Aesthetics of Self-Fashioning and Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

Today several philosophers have begun to develop a positive ethics of self-fashioning, which is non-universalist, aestheticist, and very influenced by Nietzsche. Philosophers who have championed this aesthetic ethics of self-fashioning include Michel Foucault, Richard Shusterman, Alexander Nehamas, Stanley Cavell, and Richard Rorty. Another group of philosophers has focused alternatively on problems of globalized justice, importance of spreading democracy, globalized cosmopolitanism, communicative deliberation in public sphere, and critical approaches to unjust background conditions. These thinkers include John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Martha Nussbaum, and, again, Richard Rorty. This second group finds first group to be highly problematic, because its ethics is elitist, not at all democratic. Rather than focus on what universal humanity requires, they focus on the art of living, perfectionist techniques of self-enhancement, aestheticist practices in arts of narrative self-writing, and so on-and poor of India do not factor in to that discussion. They do so unabashedly, with no apologies, and find their aestheticism to be a natural outcome of very democracy cosmopolitans have helped to champion and bring about. Can these two groups, self-fashioners and cosmopolitans, be reconciled? Rorty, who fits into both groups, thinks they can be reconciled only minimally, and makes a strong division, strongest in fact in his entire philosophical oeuvre, between private sphere and public sphere: that is, he relegates self-fashioners to private sphere, and democratic philosophers to public sphere, with nothing whatever to discuss. The present discussion, however, argues that two groups are much closer together, much more intrinsically intertwined than that, and that charge of elitism may be at least partially defused. In order to understand this split, and how it may be reconciled, it is first necessary to understand something about twentieth century split between modernity and postmodernity. These terms help to mark philosophical terrain of latter half of twentieth century, and still continue to exert their influence today. Modems hold that even after Nietzsche, reason, while hardly pure, still has content, still is only path to freedom and equality, and still provides only lighthouse in a spreading fog of nihilism. They continue to elevate Kant as central figure of philosophy, and advance idea of a globalized democracy as ultimate telos of history, a final Kingdom of Ends in which ideals of freedom and equality reign supreme. This movement continues to find strong advocates in Apel and Habermas, who have also mounted strongest critique of postmodernism.1 In contrast to modems, postmoderns have significantly less hope for reason, reject projects of grounding, justification, and emancipation, and turn a skeptical eye toward goal of a total world state of kind Kant imagined. Ever since Nietzsche, reason has been unmasked as strategic and power-- laden, an instrument of colonization and social distortion, only manipulating a self-image of emancipatory and just so as to make its distortions more subversive and efficient. Once peeled back, however, a more pluralistic and culturally creative layer comes to surface: now each culture, and each individual, rather than on-the-way to Enlightenment, is viewed by postmoderns as narrativally embedded, and normatively self-contained. Moreover, with no ethical view from nowhere for discerning ethical universals, no single cultural narrative-particularly Enlightenment-has a right to assume pride of place over others; none, that is, has any right to become a metanarrative, to use Jean Frangois Lyotard's term. In fact, it was Lyotard who, as spokesman for postmodernity, defined postmodern condition as precisely this death of belief in metanarratives, and a general skepticism toward very idea of political universalism. …