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PARTISAN REVIEW
Monbron. It has often been suggested that
Rameau's Nephew
might have
been inspired by the cosmopolitan who described himself to the philoso–
pher as having a "shaggy heart." An angry text, scoffing at all nations
(beginning with the English and the Turks, including the Spanish, the
Italians, and of course the French, and so on) and even more so
all
be–
liefs,
Le Cosmopolite
advocates, in an offhand way and not without skill,
hatred and selfishness as antidotes to hypocrisy. The drama of the for–
eigner, tossed from his bruised narcissism to a fascinated hatred for the
other, could find its expression in this embittered text, the excessiveness
of which suggests, across the centuries, Zeno's
Republic
and Menippus's
cynicism. Diderot's genius changed such intentions, straightforward to be
sure but brutal and immoderate, into a rhetoric that is also emancipated
and yet composed with an art that endows drives with adequate signs.
The pejorative meaning of the word "cosmopolitan" was
undoubtedly enhanced by such provocations that further irked the pro–
tective feeling for the nation, jealous of its prerogatives. "Whoever does
not adopt his homeland is not a good citizen," as the
Dictionnaire de
l'Academie
notes in 1762, in the article "Cosmopolitan." And Rousseau
among others: "Any partial society, when it is close and well-knit, be–
comes alienated from the larger one. Any patriot is hard on foreigners;
they are mere men, they are nothing in his eyes. This drawback is in–
evitable, but it is slight. The essential is to be good with the people one
lives with.... Beware of those cosmopolitans who seek far off in their
books duties they fail to accomplish close by." Montesquieu all the same
asserted along with Shaftesbury a positive value for cosmopolitanism, in a
century of many famous cosmopolitans. "Although one should love
one's homeland, it is just as ridiculous to speak of it with prejudice as it
would be of one's wife, birth, or property. How foolish vanity, wher–
ever it is shown!" With its raging reverse and generous obverse, between
Fourgeret and Montesquieu, cosmopolitanism henceforth appears as an
audacity, utopian for the time being, but which must be taken into ac–
count by human beings who are conscious of their limitations and aspire
to transcend them in the organization of social bonds and institutions.
When, in its dialectical motion, the world of the Spirit becomes
foreign to itself, Hegel dreams that two parts of the spiritual world start
facing each other: actuality and pure consciousness. "But the existence of
this world, as also the actuality of self- consciousness, depends on the pro–
cess through which self- consciousness divests itself of its personality, by so
doing creates its world, and treats it as something alien and external, of
which it must now take possession." This process is, as Hegel saw it,
constituted by culture
(Bildung)
-
political, economic, social, intellectual
