleges, of young ladies in distant nunneries and boarding-schools,” he writes, “seems in the higher ranks of life, to have hurt most essentially the domestic morals, and consequently the domestic happiness, both of France and England” (223). For Smith, reading together is an excellent way of finding pleasure in mutual sympathy (8). A public education that leads one to sympathize with others outside one’s immediate domestic sphere might nurture any number of bold new ideas. It does so, however, only at the risk of losing “dutiful children” for “want of habitual sympathy” (223–24). Similarly, we might presume that, for Smith, a cosmopolitan education that brings one into habitual sympathy with those beyond one’s national borders occurs only at the risk of losing dutiful neighbors or dutiful citizens. A cosmopolitan education seems practicably harmful to domestic relationships in a way that Smith cannot abide: “The most sublime speculation of the contemplative philosopher can scarce compensate the neglect of the smallest active duty” (238). Smith’s sympathy directs that passions be brought into the service of such an active, extant duty so as to further mutually beneficial relationships.

Adopting Smith’s antipathy for the virtues of apathy, many contemporary advocates of cosmopolitanism follow Smith in privileging the “thick” experience of everyday feelings, habits, and loyalties before a pure, universal “reason.”1 Much of contemporary cosmopolitan theory contravenes Smith, however, by suggesting that the age of globalization has expanded the scope of those on whom “our good and bad conduct can have much influence,” even as international capital and environmental degradation have affected crises of the nation-state.2 In envisioning the de facto existence of a global society, cosmopolitan thought tends to follow the work of Immanuel Kant, for whom our very existence in the world creates an inescapable sociability, encapsulated in and furthered through international commerce and culture (Cheah, Inhuman 81). In his 1795 tract, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” Kant argues that because “[t]he peoples of the earth have . . . entered in varying degrees into a universal community . . . a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere” (107–8). An assumption of global mutuality forms the basis for Kant’s cosmopolitanism, which he defines as the right to “conditions of universal hospitality” and upholds as a necessary precondition for the rational advancement of perpetual peace (Kant 105).3 A presumed human community necessitates sympathy for the suffering of distant others and the consequent pursuit of an international cosmopolitan order.

Whereas Smith recommends the reading of literature because it counters the cosmopolitan tendency to discount that we “naturally” feel more for those who can most affect our happiness, Kant embraces, if not literature specifically, then the humanities generally because he believes in their potential to forward his cosmopolitan project. As Pheng Cheah has shown, Kant attributes to “the humanities (humanoria) the power of cultivating our humanity” (1); the humanities work to instill “the universal feeling of sympathy, and the ability to engage universally in very intimate communication” (Kant qtd. in Cheah Inhuman, 1; emphasis in original). Consequently, humanity is able to “overcome the limitations of immediate existence and expand the circle of identification and belonging through sociability” (Cheah 1). The humanities, in other words, exercise a “universal” sympathy that reveals global humanity. As Pauline Kleingeld argues in Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship (2012), although reason is key to Kantian cosmopolitanism, Kant “attributes an important role to feeling in providing an account of the feasibility of the cosmopolitan ideal” by “claiming that human psychology is not only entirely compatible with cosmopolitanism but even promotes it” (161).

Kant recognizes the boldness of this claim for the expansiveness of human sympathy in a way that reinforces his connection of textual study with cosmopolitanism. In “Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” Kant frets that his “history” of cosmopolitanism might be read as a “novel” (51–52). This Kantian “novel,” Bo Earle argues, is one that imaginatively engages with “behavioral trends of the human species in aggregate,” including trends in culture and commerce, and represents them as moving toward a yet-to-be-realized “cosmopolitan end” (210). Kantian cosmopolitan philosophy, by offering a narrative that describes a common humanity, “provocatively directs us out into the unromantic world of hard empirical and even statistical data for redemption of our Romantic ideals” (Earle 210).4 And indeed, this philosophy finds resonance in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s proclamations that poetry can strengthen “a man[’s]” capacity to be “greatly good” by encouraging him to take on “the pains and pleasure of his species” (844). For both the philosopher and the poet, the imagination is capable of world-making: the writer apprehends a common humanity and transmits this insight through prose or poesy. A sympathetic imagination that is cosmopolitan in scope emerges as a means to cultivate a cosmopolitan community in practice.

Smith and Kant, respectively, suggest that novels cultivate those human sympathies that are antithetical to cosmopolitanism and that novels cultivate the sympathy for humanity that is a precondition for the realization of cosmopolitanism. Both thinkers, however, maintain that literature evidences something essential about human feeling. For Smith, literary sentiment exemplifies how humans do not feel sympathy on the basis of an abstract idea of shared humanity. For Kant, literature exemplifies, through its very circulation via sympathetic engagement, the fact of a shared humanity. In both cases, the possibility of cosmopolitan community hinges on if and how sympathy comprehends “the human.” This project argues that assumptions about the nature and scope of “human” sympathy continue to define models of cosmopolitan reading and, by extension, of cosmopolitan community. By making such assumptions explicit, I suggest, we might better understand how current cosmopolitan theory delimits the “human.”

The Novel and Sympathy in Contemporary Cosmopolitan Theory

Models of “human” sympathy continue to play a central role in accounts of the potential value of a literary education for the cultivation of cosmopolitan community.5 Martha C. Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah are perhaps the two moral philosophers and literary critics who, in the past twenty years, have most prominently connected novel reading with cosmopolitan practice. Both of these thinkers have imagined human sympathy as cosmopolitan in its scope. They have done so, however, in markedly different ways. While Nussbaum argues, pace Smith, that sympathy can be cultivated to embrace all humanity, Appiah suggests, pace Kant, that humanity can already be defined as cosmopolitan because of a universal capacity to sympathize.

Nussbaum defines cosmopolitanism primarily as a moral project that is critical of isolationism and requires the cultivation of sympathy beyond existing national boundaries.6 “Most of us are brought up to believe that all human beings have equal worth . . . but our emotions don’t believe it,” writes Nussbaum (Love xii). Reading literature, she posits, is one way to overcome this problematic “emotional narrowness” and to create a citizenry that feels responsibility to all humankind. The novel’s very form, Nussbaum argues, “constructs compassion in readers, positioning them as people who care intensely about the sufferings and bad luck of others, and who identify with them in ways that show possibilities for themselves” (Poetic 66).7 An education that presents “lives outside our [national] borders” as “deep, rich, and emotion-worthy” consequently works to “renew our commitment to the equal worth of humanity” (Nussbaum, Love xiv). As such, a “cosmopolitan education” not only helps us to “learn more about ourselves” but also allows us to “make headway solving problems that require international cooperation” and to “recognize obligations to the rest of the world that are real and that otherwise would go unrecognized” (11–12). Nussbaum’s cosmopolitans understand that “they are, above all, citizens of a world of human beings” (6).

Against Nussbaum’s vision of aspirational moral community that is critical of a perceived status quo, Appiah defines cosmopolitanism primarily in terms of an extant ontology that accounts for already existing sympathies that cross national boundaries. Appiah proposes that the practice of cosmopolitanism does not so much require agreement about moral principles—such as the equal worth of all human beings—as “dialogue among difference” and “conversations among places” (“Cosmopolitan” 207, 225). Cosmopolitanism, argues Appiah, “begins with the simple idea that in the human community, as in national communities, we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association” (Cosmopolitanism xix). Such “habits of coexistence,” argues Appiah, are made possible through the sympathetic imagination—through “the capacity to follow a narrative and conjure a world” (“Cosmopolitan” 224). Whereas Nussbaum views reading literature as a means for extending sympathy beyond national borders, Appiah views it as the exercise of an extant cosmopolitan sympathy. “What makes the cosmopolitan experience possible,” writes Appiah, what “grounds our sharing,” is “the grasp of narrative logic that allows us to construct the world to which our imagination responds” (“Cosmopolitan” 223). For Appiah, our capacity “to respond in imagination to narratively constructed situations” (223), our ability to read with “sympathy and concern for others” (203), makes cosmopolitans of us all—even as the novel, as a standing invitation to exercise the “narrative imagination” (223), “is cosmopolitan in its very beginnings” (203). Novel reading exercises what Appiah sees as the quintessentially human sympathy that binds us in an extant cosmopolitan community. Appiah’s cosmopolitans are not necessarily united by the fellow feeling and shared principles that are often implied by the term citizenship; rather, Appiah insists, among cosmopolitans, “the world we imagine is more than a world of fellow-citizens” (202).

Nussbaum and Appiah argue, respectively, that the reach or existence of the sympathetic imagination determines the possibility of cosmopolitan practice. Both visions of universal cosmopolitan sympathy have been placed under critical scrutiny. Homi Bhabha, notably, has critiqued Nussbaum’s vision of a self that privileges a liberal conception of “humanity” before other, more local loyalties (“Unsatisfied”). “The usual argument against Nussbaum’s version of cosmopolitanism,” writes Bruce Robbins (echoing Adam Smith), “is that we cannot possibly be expected to care about those far away as intensely as we care about our families” (“Cosmopolitanism” 53). In demanding the universal cultivation of sympathy for all humankind, Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism demands the universalization of an ideal liberal humanist subject.8 Consequently, “the older, singular, Nussbaum-style cosmopolitanism is now regularly dismissed as universalism in disguise” (Robbins, “Cosmopolitanism” 48). As Megan Boler argues in Feeling Power (1999), “through modes of easy identification and flattened historical sensibility, the ‘passive empathy’ represented by Nussbaum’s faith in ‘poetic justice’ may simply translate to reading practices that do not radically challenge the reader’s world view” (156).

Appiah, in contrast, strikes an “attractively ‘conversational’ balance between universal demands and local particularities” (Bongie 58), suggesting that cosmopolitanism can be practiced in different ways in different localities. The assumption, however, of a humanity that is essentially cosmopolitan in its capacity to sympathize with “others” who “are down the street today or across oceans or centuries from ourselves” risks a certain complacency (Appiah, “Cosmopolitan” 224). As Chris Bongie, building on the work of Peter Hallward, argues, Appiah tends to conflate a “descriptive assessment of culture”—as cosmopolitan and hybrid—with “prescriptive political practices” (58). Robbins similarly notes in Appiah a problematic elision of cosmopolitan culture and substantive politics. There is “continuity” between Appiah’s notion of “getting used to” and a “more general liberal presentism,” Robbins suggests (“Cosmopolitanism” 56). The notion of an ongoing, cosmopolitan cultural exchange constructs “a temporality that quietly urges us to go easy on the imperial horrors of the past” and “is credited with almost super-natural ability to resolve the contradictions of the present and future, or at least to get used to them” (57).9 Appiah’s cosmopolitanism resonates not just with a problematic liberalism but also with a strain of localist conservatism, which Lauren Berlant describes as “rephras[ing] the embodied indignities of structural inequality as opportunities for individuals to reach out to each other, to build concrete human relations” (4). Whereas Nussbaum’s prescription of sympathy risks articulating a cosmopolitan politics premised on an abstract universal sympathy, Appiah’s description of sympathy risks depoliticizing cosmopolitanism. Such critiques question whether and how human sympathy can be conceived in cosmopolitan terms. The question of whether and how sympathy can be conceived as “human” remains relatively untouched. As I will demonstrate, the tendency to query the limits and potentials of human sympathy is s...