Abstract
This inaugural chapter in our volume discusses the issue of cosmopolitanism and explores the multiverse of transformations that it is confronted with. It submits that cosmopolitanism is part of an ongoing process of cosmopolitanization. Cosmopolitization as an ongoing process of critique, creativity and border-crossing involves transformations in self, culture, society, economy and polity. It involves multidimensional processes of self-development, inclusion of the other and planetary realizations. In the field of self-development, cosmopolitanization involves development of a transcendental self, transnational citizenship and cultivation of our cosmic humanity. Cosmopolitanization, as inclusion of the other, builds upon contemporary strivings in economics, politics, religions and spiritual mobilizations embodying post-capitalist, post-national and post-religious spiritual formations. The chapter also discusses the issue of cosmopolitan responsibility and notes three major challenges here—realization of global justice; realization of ‘cross-species dignity’; and dialogue among civilizations, cultures, religions and traditions. It outlines the pathways of going beyond cosmopolitanism by striving for a post-colonial cosmopolis characterized by global justice, trans-civilizational dialogues and dignity for all.
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Notes
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See their website at: www.attac.org
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Irigaray (2002: 25, 39) writes: ‘We avoid letting ourselves be moved, questioned, modified, enriched by the other as such … We flee dialogue with a you irreducible to us … The transcendence of the you as other is not yet, really, part of our culture’.
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Of the kind suggested in Beck, but Mohanty has talked about it in another context (cf. Mohanty 2000).
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Anekantavada refers to a mode of thinking that truth has many dimensions and many roads of arrival.
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‘For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism … is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and Christian ethic of love’ (Habermas 2002: 148–9).
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Habermas is not alone amongst thinkers from the contemporary Euro-American world in this foundational exclusivity. Vattimo (1999, 2002), for example, draws our attention to emergent movements of building a post-Christian world from within Christianity, based upon love and non-violence, but he seems to consider these as the unique heritage of Christianity rather than seeing similar developments in many religions in the world (cf. Giri 2002; Toynbee 1956).
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Safranski uses the term ‘multiverse’ in elaborating Kant’s project of cosmopolitanism: ‘[Plato’s philosophy] generally treats multiplicity and historical becoming as symptoms of defective being … It was Kant who, in the eighteenth century, outlined a conception of world peace on an underlying assumption of multiplicity … The conclusion to be drawn from Kant’s reflection is that there will be no homogeneous and political universe. Politically speaking, the world remains a “multiverse”’ (Safranski 2005: 28).
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This is in tune with the conception of emergent ethics proposed by Philip Quarles van Ufford and myself in our collaborative work on development ethics (Quarles van Ufford and Giri 2003).
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Nussbaum’s focus on aesthetic education reminds us of Schiller’s project of ‘aesthetic education of man’ (Safranski 2005: 66). But Safranski adds: ‘Schiller was aware that such aesthetic education cannot have a wide social impact and is not suitable as a political strategy; nor did he expect aesthetics to bring about a fundamental change in the different reality of his time. It was enough for him that the aesthetic sense offered some protection against the devastating effects of that reality’ (ibid.: 66–7).
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She writes: ‘there is a great deal of room for transcendence of our ordinary humanity … transcendence, we might say, of an internal and human sort … There is so much to do in this area of human transcending (which I also imagine as a transcending by descent, delving more deeply into oneself and one’s humanity, and becoming deeper and more spacious as a result) that if one really pursued that aim well and fully I suspect that there would be little time left to look about for any other sort’ (Nussbaum 1990: 379).
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‘Each individual is the stage where the world makes its entrance, where it can make its appearance … To shape globalization is therefore still a task that can be handled if the other major task is not neglected: the task of individuality itself. For the individual is also the whole where heavens and earth touch’ (Safranski 2005: 41).
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Desmond Tutu also brings a similar perspective from the African tradition of Ubuntu where ‘my humanity is caught up and inextricably bound up in yours’. Ubuntu speaks about ‘wholeness; it speaks about compassion. A person with Ubuntu is welcoming, hospitable, warm and generous, willing to share’ (Tutu 2005: 26).
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See, for example, Galtung and Ikeda (1995); Gorbachev and Ikeda (2005); Henderson and Ikeda (2004); Ikeda and Teheranian (2000); Ikeda and Toynbee (1976). Particularly significant here what Gorbachev tells us in his dialogue with Ikeda: ‘Personally, I learned my first lessons in cosmopolitan education at home in Stavropol. It was not theory but the fundamental basics of life in the North Caucasus. There people of many nationalities live side by side, sometimes in the same village or settlement. Preserving their own cultures and traditions, they help each other in time of trouble’ (Gorbachev and Ikeda 2005: 97).
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Acknowledgement of suffering of the human, animal and the non-human world though not reducing these to simple generalizing type (acknowledging what Derrida calls ‘irreducible living multiplicity of mortals’ (ibid.: 41) as all animals are not the same is an integral part of planetary realization. What Derrida (2008: 28) writes beginning with the suffering of animals deserve our careful consideration:
“Can they suffer?” amounts to asking “Can they not be able? And what of this inability? What is this nonpower at the heart of power? Being able to suffer is no longer a power; it is a possibility without power […] Mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life, to the experience of compassion, to the possibility of sharing the possibility of this nonpower […] the anguish of this vulnerability, and the vulnerability of this anguish.
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Giri, A.K. (2018). Cosmopolitanism and Beyond: Towards Planetary Realizations. In: Giri, A. (eds) Beyond Cosmopolitanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5376-4_2
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