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Article Excerpt
Modern cosmopolitanism is largely an affair of philosophy and the social sciences. Whether one thinks of the ideal ethical projects of worldwide solidarity of the eighteenth-century French philosophes or Kant, or of more recently emerging discourses of new cosmopolitanism in our era of economic globalization, transnational migration, and global communications, literature seems to have little pertinence to the construction of normative cosmopolitan principles for the regulation of institutional actors on the global stage, or to the study of the proliferating associations and networks that envelop the entire globe. Cosmopolitanism is primarily about viewing one self as part of a world, a circle of belonging that transcends the limited ties of kinship and country to embrace the whole of humanity. However, since one cannot see the universe, the world, or humanity, the cosmopolitan optic is not one of perceptual experience but of the imagination. World literature is an important aspect of cosmopolitanism because it is a type of world-making activity that enables us to imagine a world.
At first glance, cosmopolitanist discourse seems only to refer to literature in disparagement. Kant frets that his teleological account of world history, with its goal of establishing a world federation of states, will be taken for a fanciful fiction: "It is admittedly a strange and at first sight absurd proposition to write a history according to an idea of how world events must develop if they are to conform to certain rational ends; it would seem that only a novel could result from such a perspective [Absicht]." (1) However, he also points out that cosmopolitanism is a pluralism, the imagining of a larger community (the world) such that one's self-importance diminishes as a result of considering other perspectives beyond immediate self-interest: "the opposite of egoism can only be pluralism, that is, the way of thinking in which one is not concerned with oneself as the whole world, but rather regards and conducts oneself as a mere citizen of the world [Weltburger]." (2) In this imaginative process that generates cosmopolitan feeling, we can discern three moments. First, one must sunder the identification of oneself with the world and breach and transcend the limits of this particularistic perspective. Second, one must imagine a universal community that includes all existing human beings. Third, one must place oneself within this imagined world as a mere member of it, subordinating one's egoistic interests to that of the whole.
Literature creates the world and cosmopolitan bonds not only because it enables us to imagine a world through its powers of figuration, but also, more importantly, because it arouses in us pleasure and a desire to share this pleasure through universal communication. Literature enhances our sense of (being a part of) humanity, indeed even brings humanity into being because it leads to sociability. For humanity (Humanitat), as Kant argues in the Third Critique, "means on the one hand the universal feeling of participation [das allgemeine Teilnehmungsgefuhl] and on the other hand the capacity for being able to communicate one's inmost self universally [sich innigst und allgemein mitteilen ], which properties taken together constitute the sociability [Geselligkeit] that is appropriate to humankind [Menschheit], by means of which it distinguishes itself from the limitation of animals." (3)
Goethe conceived of world literature as a dynamic process of literary exchange, intercourse, or traffic, exemplified by the international character of his own relations with foreign authors and intellectuals and by the revitalizing movement of mirroring (Spiegelung) brought about by the reception, translation, review, and criticism of literary works in other languages. (4) He writes:
There is being formed [bilde] a universal world literature, in which an honorable role is reserved for us Germans. All the nations review our work; they praise, censure, accept, and reject, imitate and distort us, understand or misunderstand us, open or close their hearts to us. All this we must accept with equanimity, since this attitude, taken as a whole, is of great value [Werth] to us. (5)
For Goethe, world literature is an active space of transaction and interrelation. The content of the ideas that are exchanged matters little; what is of greatest worth is the ethos generated by the transaction. The world is only to be found and arises in these intervals or mediating processes. It is constituted by and, indeed, is nothing but exchange and transaction.
The ethical end of this intercourse is not uniformity, Goethe argues, but mutual understanding and tolerance between nations, through the revelation of universal humanity across particular differences even as such differences are valued: "The idea is not that nations shall think alike, but that they shall learn how to understand each other [sondern sie sollen nur einander gewahr werden, sich begreifen ], and, if they do not care to love one another, at least that they will learn to tolerate one another."(6) World literature is an ongoing work of negotiation between a range of particulars in order to arrive at the universal. This negotiation is properly worldly because it creates the world itself as intercourse in which there is appreciation and tolerance of the particular. Goethe further brings out the mediatory character of world literature by comparing it to translation between languages and the exchange of currency:
Whatever in the poetry of any nation tends to this [that is, the universal] and contributes to it, the others should endeavor to appropriate. The particularities [die Besonderheiten] of each nation must be learned, and allowance made for them, in order by these very means to hold intercourse with it; for the special characteristics/ properties [die Eigenheiten] of a nation are like its language and its currency: they facilitate intercourse, nay they first make it completely possible. (7)
The particularities of national literatures must be respected because without such differences, there would be no need for the intercourse that is necessary to bring out the universal kernel.
Translation, for Goethe, best exemplifies tolerance of particularities because it does not remove, but attempts to bridge differences:
A genuine universal tolerance is most surely attained, if we do not quarrel with the particular characteristics of individual men and peoples, but only hold fast to the conviction, that what is truly excellent...
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