8

The Cosmopolitan Experience and Its Uses

THOMAS BENDER

While there is not a common understanding or definition of cultural cosmopolitanism or a politics of cosmopolitanism, the phrase is understood to have a positive valence and progressive implications.1 Certainly, in the global and multicultural 1990s many progressives turned to cosmopolitanism as a desirable cultural and political value. This association of cosmopolitanism with ethnos is currently understood as positive. But there is always the danger of the flip side. The word and the idea also have a darker connotation in central Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where it was an anti-Semitic epithet.

I want to reframe the way we think of cosmopolitanism, making it an experience and a quality. Rather than thinking of it as an idea, a political category, theory, or analytical concept, I propose that cosmopolitanism is most usefully understood as an experience with both cultural and political implications. I have two reasons. One is mildly theoretical, prompted by Bruno Latour’s challenge to sociological concepts that have no empirical existence. For Latour the most notorious example is the sociological tradition derived from Emile Durkheim’s master concept of the “social” or a “social fact.”2 The second posits that the world of difference, the foundation of cosmopolitanism, is a domain of inevitable uncertainties and recalculations about oneself and of people and places. Thus cosmopolitanism is not a thing but an active, even unsettling ongoing process. The cosmopolitan is not, as in popular usage, a person who is easy moving around the world, never uncomfortable. My notion of cosmopolitanism is at odds with the long-standing commonplace that “cosmopolitan people” are those who are “able to feel at home anywhere.”3

Cosmopolitanism, as I understand it, is challenging, even hard work. It is best understood within the experiential and experimental framework of the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. Both James and Dewey challenged enclosure and celebrated experience. Experience is active; it cannot be reduced to a thing. James believed that concepts and descriptions needed to be unstiffened as “experience overflows its own definition.”4 For Dewey experience is fundamental. It is used in the title of two of his most important books. Early on he trained his mind on the “processes of experiencing.”5 Dewey’s article in 1894 on “The Reflex Arc in Psychology,” the publication that moved James to embrace Dewey as a vital colleague, elided the mind-body problem by displacing the stimulus-response notion of mind and behavior. For Dewey, the movement from stimulus to action was not phased; it was a single event. If that argument was celebrated by James for solving the mind-body problem, it can also be understood as locating experience at the center of human knowing and action.6

The cosmopolitan, as I understand it, is someone for whom experience is consequential. By that I mean that new experiences are neither casually absorbed nor exoticized. New experience for the cosmopolitan is moderately unsettling. Such an unsettling stimulates inquiry into the novelty or difference. But—and this is the main point—it also prompts introspection by the cosmopolitan. The cosmopolitan is open to the unease of forming a new understanding of both one’s self and of the world when invited by the confrontation of difference. Cosmopolitanism is not a seeking of universal commensurability, or what James called “monism” and Karl Mannheim characterized as the impulse of individuals and groups “to make their interpretation of the world universal.”7 The cosmopolitan, by contrast, turns inward to introspection in the face of outward difference. The issue in a world of difference is not the play between particularism and universalism, but rather that of particularism and particularism. It implies being open to a particular kind of novel experience.

Jane Addams not only embodied this sort of cosmopolitanism at Hull House in immigrant Chicago, but she explained it and its importance in Democracy and Social Ethics (1907). The transformative moment begins with a sense of unease, or, as she put it, “maladjustment” in the world surrounding oneself. “We are learning,” she wrote, “that a standard of social ethics is not attained by travelling a sequestered byway but by mixing in the thronged and common road.” Engaging and experiencing that world of difference nourishes a “democratic spirit, for it implies that diversified human experience and the resultant sympathy which are the foundation and guarantee of Democracy.” For her, “social perspective and sanity come only from contact with social experience; that is the surest corrective of opinions concerning the social order.” Such experience of a “wide reading of human life” enables a “new affinity for all men, which probably never existed in the world before.” She places the citizen under a “moral obligation” to choose “our experiences, since the result of those experiences must ultimately determine our understanding of life.”8

I think Addams is not too far from what Anthony Appiah calls “rooted cosmopolitanism,” but she insists on more. Her understanding demands much more introspection and negotiation.9 She expects nothing less than a serious inquiry into one’s own sense of self as well as the character of the “other.” My sense of what this burden implies is articulated in a passage in Clifford Geertz’s Local Knowledge. It is a passage to which my thinking often returns:

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening. To see others as sharing a nature with us is mere decency. But it is from the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms of human life locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds, that the largeness of mind, without which objectivity is self-congratulation and tolerance a sham, comes.10

Again, such cosmopolitanism is not easy. In fact, one must be aware that the cosmopolitan experience as here described is always slightly subversive of one’s sense of self and one’s relation to a “home” culture. A cosmopolitan must cultivate a doubleness that allows both commitment and distance, an awareness at once of the possible distance of the self and of the possibility of dialogical knowledge of the other person or group. The echo of W. E. B. Dubois is intended.11

As already noted, this understanding of cosmopolitanism is quite a distance from the notion of the cosmopolitan as one who is comfortable anywhere. William James warned that “whoever says that the whole world tells one story utters another of those monistic dogmas that man believes at his risk.” It is easy, he added, to “see the world pluralistically, as a rope of which each fibre tells a separate tale; but to conceive each cross-section of the rope as an absolutely single fact, and to sum the whole longitudinal series into one being living an undivided life, is harder.”12

The cosmopolitan mixes unfamiliarity and recognition. The cosmopolitan is engaged but always slightly uncomfortable, even at home. There is something of the sensibility of the migrant or exile. Tzetvan Todorov has made this point with an account of a comment and the pathway that brought the comment to his attention. “The man who holds his country sweet is only a raw beginner; the man for whom each country is as his own is already strong; but only the man for whom the whole world is a foreign country is perfect.” The route that brought this comment to him was in a way a map of cosmopolitanism: Todorov, a Bulgarian living in Paris, took it from Edward Said, a Palestinian long resident of New York, who took it from Eric Auerbach, a refugee German Jew living in Istanbul.13 The cosmopolitan’s own world and its surround become themselves objects of inquiry and selfhood.

In recent years, a number of scholars have contrasted the nation-state and empire, with the former intolerant of difference and the latter far more tolerant.14 This is not universally true. In fact, as Carl Nightingale has recently shown, racial residential segregation may have been invented in the cities of British India in the eighteenth century.15 But the Ottoman Empire is the preferred example for this claim, and the imperial authorities did accommodate a large number of different cultures and polities. As long as taxes were paid to the sultan in Istanbul, different cultural and religious groups were allowed to organize their lives in ways fitting their own preferences. This is often referenced as an instance of cosmopolitanism, but I think the Ottomans supported pluralism and toleration. Tolerance is a considerable virtue, but if it is cosmopolitanism, it is cosmopolitanism lite, as it does not demand self-reflexivity.

However, the French Empire in eighteenth-century North America provided an example of what might be called a cosmopolitan world. In his celebrated book, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, Richard White shows how far partial intercultural understanding (or partial misunderstanding, as he describes it) created a cosmopolitan world that embraced Europeans and Native Americans. Neither the Native Americans nor the French Recollect missionaries, Jesuits, colonial officials, traders, and trappers fully understood the other, but neither did they seek to extend or impose their own worldview. In a pattern of perhaps deliberate misunderstanding that was driven by mutual need, difference and collaboration enabled each to find analogues in the other culture by looking in fresh ways at their own culture. They did not enter into the worldview of the other—though a few “went native.” But they grasped enough to actually learn more about themselves and ways they could comprehend and be comprehended by the others. That, to me, is an example of cosmopolitanism. It was built on experience and it was active. It was not easy; it depended on needs (trade), and the power and resources had to be relatively equal, making for a reasonably level playing field—a “middle ground,” as White characterizes it.16

On that ground they sought analogues, not perfect ones, but workable ones. They did not fully enter into the world of the other—or have any desire to do so. But they did enter enough to establish a working mutuality. Both practicality and discomfort prompted the self-reflection that pointed toward a Jamesian cosmopolitanism. In his discussion in Pragmatism of how ideas change, James made the point that rethinking or reorganizing our ideas is often the result of an “inward trouble.”17 For James this discomfort applied to the challenge of being a cosmopolitan, as he explained in a letter of 1894: “One should not be a cosmopolitan; one’s soul becomes ‘disintegrated.’ … One’s native land seems foreign. It is not wholly a good thing, and I suffer for it.”18

For centuries the homes of cosmopolitanism have been cities and the sea. Melville’s South Sea novels, including Moby Dick, reveal the cosmopolitanism of the sea.19 Cities, like empires, but more consistently, have shown themselves more open to cosmopolitanism than nation-states, which tend to seek uniformity or sameness, whether of language, religion, skin color, or ethnicity.

If the metropolis is the natural home of cosmopolitanism, the suburb—especially the gated community version—is its opposite. The metropolis more or less enforces immediate confrontation with social difference. Of course, it is possible, even all too common, to avoid the recognition of others. But my point is that even recognition is not enough for the experience that makes a cosmopolitan. Sometimes extremely different experience produces recoil, even fear, that may be difficult to overcome. Whether intense or mild, the point is not just engagement with the other, but self-reflexivity. One has to become in some degree less at home with one’s city and one’s self on the way to becoming a cosmopolitan. The experience that makes a cosmopolitan is at once a partial understanding of the other and an enriching partial reunderstanding of one’s self. It is not easy.

It was such an understanding that underlay the urban theories of Frederick Law Olmsted, the nineteenth-century designer of Central Park and other great urban spaces. He thought that Broadway sidewalks and those of other crowded streets produced a suspicion of others: too much rushing, too great a need for alertness, too much worry about confronting a pickpocket, too little time for reflection about those about you or yourself. “Our minds are thus brought into close dealings with other minds without any friendly flowing toward them.” He added that city life produces “a tendency to regard others in a hard if not always hardening way.” Most important, he felt that such “conditions” compelled urban dwellers “to look closely upon others without sympathy.”20

Olmsted’s concern about sympathy is not that of a Hallmark card. It is a potentially transforming experience. Olmsted’s usage is described by Adam Smith in his Theory of the Moral Sentiments (1759). Smith called for an effort of imagination to understand, to feel some affinity with another person who is marked by difference.

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.… By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation.21

Smith’s example predicates a confrontation with another person in pain or distress. But his point is sympathy in the face of difference. In fact, one of Smith’s examples of this act of sympathy was that of a male imagining himself in the position of a woman experiencing the pain associated with labor.

One’s engagement with difference, whether marked by pain or any other condition of difference, provides an experience that prompts both a reaching out and a self-reflexive awareness. What Smith calls sympathy is a double action that could be characterized—as Smith does—as a moral act of recognition and engagement. That experience reorients us to the world around us, whether in a small or large way. And that is the foundation of cosmopolitanism.

Olmsted’s New York was a somewhat chaotic mix of peoples and cultures, made all the more unsettling as the capitalist economy encouraged competition rather than sympathy. Alienated labor marked not only the working classes but the emerging middle classes as well. It was the city of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” and the urban experience that he described in the opening page of Moby Dick (1851):

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes.… Right and left, the streets take you waterward.… Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon.… What do you see? Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed on ocean reveries.… But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone?22

Olmsted had been one of those clerks, having been apprenticed to a mercantile house on the East River. After a few months of misery he escaped by sea as crew on a China clipper. But that too disappointed him. In time he made his mark as the first and foremost American urban theorist and designer.

Olmsted’s vision of metropolitanism at once affirmed the possibility of a shared public culture and recognized the permanence of social and cultural differences based on class, ethnicity, and gender. The Central Park was to be a terrain, free of the competitiveness of the capitalist city surrounding it and open to the multicultural population of the city. The park needed to be “so attractive as to force into contact the good & bad, the gentlemanly and the rowdy.”23

He understood that the aesthetic experience of the landscapes he designed could not erase class division, but the park offered an “opportunity for people to come together for the single purpose of enjoyment, unembarrassed by the limitations with which they are surrounded at home, or in the pursuit of their daily avocations.”24 There is in this notion an insight that points toward the experience that can open one to a cosmopolitan understanding of different ways of being in society.

Recognizing the ineradicable social, economic, and cultural structures that divided the population of the metropolis, he insisted that there was a possibility in this grand common space for moments of recognition of the “other” in a shared experience. Olmsted reported to the American Social Science Association in 1870 that at the park “you may … often see vast numbers of persons brought closely together poor and rich, young and old, Jew and Gentile. I have seen a hundred thousand thus congregated.” And he added, there was an evident “glee in the prospect of coming together, all classes largely represented … each individual adding by his mere presence to the pleasures of all others.”25 Without ceasing to be who they were, the thousands he described were surely affected by not only the difference of others, but of their own difference from others—yet enjoying the whole.

In designing Central Park (and many other American parks) Olmsted sought the opposite of New York’s Union Square. At the time Olmsted began work on the park, Union Square was the lively hub of the city, the meeting place of all peoples, a role it played until 1904, when Long Acre Square became Times Square and replaced Union Square. His vision for the park was a world of serenity where the diverse population of the city could experience each other in an atmosphere that encouraged openness and mutual sympathies. The resulting cosmopolitanism would, he felt, both enrich individual lives and sustain a vital public life.

Yet Olmsted was in the end too cautious. He misunderstood or failed to grasp the dynamic of the social world of Union Square. He erred in thinking that cosmopolitanism could only be enacted under the controlled conditions of the park, where rural aesthetics and heavy policing were thought to be essential reassurance for a diverse public. In fact, Union Square, which unnerved him, worked in a way that was more similar to his understanding of the park than he could imagine. The confrontation with difference was more dramatic, perhaps even harsher. Yet there was often a cosmopolitan result.

Union Square was a meeting point of many New Yorks. If immigrants flanked the Square on the southeast, to the west was exclusive Fifth Avenue. Just a block off the Northeast perimeter was the city’s most gracious residential block, Gramercy Park. Nearby the Gilder-deKay “studio” was the city’s most important salon, hosted by editor Richard Watson Gilder and the artist Helena deKay, where writers, theater people, and artists met every week. Next door to the Gilder home was the Century Club, where the gentry of the city gathered when they were not at the Union League Club, also on the Square.

All around the Square were restaurants, hotels, and shops of every kind. There was, of course, Delmonico’s, but there was also Moretti’s restaurant, where Americans were introduced to spaghetti, macaroni, and Chianti. Tiffany’s, Brentano’s Literary Emporium, Stewart’s Department Store, and Lord and Taylor were destinations at the Square for the elite. At the counters of these department stores elite women were served by working-class women. But these women related to each other differently at the nearby Consumer’s League, a cross-class organization where “shop girl” and “consumer” worked on behalf of “shop girls” and seamstresses.

If Steinway Hall and the Academy of Music anchored Fourteenth Street just east of the Square, all around there were various popular entertainments that drew the working class. Tin Pan Alley had its origin here, and the Palace Gardens provided entertainments ranging from fireworks and pagodas to mimes, magic, ventriloquism, and Indian dances. At the Hippotheatron across the street from the Academy of Music, there were acrobatics, pantomimes, and equestrian shows. A little farther east was Luchows, a German restaurant, and Hubert’s Dime Museum. The Square was also the home of Tammany Hall, where elites and union leaders collaborated. Tony Pastor’s Theatre (in the lower level of the Hall), was where vaudeville was invented, drawing popular audiences.

This listing—and it is partial—reveals the complexity and openness of this central space in the city. With a mix of uses and classes tugging at each other, a diverse public was formed on this terrain. It was the kind of experience that nourished cosmopolitanism. Here the particular, homogeneous cultures of the city’s different populations came into contact and awareness. Out of this interaction men and women were confronted with experiences that forced both observation of the “other” and self-reflection. Each contributed to the whole of a distinctive “public,” and each brought back to the gemeinschaftlich world of their local community something new and different to think about—providing the foundation for a more cosmopolitan sensibility.

Such experiences as I have pulled out of history are harder to find today. If cosmopolitanism is defined as a lived relation to difference that both reaches out to others and into one’s own self, an era of making urban cosmopolitans may be coming to an end. Both the definition and the making of the cosmopolitanism I have emphasized here has been dependent upon spaces and interactions that characterized metropolitan cities between roughly 1850 and 1950. Since then urbanism has vastly changed, as massive migrations of peoples on every continent have moved into sprawling and divided megalopolises, where the conjunctures that were once at Union Square are unlikely. The spatial reorganization of our lives and the vast expansion of digital relations together radically limit social experience. The dissolution of that experience will either weaken, even dissolve, the ideal and experience of cosmopolitanism or invite us to create and locate new experiences that will nourish a new cosmopolitanism and the cosmopolitan experience.

NOTES

  1  For a recent analysis of the complexity of the language of cosmopolitanism, see Giles Gunn, Ideas to Die For: The Cosmopolitan Challenge (New York: Routledge, 2013).

  2  Bruno Latour, “Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social,” in Patrick Joyce, ed., The Social in Question: New Bearings on the History of the Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), 117–32.

  3  Harriet Prescott Spofford, Art Decoration Applied to Furniture (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877), 162, referring to the incorporation of “Oriental” materials and themes in domestic settings.

  4  Quoted in Ross Posnock, The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 10.

  5  John Dewey, Experience and Nature (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1925), 10. He also used experience in the title of Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch & Company, 1934).

  6  John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” Psychological Review, 3 (1896), 357–70.

  7  Karl Mannheim, “Competition as a Cultural Phenomenon,” in his Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), 196–98.

  8  Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics [1907], ed. Anne Firor Scott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 7, 9–10.

  9  K. Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). Addams and Appiah are closer if she is compared with his earlier book, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

10  Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 16.

11  See his Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1961), chap. 1.

12  William James, The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 411.

13  Tzetvan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).

14  See especially the impressive book by Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper, Empires in World History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) for an argument for empire in respect to the matter of the politics of difference in empires.

15  Carl Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

16  Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

17  William James, Pragmatism and Other Writings, ed. Giles Gunn (New York: Penguin, 2000), 31.

18  Letter to Carl Stumpf, “Familiar Letters of William James—II,” Atlantic Monthly (online), August 1920.

19  See also Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000); Greg Dening, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Time, Culture, and Self (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, I Speak of the City: Mexico City at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

20  Frederick Law Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” Journal of Social Science 3 (1871), 11, 22.

21  Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 9.

22  Herman Melville, Moby Dick, or the Whale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), 1.

23  The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, eds. Charles Beveridge and Charles Capen McLaughlin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), vol. 2, 236.

24  Albert Fein, ed., Landscape into Cityscape: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Plans for a Greater New York City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 101.

25  Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” 18–19.