Relation to others· Society and historydifficulty
Belonging
Where does our belonging lie first: with our own community, or with humanity as a whole?
Favouring our own gives us roots but can shut the door on the stranger; opening to all enlarges the heart but risks belonging nowhere. To decide is to say whom we owe something to first, when near and distant loyalties come into conflict.
Communitarianism and patriotism
6We are not abstract individuals: our identity and attachments arise from the concrete communities that shaped us, family, nation, culture. Loyalty to one's own is not a prejudice but a virtue, and the real source of solidarity.
Explore this position →Odysseusexplicit
The whole Odyssey is strung on a single desire, , the return: Odysseus crosses the known world and refuses the islands where he might settle, happy and forgetful, only to regain Ithaca, his rocky land. Held by the nymph , he spends his days on the shore weeping toward the sea and his home. The marriage bed he carved himself from a living olive tree, rooted in the ground, says plainly enough that for him identity and happiness rest on rootedness, not on the elsewhere.
Odyssey, V, 151-158 (weeping toward the sea on Calypso's island) · Odyssey, XXIII, 183-204 (the bed carved from the rooted olive tree)
Romanticismexplicit
One is not a human being in general but first of a language, a soil and a people, and it is this rootedness, not the cosmopolitan abstraction of the , that gives a life its depth. awakens the proper genius of each nation in its songs, its tales and its language; from this will be born, for better and for worse, the modern idea of the nation as a community of destiny.
Herder, Voices of the Peoples in their Songs · Herder, Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humanity
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Confuciusinferable
The individual exists only as caught in a fabric of particular relationships: family, lineage, community, state, ordered by the li 禮 (rites). Xiao (filial piety) and loyalty to one's own take priority over any abstract belonging to humanity, anchoring Confucius on the side of .
Analects, I, 2 (the familial order, foundation of the social order) · Analects, XII, 11 (let the father be a father, the son a son)
Confucianisminferable
The moral identity of the Confucian subject is woven from its belongings: the family, the lineage, the local community, and the state ordered by the rites (li 禮). One becomes fully human only within these relationships (the five cardinal relations), not as an abstract individual or an undifferentiated citizen of the world.
Mencius (Mengzi), 3A4 · Confucius, Analects (Lunyu), 12.11
Lucretiusinferable
The pursuit of honours and power, which throws men against one another, is ranked among the empty desires born of the fear of death: better to obey and keep quiet than to wish to rule affairs by command and to hold kingdoms. Like the Epicureanism of which he is the herald, Lucretius turns men away from civic ambition and public life toward the security of withdrawal, which leans toward a restricted community rather than an active cosmopolitanism.
On the Nature of Things, V, 1120-1135 (better to obey in peace than to reign)
Epicurusinferable
The motto live unnoticed (lathe biosas) turns the sage away from public life: the city, its honours and ambitions are sources of disturbance, and true security lies in withdrawal and friendship, not in civic engagement. This preference for a small elective community, the Garden, over an active cosmopolitanism inclines slightly toward communitarianism.
Vatican Sayings, 58 (freeing oneself from the prison of public affairs) · Principal Doctrines, XIV (security through withdrawal from the crowd)
Cosmopolitanism
12We are first citizens of the world: human dignity does not stop at borders. Local attachments are contingent, and it is to humanity as a whole that we belong first, beyond all homelands.
Explore this position →Diogenes of Sinopeexplicit
If the borders of cities are only , convention without grounding in nature, none can command the allegiance of a rational being: a city has no more natural claim on me than the accident of my birth. Hence the word that Diogenes is the first to take for himself, a citizen of the world: not love of an enlarged homeland, but the refusal to acknowledge any, all of humanity taken as the only horizon. The provocation strikes at Greek civic pride, which counted the exile as fallen: the banished man of Sinope turns his condition into a claim. The Stoics would inherit the word, but back it with a cosmic city ordered by the ; in Diogenes it stays first of all a gesture of refusal, with no cosmology.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 63
Cynicismexplicit
If the borders of cities are only nomos, convention without grounding in nature, then none can command the allegiance of a rational being: a city has no more natural claim on me than the accident of my birth. Hence the word kosmopolitēs that Diogenes coins, the first to call himself a citizen of the world: not love of an enlarged homeland, but the refusal to acknowledge any, all of humanity taken as the only horizon. The provocation strikes at Greek civic pride, which counted the exile as fallen: the Cynic makes that his claimed condition.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, VI, 63
Senecaexplicit
Seneca distinguishes two commonwealths: the narrow one of our birth, and the great city common to gods and men, measured by the course of the sun. Every human is our fellow citizen by virtue of shared reason, nature having made us kin: a grounded in Stoic .
On the Tranquillity of the Mind, IV (the two commonwealths) · Letters to Lucilius, XCV, 52-53 (nature made us kin)
Marcus Aureliusexplicit
From the common to all men, Marcus concludes to a single city of the world of which each is a citizen before belonging to his homeland. The formula is his own: a citizen of Rome as Antoninus, but a citizen of the world as a man, the first belonging subordinate to the second.
Meditations, VI, 44 · Meditations, III, 11 · Meditations, IV, 4
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Kantexplicit
Kant defends cosmopolitan right and the idea of a federation of free states as the horizon of history: every human being has a right of universal hospitality as a citizen of the earth. The nation state remains a necessary mediation, which qualifies the score.
Perpetual Peace · Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose
Stoicismexplicit
The Stoics articulated ancient cosmopolitanism: every human being, as a rational creature, is a citizen of the world before being a citizen of any particular city. Marcus Aurelius calls himself a citizen of Rome as Antoninus, but a citizen of the world as a man.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VI, 44 · Epictetus, Discourses, I, 9
Epictetusexplicit
Taking up Cynic and Stoic cosmopolitanism, Epictetus invites us to call ourselves citizens of the world and sons of Zeus rather than citizens of a particular city. Local attachments remain as roles to honor, hence a strong but not extreme position.
Discourses, I.9 · Discourses, II.10
Marxexplicit
For Marx the decisive solidarity is not national but of class: the workers have no country, and the proletarian watchword calls for transcending borders in the name of a proletarian internationalism. The relevant community is neither the nation nor abstract humanity, but the world proletariat, which leans strongly toward a class cosmopolitanism.
Manifesto of the Communist Party, ch. 2 and conclusion (the workers have no country; workers of all countries)
Millinferable
The principle of utility knows no borders: the happiness of all humanity is its measure, giving Mill's morality a reach. He condemns slavery wherever it occurs and judges progress by the improvement of the lot of all mankind, beyond national belonging.
Utilitarianism, ch. 2 (the happiness of all concerned) · The Contest in America (1862), against slavery
Schopenhauerexplicit
He mocks national pride without mercy, 'the cheapest' of prides, that of the man who, having nothing personal to be proud of, falls back on the nation he shares with millions of others. A cosmopolitan and polyglot mind, nourished by East and West, he holds truth to have no homeland.
Parerga and Paralipomena, 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life', ch. IV
The Enlightenmentexplicit
A citizen of the world before being a citizen of his city, the man of the Enlightenment claims a belonging that overflows borders and confessions. Reason and humanity being common to all, national and religious particularisms weigh less than what unites the human race. draws from this a project of cosmopolitan right and « perpetual peace » among nations; the Republic of Letters already offers its lived figure, a learned community without a homeland. This cosmopolitanism nourishes the critique of war, slavery and fanaticism.
Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace · Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, art. "Fatherland"
Michel de Montaigneinferable
Discovering through the accounts of the New World that other peoples live otherwise and just as well, Montaigne loosens the exclusive attachment to his own city: he feels himself a citizen of the world and counts all men his compatriots. But this cosmopolitanism remains that of a rooted man, loyal to his laws, his friendships and his country by as much as by choice. An openness without uprooting, more curious about the foreigner than aspiring to the universal.
Essays, III, 9, "Of Vanity" and I, 31
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Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- PrescriptivePolitical & legalFrom kin to compatriots
Compatriots are strangers: does patriotism nonetheless extend to them the loyalty owed to those close to us, like an enlarged family, or is it an altogether different attachment? Where our belonging goes first is a question with its own axis.
the nationPartiality - PrescriptiveAlone or with others
Is flourishing self-sufficient, or does it require friends and a city, so that one cannot be fully happy apart from others?
the city, our bondsThe highest good
The cheapest sort of pride is national pride.Schopenhauer · Parerga and Paralipomena, 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life', ch. IV
As Antoninus, my city and homeland is Rome; as a man, it is the world.Marcus Aurelius · Meditations, VI, 44
We are members of one great body... nature made us kin, begetting us from the same principles and for the same ends.Seneca · Letters to Lucilius, XCV
When asked where he came from, he said: "I am a citizen of the world."Diogenes of Sinope · Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 63
Working Men of All Countries, Unite!Marx · Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
Live unnoticed.Epicurus · Fragment 551 Usener (lathe biosas)