美中全球议题对话项目

Martha Nussbaum presents an example of the first conception of cosmopolitanism in her early essay “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism.” In this highly influential account, she offers a contemporary Western liberal cosmopolitan theory, crafted on Kantian principles about the moral status and dignity of persons as rational moral agents. While her account offers a powerful statement of an important moral point of view, it also faces certain challenges, especially as a prescription for how to understand and navigate our global, multicultural world. 

Our second conception of cosmopolitanism understands it to be an ideal view about oneself and one’s perspective or stance toward other cultures and the people who live therein. This is the conception of cosmopolitanism that informs and inspires Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006), in which he seeks to describe how one can live as what he calls a “grounded cosmopolitanism”: roughly, someone who embraces and remains committed to a home tradition or culture while working to understand and appreciate a range of other cultures and traditions in the wider world. 

A third conception of cosmopolitanism takes it as a political philosophy: a view about what nation-states owe to one another. This is the view that Nussbaum employs in her more recent book, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Idea (2019). In this monograph, which marks a dramatic departure from her earlier work, she describes a Stoic tradition of philosophy inspired by the famous quote attributed to Diogenes of Sinope about being a citizen of the world but focuses on the bifurcation this tradition draws between a particular conception of justice—according to which people possess and are owed a fundamental and unalienable dignity that is impervious to a range of contingent aspects of life—and the physical material needs that in fact are necessary for human flourishing.

Each of the three conceptions of cosmopolitanism described above contributes in significant ways to a more adequate and satisfying understanding of the global nature of the modern world and the multicultural dimensions of contemporary societies. Each can and some have been used as the basis for more critical-theory approaches to this general set of issues.

Scholars such as Chai Shaojin have described a possible new expression of Confucian cosmopolitanism. This form of cosmopolitanism is based on the idea of “forming one body” with other people, creatures, and things, seen in many later Chinese thinkers but most often identified with the philosophy of Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1427-1529). Such metaphysical unity is thought to generate a greater sense of care for all things, the same kind of care one feels for oneself. The first thing to note about this ideal is that a cosmopolitan guest is not a cultural tourist. A cosmopolitan guest is not just passing through or observing other people and cultures for personal pleasure or enjoyment; they are seeking to understand, appreciate, and learn from—not merely about—the people and places they visit. They seek to understand other ways of life because they believe that this is part of what it means to respect other people and cultures in a robust and practical sense and that this will teach them important things about what it is to be and live life as a humane person.

What practical steps can an individual, community, or society take to bring themselves closer to this ideal? The keys to living as a cosmopolitan guest are cultivating a characteristic attitude toward the other peoples and cultures of the world and developing and practicing a particular set of skills associated with understanding and appreciating them. The attitude consists of being open and inquisitive to alternative, new ways of living—what we might call different approaches to “doing” what it is to be human. A cosmopolitan is dedicated to pursuing an ongoing quest to live well and to appreciate the fullest range of possibilities for how to organize their lives, communities, and societies. Cosmopolitan guests seek to develop and practice a particular set of skills. They work to cultivate the ability to understand and appreciate other people and cultures by developing greater powers of imagination, empathetic concern, and the arts of interpretation and will exercise these in a life of humanistic inquiry, study, and travel.

In any event, one need not commit oneself to becoming a scholar of other cultures to embrace the characteristic attitude or develop and practice the set of skills described above. One just needs to make a reasonable, ongoing effort to explore the lives of other people and cultures and attain a sympathetic understanding and appreciation of what makes them different and good. This must include study of the history, art, literature, music, and some of the languages of these people and places and, as suggested above, ideally would include traveling to these places, physically or virtually, and seeking to meet and learn about and from those who live there. This all could be achieved in a number of different ways on an individual basis, but institutions, communities, and societies can do a great deal more to make such endeavors part of the normal course of education, from primary school through post-secondary education, and facilitate individual, private efforts to pursue such study. 

I have described a distinctive and unique conception of cosmopolitanism that presents an ideal for people in the modern, developed world. This ideal, the cosmopolitan guest, describes someone who recognizes the fact of irreducible ethical pluralism and seeks to live a life in light of this truth about the other people and cultures of the world. A cosmopolitan guest engages in a lifelong quest to live well and to appreciate a range of possibilities for how to organize their lives, institutions, communities, and societies. Those seeking to cultivate the ideal of being a cosmopolitan guest will work to develop and practice a distinctive attitude and set of skills; they will cultivate the ability to understand and appreciate other people and cultures by cultivating their powers of imagination, empathetic concern, and interpretation, and they will exercise these in a life of humanistic inquiry, study, and travel—both real and virtual.

As noted earlier, this does not require one to study a wide range of alternative lives or cultures, much less every available candidate. The aim, rather, is to understand one or perhaps a few other ways of “doing” the human in a deep and sympathetic manner. This is sufficient for bringing home the key points mentioned above. One’s particular way of life is but one among many, and this fact can only be made sufficiently salient by entering into other forms through the exercise of empathy and imagination.  This process is much like the experience one undergoes when one learns enough of another language to start to see and engage the world through its categories, norms, and expectations, and this is one very important reason to include the study of foreign languages in the modern curriculum. Such study enables one to sympathetically understand an alternative form of life; it expands one’s horizons and the range of what one appreciates and prepares one to be a welcome guest and good companion of fellow human beings around the world. 

This in no way implies that one will lack the ability to assess and at times criticize the behavior, practices, or beliefs of the people or cultures one comes to understand or that one will forsake one’s home tradition and adopt the new way of life—though that of course is always possible. It will, though, enable one to understand and appreciate not only others but oneself more deeply and humanely and make it much more likely that we all can not only live more peacefully together upon this earth but will find and share more of the distinctive joys associated with being human. 

This essay is an excerpt of a longer paper, written as part of the author's participation in the Georgetown University Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues' U.S.-China Research Group on Cosmopolitanism, that will be published in a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Confucian Philosophy and Culture.

Philip Ivanhoe is a professor and department chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Georgetown University.