“You can’t be universal without being
provincial, can you?”
â Robert Frost
MARK SHIFFMAN teaches in the Humanities Department
at Villanova University. He earned his Ph.D.
from the Committee on Social Thought at the
University of Chicago.
It seems to me that all the foregoing discussions
of possible “cosmopolitanisms” have
privileged the second half of that term over
the first, offering us one or another form of
“cosmopolitanism,” but all without a cosmos.
The cosmos or “world” seems here to mean
a global, transnational communityâwhether
of atomic individuals, philosophic gentlemen,
or religious communicantsâand the
question is whether our identity will be
political (i.e. grounded in a particular and
circumscribed human community) or
transpolitical. For Webb, “invoking the name
of a place” is synonymous with “falling back
on one or another self-contained tradition or
community.” A place is, apparently, nothing
more than an area of such dimensions that a
polis may be placed upon it. There is certainly
no indication that it might be a piece
of the earth that, if we love it sufficiently, will
open our hearts and minds to the whole world
of which it is a particular and beautiful
manifestation, thereby placing us in spiritual
communion with others who engage and
love it in its other particular manifestations.
Robert Frost, imagining his final resting
place, said, “I would have written of me on
my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the
world.” Although T. S. Eliot considered
Frost too entirely a New England poet to
serve as an illustration of characteristically
American literature, the judgment of posterity
seems to have proven Eliot wrong. Frost
is at once a New England poet, a characteristically
American poet, and a universal poet.
Frost’s spiritual engagement was with the
world we share, and it was a lover’s engagement
because it was a local affair. When
Webb holds up Eliot as a cosmopolitan
“defending timeless and placeless principles
of human flourishing,” one has to wonder
how far he is willing to take this “placelessness.”
Poets like Frost demonstrate that, contrary to
Webb’s apparent assumption, language need
not be placeless to be universal.
The contrast between Frost and Eliot is
instructive for distinguishing the position I
would want to defend from the one Webb
proposes. Eliot’s universality is a rarefied
kind, appealing primarily to a highly educated
elite. It is responsive to its historical
moment, and laden with cross-cultural symbolist
interweavings that require ever more
lengthy footnotes to decipher. This poetry is
particularly suited to Webb’s cosmopolitan
elite of “philosophers, literati, and broadminded
clerics” whose “pursuits, almost by
definition, work best on universal terrain.”
It is exactly this odd conceit of “universal
terrain” that I find implausible. All terrain is
local terrainâand not only by definition, but
in reality. Frost conjures his local flora, fauna,
and folk with a wryly loving concreteness
that can speak directly to anyone who takes
the time to listen. By means of his poetic and
contemplative insight, Frost makes this local
terrain universally available to the imagination,
in a way that gives us better eyes for any
local terrain of our own to which we may
take the time to give our attention. This kind
of profound insight into the actual cosmos as
it manifests its universal attributes in particular
circumstances is the basis both of universally
available poetry and of genuine philosophy.
If poetry and philosophy have an ancient
quarrel, it is because they are rivals in a
lover’s quarrel with the world.
Aristotle is a genuine, universal philosopher
in this sense; Marcus Aurelius is not. The
concreteness of Aristotle’s thought, his profound
insight into the workings and forms of
nature, his keen awareness of how the features
of a place affect the life lived in it, his
defense of the household and political order
whose integrity are preserved by their organization
around cultivation of the landâall
this reveals a profound attentiveness to the
world we share as revealed in its particularity.
Marcus Aurelius, on the other hand, was the
inheritor of an abstract systematic account of
the world, which he imbibed growing up in
the rarefied precincts of the Roman imperial
circle. He was somewhat broad-minded for
a Stoic, in that he often entertained Epicurean
conceptions of the cosmos as well. But
both these systems are exactly that: conceptions,
constructs of the mind that draw a
conceptual map of the world and place that
map between mind and world in order to
foster detachment. They differ in this respect
from Platonism and Aristotelianism, which
cultivate open-ended inquiry into phenomena
guided by a love for the goodness,
beauty, and truth of the beings that present
themselves to us on their own terms.
These fundamental differences manifest
themselves in the way Aristotelianism and
Stoicism understand place. In Physics IV.1-5,
Aristotle articulates the meaning of place in a
way that resists any abstract homogenization
of the world by the intellectual imagination.
Place is always concrete, particular, related
to definite points of reference. Stoic philosophy,
on the other hand, replaces the notion of
place with the abstract and undifferentiated
notion of space. Space has no identity; it is an
interchangeable quantum without human
meaning, an indifferent theater for the drama
of the will. This conception harmonized
neatly with the relationship to place operative
in the Roman imperium, as it does with
the mostly arbitrary geography of the modern
nation-state (see, e.g., Benedict Anderson’s
Imagined Communities [1983]). It should give
us pause when we reflect that it was the Stoics
who coined the concept of cosmopolitanism,
and that the formulation of it adverted to by
Webb transposes the qualitative distinction
between household and city, insisted on by
Aristotle, into a merely scalar distinction.
It makes no small difference, it seems to
me, which philosophical tradition we have in
mind when we construe the universality of
reason. Though Webb’s account of the universality
of reason is underdeterminedâhe
is, after all, primarily a strategistâjudging
by the general tenor of his treatment, he
seems to see reason as detached and autonomous,
following its own inner necessity.
This, however, by a classical account, is only
half the story. The Platonic and Aristotelian
tradition distinguishes between nous and
dianoia (in Latin, intellectus and ratio). Ratio is
the operation of reason according to its own
inner development, and it is perfectly capable
of straying. Intellectus is the concrete
apprehension of the inner reality of things; it
is what keeps the other part of reason steadily
grounded. Intellectus is enacted in the practice
of theoria or contemplatio, a practice of
attentiveness cultivated over time, a time
spent tarrying with the same particulars and
penetrating them ever more deeply. It is the
same practice that enables the poet to penetrate
to the universal. It is essential both to the
excellence of so-called theoretical philosophy
and to the right apprehension of the particulars
that inform practical judgment and the
life of virtue. (Jane Austen and Plato both
painted on a small canvas, but thae postage
stamp carried their thoughts everywhere.)
In short, Webb’s “substantive cosmopolitanism”
seems to lack both substance and
cosmos, because its invocation of philosophical
universalism prescinds from the substantive
reality of the shared cosmos (“world”)
that renders reason universal. What Rowland
might have called her “transubstantive cosmopolitanism”
seems, as articulated, to run
a risk of Gnosticism that her papal authority
warns againstânamely, of trying to understand
redemption separately from creation
(see Ratzinger, In the Beginning [1990], Appendix).
Reno’s “rooted cosmopolitanism”
seems another name for an existential commitment
to tradition in the metaphysical
voidâperhaps the inevitable fate of a conservatism
divorced from the particularity of
a place that can reveal the world in its lovable
truth and beauty, and can give virtue time to
take hold solidly and take responsibility for
enduring goods.
Perhaps we might call the alternative I
have in mind “substantively rooted
cosmophilia.” That would never do for the
name of a political strategy, nor should it. It
is rather a way of existing in the world that
makes having a defensive political strategy
worthwhile. Aristotle argues that politics is
natural to man because the polis renders most
fully attainable and sustainable the substantive
goods toward which the household is
naturally ordered. Politics beyond the polis is
an artificial contrivance for other, primarily
defensive purposes, and so has an extrinsic,
however necessary, relationship to our substantive
life.
Of course we have to speak in a universal
language to articulate what it is we want to
defend and why it is worth defending. This
does not amount to cosmopolitanism; it is a
feature of language as such, and any articulate
defense will make universal claims. The
difficulty is in articulating an experience of
the world in its concrete richness and beauty,
its vitalizing particularity, to those who have
embraced habits of being that render them
oblivious to its appeal. In our own time, a
figure Webb might have taken for a model,
E. F. Schumacher, drew upon humanity’s
great wisdom traditions to recapture an
understanding of this anti-reductionist attentiveness
to what is, moving easily among
scholastic, Hindu, Taoist, and Buddhist
thought. It is widely recognized that a restoration
of the discipline of intellectus serves as
a foundation for the argument of
Schumacher’s Small is Beautifulâa rallying
call for resisting the cosmopolis by adopting
the wider horizon of the cosmos.