Cosmopolitagonism: Examining Husserl’s Ethical Community at the (Political) Frontier

This paper explores the question of the frontiers of the cosmopolitan community through a discussion of Husserl’s theory of a universal, rational, and ethical community. I show that any cosmopolitanism cannot and should not erase political frontiers and hence the question of exclusion from this cosmopolitan community. Acknowledging them is the first step toward a cosmopolity aware of its own limits. This stance can be baptised ‘cosmopolitagonism’. The late Husserl develops a phenomenology of community (Steinbock 1995; Buckley 1996; Miettinen 2020) which is decisively cosmopolitan in scope, echoing Kant’s influence on phenomenology (Gorner in Bird 2006). Husserl explicitly tackles the question of the universal community in Crisis of European Sciences (C, 1970). For Husserl as for Kant, the cosmopolitan community emerges on one condition: that the rationality present in all human beings be actualised. Husserl ties the discovery of rationality to the birth of Europe in Greece, where pure theory becomes possible (ibid: 279). A “new man” (Brainard 2007: 20) is born: the (European) philosopher, who generates a new type of community from the actualisation of Reason (C, 299). This new community expands from the European philosopher to the whole of humanity through “Europeanisation” (ibid: 275), the expansion of Reason, and reaches its cosmopolitan state in the community of love (Liebesgemeinschaft) (Buckley 1996) which knows only friends (Miettinen 2020: 112). This philosophical community is truly universal and ethical: it allows humanity to live by its own purpose, the infinite task of rationality. It is a cosmopolitanism formed from below by philosopher-men as the “functionaries of mankind” (C, 29). It cannot be carried out by states in a vertical international order. Husserl’s cosmopolitanism implies doing away with the state and the political altogether, understood as the intermediary stage toward the ethical community (Schuhmann 1988). However, on the one hand, cosmopolitanism arising from below is hampered by its origin in the European philosopher. Just as Kant saw Europe as the vanguard of cosmopolitanism, Husserl reproduced a cosmopolitanism which is at once subordinated to a geographical entity (Europe) and conditional for other peoples (who have to ‘Europeanise’ themselves to enter the cosmopolitan condition). On the other hand, cosmopolitanism cannot do away with the complete erasure of frontiers (Bennington 2017): the inclusion in the cosmopolitan, ethical community is predicated upon the condition of actualised rationality. An enemy remains: irrationality, either as pragmatic politics (C, 288) or as those who are not considered rational beings yet, like the “Papuan” (ibid: 290). It is impossible, for cosmopolitanism as for any community, to erase its frontiers (Bennington 2017: 75). One thus needs to politicise cosmopolitanism, to render visible the political boundaries of the cosmopolitan community (Schmitt 2007). One has to acknowledge the political mechanisms of inclusion, exclusion and belonging of the cosmopolitan community for a critical cosmopolity to emerge. ‘Cosmopolitagonism’ would imply acknowledging those frontiers to critique them: what normative bases does one type of cosmopolitanism carry? What is its anthropology and what figures of exclusion does it generate? How is it used by political actors?