The Modern Form of Cultural Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

The article deals with interaction of transculturalism as the ideology of uncertainty with a cultural version of cosmopolitanism. In the cosmopolitan in its ontic plane, today’s thinking is not just universal and global. The emphasis is predominantly on the unidentified, in particular, the deprived of national attributes or opposed to national ones. Thus cosmopolitanism represents itself as an alternative to identification, that is, as uncertainty, incertitude in the conditions of a cultural homogenization of the world. This emphasis is connected to the idea of the possibility of an individual’s existence at once in several cultures or coexistence in a cultural mix, expressed in the concept of transculturality. The application of principles of cosmopolitanism in the realm of culture initially causes a certain contradiction through which radical cosmopolitans reject the very idea of culture. After all, this idea asserts human pluralism: culture as the attribute of the human by definition is something plural – a variety of ways to be human; so it can`t be abstractly-human. While the principle of cosmopolitanism consists of the oneness of humanity, and therefore indistinguishability within it. The overcoming of contradictions is sought in the justification of the purely private relations of a single person-nomad with world culture, his or her devotion to it. Such devotion in the vision of transcultures is achieved by an individual’s refusal from one’s own (local, national, etc.) culture and by endless journeys through cultures, that is, a cosmopolitan identification of both individual and culture. In an escape from the “captivity” of a specific culture, that is, in confirming the principles of uncertainty, transculturalists perceive almost the only path to cultural freedom. The article describes how transcultural ideology is formed and unfolded in the framework of modernized cosmopolitan trends. The author shows that transculture now is not an accomplished feat, it remains a kind of utopian project, a projective construct of cosmopolitan-oriented culturological thought.