Several years ago, the American University of Beirut invited me to submit a few hypotheses on the relationship between cosmopolitanism and secularism—that is, the worldwide and the worldly in today’s world—for discussion and, if need be, refutation.1 What occasion could have been more appropriate—or more intimidating? The interest and stakes of this relationship are obvious. It sparks impassioned debate throughout the Mediterranean region we live in—and produces more doubts and misunderstandings than certainties or notions commanding common assent. How to approach the subject so as to steer clear of both pious wishes and standing divisions? The best way to proceed, no doubt, would be to lay one’s cards on the table, however inadequate they might be. As I took pains to explain to my hosts from the outset, I am the product of an epistemological tradition based on the principle that one really learns only from one’s mistakes. It remained, however, to put this principle into practice, and I was counting on my hosts to help me do so. All of us had also learned from Edward Said that differences of culture and origin need not stand in the way of mutual comprehension, if we take them into account and subject the prejudices they may mask to systematic criticism.
This section of the book is an expanded version of my November 12, 2009 lecture titled “Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Controversial Legacies and Prospective Interrogations.”2 I revised the text of the original lecture for publication as a book in French, fleshing it out with a few more quotations, elaborations, and references. I also wrote an envoi for the French edition. The resulting essay, which by no means lays claim to the status of doctrine or theory, will, I hope, help to reopen and sustain the transnational, transcultural debate that many of us have been calling for, by investing it with a philosophical dimension that is occasionally neglected in order to suppress the distance (and the distinction) between history and politics. On that condition, the critical ambition inherent in the universalism that we have inherited from the Enlightenment may avoid transformation into its opposite: a purely ideological tradition given locally institutionalized form in the interests of a now untenable hegemony.3