The following is the fourth installment of a four-part symposium republished here from the current edition of Modern Age: A Debate on Localism & Cosmopolitanism. Read from the beginning.

“You can’t be universal without being
provincial, can you?”
—Robert Frost

It seems to me that all the foregoing discussions of possible “cosmopolitanisms” have privileged the second half of that term over the first, offering us one or another form of “cosmopolitanism,” but all without a cosmos. The cosmos or “world” seems here to mean a global, transnational community—whether of atomic individuals, philosophic gentlemen, or religious communicants—and the question is whether our identity will be political (i.e. grounded in a particular and circumscribed human community) or transpolitical. For Webb, “invoking the name of a place” is synonymous with “falling back on one or another self-contained tradition or community.” A place is, apparently, nothing more than an area of such dimensions that a polis may be placed upon it. There is certainly no indication that it might be a piece of the earth that, if we love it sufficiently, will open our hearts and minds to the whole world of which it is a particular and beautiful manifestation, thereby placing us in spiritual communion with others who engage and love it in its other particular manifestations.

Robert Frost, imagining his final resting place, said, “I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” Although T. S. Eliot considered Frost too entirely a New England poet to serve as an illustration of characteristically American literature, the judgment of posterity seems to have proven Eliot wrong. Frost is at once a New England poet, a characteristically American poet, and a universal poet. Frost’s spiritual engagement was with the world we share, and it was a lover’s engagement because it was a local affair. When Webb holds up Eliot as a cosmopolitan “defending timeless and placeless principles of human flourishing,” one has to wonder how far he is willing to take this “placelessness.” Poets like Frost demonstrate that, contrary to Webb’s apparent assumption, language need not be placeless to be universal.

The contrast between Frost and Eliot is instructive for distinguishing the position I would want to defend from the one Webb proposes. Eliot’s universality is a rarefied kind, appealing primarily to a highly educated elite. It is responsive to its historical moment, and laden with cross-cultural symbolist interweavings that require ever more lengthy footnotes to decipher. This poetry is particularly suited to Webb’s cosmopolitan elite of “philosophers, literati, and broad-minded clerics” whose “pursuits, almost by definition, work best on universal terrain.”

It is exactly this odd conceit of “universal terrain” that I find implausible. All terrain is local terrain—and not only by definition, but in reality. Frost conjures his local flora, fauna, and folk with a wryly loving concreteness that can speak directly to anyone who takes the time to listen. By means of his poetic and contemplative insight, Frost makes this local terrain universally available to the imagination, in a way that gives us better eyes for any local terrain of our own to which we may take the time to give our attention. This kind of profound insight into the actual cosmos as it manifests its universal attributes in particular circumstances is the basis both of universally available poetry and of genuine philosophy. If poetry and philosophy have an ancient quarrel, it is because they are rivals in a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Aristotle is a genuine, universal philosopher in this sense; Marcus Aurelius is not. The concreteness of Aristotle’s thought, his profound insight into the workings and forms of nature, his keen awareness of how the features of a place affect the life lived in it, his defense of the household and political order whose integrity are preserved by their organization around cultivation of the land—all this reveals a profound attentiveness to the world we share as revealed in its particularity. Marcus Aurelius, on the other hand, was the inheritor of an abstract systematic account of the world, which he imbibed growing up in the rarefied precincts of the Roman imperial circle. He was somewhat broad-minded for a Stoic, in that he often entertained Epicurean conceptions of the cosmos as well. But both these systems are exactly that: conceptions, constructs of the mind that draw a conceptual map of the world and place that map between mind and world in order to foster detachment. They differ in this respect from Platonism and Aristotelianism, which cultivate open-ended inquiry into phenomena guided by a love for the goodness, beauty, and truth of the beings that present themselves to us on their own terms.