(written for the course Modernism and Postmodernism Period by Wesleyan University)
If the Hegelians are right, then there are no ahistorical criteria for deciding when it is or is not a responsible act to desert a community, any more than for deciding when to change lovers or professions.” — Richard Rorty
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Swiss philosopher from the 18th century and Judith Butler, an American postmodernism philosopher are two thinkers that Anthony Appiah would probably consider ‘cosmopolitan’ in his terms.
Cosmopolitan, according to Kwane Anthony Appiah, is a person able to live equally among the others, with no difference of colour, belief, profession, social class “he defends a vision of art and literature as a common human possession, distinguishes the global claims of cosmopolitanism from those of its fundamentalist enemies, and explores what we do, and do not, owe to strangers.” .
Rousseau used to say that man was born equally right, innocent and good hearted, “men who make up this herd we call society, placed in the same circumstances, will all do the same things, unless more powerful motives prevent them.”. The problem was that the society he was inserted corrupted him in a way he could not consider himself the same or equal anymore “Where there is no effect, there is no cause to look for. But here the effect is certain, the depravity real, and our souls have become corrupted to the extent that our sciences and our arts have advanced towards perfection.” The constant search for developing and growth turned things better for the world but worse for the man, for his soul. Thus, with no society to disrupt the good man, he could live among the others as equal.
Butler also argues that society change one’s mind in a way we start differ from one another since we are born by the genders, “If gender is a kind of a doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one’s knowing and without one’s willing, it is not for that reason automatic or mechanical. On the contrary, it is a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint.”. If it wasn’t for the desire to have a gender definition, society would live equally as human beings only, not as a dominant or dominated gender “This means that to the extent that desire is implicated in social norms, it is bound up with the question of power and with the problem of who qualifies as the recognizably human and who does not.”
Because of gender inequality, women in some cultures suffer the suffocating life of having to be submissive, not allowed to go to schools nor possess properties. In other cultures, the transsexual or the transgender suffers the consequences of changing his biological gender “Transgendered and transsexual people are subjected to pathologization and violence […] They are part of a continuum of the gender violence that took the lives of Brandon Teena, Mathew Shephard, and Gwen Araujo.” This violence is extended to children who are the most vulnerable ones, suffering such brutality from his parents or family “acts of “correction” undergone by intersexed infants and children that often leave those bodies maimed for life, traumatized, and physically limited in their sexual functions and pleasures.”. In other words, for Butler in a society that we wouldn’t acknowledge the other by the gender, we could live as equals.
Conclusively, being a cosmopolitan seems to demonstrate that mutual respect and understanding is possible and necessary among the world’s people. “Anthony Appiah’s belief in having conversations across boundaries, and in recognizing our obligations to other human beings, offers a welcome prescription for a world still plagued by fanaticism and intolerance.”
Bibliography
Appiah, Kwane Anthony. Appiah.net (http://appiah.net/books/cosmopolitanism)
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. 2004
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. 1750