Obama as Philosopher

A week after President Obama delivered the most ballyhooed speech about international relations in years, another figure of complicated global lineage, the Anglo-Dutch scholar Ian Buruma, a professor of human rights and journalism at Bard College, gave a less heralded but importantly related address here.

In the elegant Wiener Börsensäle, the historic former stock exchange in a city whose vulnerability to Islam symbolized tensions between Europe and Muslim culture for centuries, Buruma spoke on "The Virtues and Limits of Cosmopolitanism," presenting sophisticated context for an idea at the core of Obama's approach in Cairo.

Cosmopolitanism is a "tricky" notion, Buruma observed. In one regard, we think of it as "a positive term denoting a high degree of cultivation and even glamour." We recognize, as per the Oxford English Dictionary, that it connotes "ease in many different countries and cultures." In another regard, Buruma noted, the "same word, spoken with a sneer and contempt," and often preceded by "bourgeois" or "rootless," played an ugly role in Nazi and Soviet propaganda. In that slanderous argot, the "cosmopolitan," being "of too many places," simply "cannot be one of us" — whoever we may be.

Buruma's etymology lesson, appropriately offered in a "Jan Patocka Memorial Lecture" honoring the Prague Spring philosopher who inspired Václav Havel's own openmindedness, suggests the delicate intellectual maneuver Obama tried to pull off in Cairo. There he expressed what lies behind many of his surface "nonpartisan" positions: a cosmopolitan ideal of the American thinker. The thinker, that is, committed to cooperative conversation, a figure first powerfully delineated by Richard Rorty in his neopragmatist works, then echoed in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (W.W. Norton, 2006) by Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Ghanaian-American philosopher whose leadership in many American high-cultural organizations parallels Obama's own ascent.

As Appiah noted in his book, cosmopolitanism dates back to the fourth-century Cynics, who "rejected the conventional view that every civilized person belonged to a community among communities." Stoics from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius picked up the idea, as did St. Paul ("There is neither Jew nor Greek ... for ye are all one in Christ Jesus") and thinkers from Kant to Arendt and Derrida. For Appiah, two strands "intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives."

The special "trickiness" of cosmopolitanism for an American president is to shape it in the face of a double challenge: maintaining pride in the allure of America's own values, while resisting the bluster of academic Americanists who often exuberantly exalt our pluses over our minuses. Even a relatively skeptical sort, such as British-born Simon Schama in his The American Future: A History (just published in the United States by Ecco), gushes over America's "perennial capacity for reinvention" and declares that the "American future is all vision, numinous, unformed, lightheaded with anticipation."

William H. Goetzmann, a professor emeritus of history and American studies at the University of Texas at Austin, stands as a current specimen of the highly appreciative Americanist. In his recent Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought From Paine to Pragmatism (Basic Books), Goetzmann announces his theme as "the American quest for the climactic model of world civilization that not only would incorporate the best ideas, the best lifestyles, and the most important spiritual values, but also would forever remain free and open to the new. It would be the world's first truly cosmopolitan civilization."

He properly begins the book with Thomas Paine, who insisted that "the cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind." Paine believed, Goetzmann reminds us, that "America was God's country of the future," with its "spirit of revival, constant regeneration, and future-oriented habits of pragmatic thinking." The author writes that Paine, like other Revolutionary leaders, helped shape certain Enlightenment habits of mind into "traditional American values," among which are "a reverence for principles, particularly individual liberty, a dedication to reason and the rational solution, a belief in order and at the same time constant change, [and] a talent for practicality."

Obama plainly agrees with some of those views, but he proved subtler on his five-day international trip. He signaled what makes us wonderful without declaring that we're wonderful. Leaving business moguls and Americanists at home, he relied on an entourage of ideas. The New York Times and others have joked that Obama increasingly sounds like a professor in chief, and there's truth to that. But professors need students to sign up for their courses and agree to be graded. Obama, by once again sticking his neck out in front of free agents — a foreign audience — continued the process of fashioning himself as both philosopher in chief and cosmopolitan in chief.

The first part of Obama's Cairo teach-in combined the best of rhetoric and philosophy. In the shrewd tradition of Isocrates and Aristotle, the president softened up his audience in Cairo University's ornate auditorium by quoting the Koran and dispensing rich praise. He related how Islamic culture had given us "the order of algebra, our magnetic compass and tools of navigation, our mastery of pens and printing, our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed." Despite next launching into a sustained "on the one hand, on the other hand" structure, he sidestepped what might be called the Bernard Lewis counterpoint to Islam: "But what have you done for us lately?"

Obama balanced almost every point in favor of Israel as a Jewish state with one that favored Palestinian Arabs. That his audience didn't immediately absorb the lesson in evenhandedness was apparent. The audience applauded only points directly in Islam's or the Arab world's self-interest. Though Obama observed that "the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied," he chose not to add that "the day this audience applauds such a point, made in the interest of others, is the day peace will come." That might have driven home his point far more strongly. But it would not have been Obama — cool, polite, generous, cosmo.

All the same, he imparted rules for philosophical discourse: "We must say openly the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another, and to seek common ground." At its core, his teaching was ethical and political, using the intellectual tools of logic to illuminate hypocrisy and contradiction: "None of us should tolerate these extremists," he said. "They have killed in many countries. They have killed people of different faiths — but more than any other, they have killed Muslims. Their actions are irreconcilable with the right of human beings, the progress of nations, and with Islam. The holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind."

Without weighing the pros and cons of American egalitarianism, Obama simply affirmed that "a woman who is denied an education is denied equality." Countering Machiavelli without mentioning Madison, he spoke straight to the prince: "You must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party." Weaving the ethical, political, and pragmatic together, Obama told Palestinians that if they forswear violence and take the high road, à la Gandhi and King, they will get their state.

During the final two days of his international lecture tour, in Germany and France, policy again vanished behind Obama's philosophical nonnegotiables, boldly submitted as starting points for negotiation. At Buchenwald, addressing Holocaust denial, Obama denounced "a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful." At Omaha Beach, the president followed stories of heroic soldiers with a hybrid principle of existential pragmatism, pitch perfect for the occasion and redolent of Camus, whom Elie Wiesel had quoted the day before.

"Our history has always been the sum total of the choices made and the actions taken by each individual man and woman," said Albert Obama. "It has always been up to us." Schama himself, reviewing the oratory, dubbed Obama "our new American Pericles."

Over all, though, Obama's most singular philosophical breakthrough was to artfully project the cosmopolitan idea that the U.S. president must care about non-Americans. True, Obama observed months ago that he's the president of the United States, not the president of China, and understandably must put the needs and safety of Americans first. But to an extraordinary extent, Obama effectively announced that the U.S. president, because of the United States' effect on and involvement with the rest of the world, must think of other global citizens as constituents.

A truly cosmopolitan culture permits its members to choose different styles of life and thought, including antiquated ones, as long as they don't harm the neighbors. Obama, like no president before him, has notified the rest of the world that the United States will continue to export its philosophy, ethos, and political theory — but through conversation, not declamation, seeking free adoption, not grudging acquiescence.

Philosopher prez and cosmopolitan in chief. After all this time, you figure, we were entitled to one. It looks as if we've got him.

Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer,teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.