ABSTRACT
What is it to envision the individual as ‘freed’ from culture, custom and community? The proposition concerns both ontology and morality. One states that individual human beings might enjoy an existence beyond the bounds of collectivities, their norms, conventional practices and traditions of classifying the world. One states that individuals have the capacity to author their own world-views, to construe their own life-projects, and that they should have the right to fulfil this capacity as they see fit and insofar as they do not infringe the rights of others. According to this vision, individuals are the constituent units of humanity – humankind is a collection of individual ‘I’s – and the individual life is a thing-in-itself which cannot to be treated as means to any ends besides those it itself has construed. ‘Cosmopolitanism’, after Immanuel Kant and the ‘categorical imperative’, may be defined as
the project – both scientific and political – that endeavours to promote the above ontology and morality in tandem. To be human is to be individual and every individual is equally human. Every contingency – of time and space, of culture, custom and community – should so far as possible be removed that disenfranchises an individual from enjoyment of a human birthright to constitute his or her own life, own world-views and life-projects. On a cosmopolitan view, the constitution of a just society involves global procedures whereby ‘Anyone’ – the global individual – is afforded the space to come into his or her own, to become themselves, according to their own criteria of judgement and interpretation.
