kosmopolitēs

Kosmopolitēs is the Stoic name for what a human being is, on the philosophy's own account. Not a citizen of Athens or Rome. Not a member of a tribe. A citizen of the cosmos — the ordered universe of rational beings, of which one's own polis, family, and community are subsets.

The term predates Stoicism. Diogenes the Cynic, asked where he came from, answered kosmopolitēs. The Stoics inherited the word and gave it doctrinal weight. For Marcus Aurelius, in Meditations 4.4: if our intellectual part is common, the reason also, in respect of which we are rational beings, is common: if this is so, common also is the reason which commands us what to do and what not to do; if this is so, there is a common law also; if this is so, we are fellow-citizens; if this is so, we are members of some political community; if this is so, the world is in a manner a state.

The doctrine is the cosmic application of oikeiōsis — the natural impulse of self-care, extended through reason to its full scope, and presupposes the shared logos that makes all rational beings genuine fellow citizens. The first oikeiōsis is recognition of one's own body and welfare. The second is recognition of one's family. The third, neighbours. The fourth, countrymen. The fifth and final, all rational beings, regardless of city, tribe, or nation. The kosmopolitēs is the practitioner who has recognised the fifth.

The doctrine is not a political programme. The Stoics did not believe the cosmopolis could be achieved as a political reality through any specific reform. The cosmopolis is a moral fact — the actual community of all rational beings, present whether or not it is recognised. The political task may be to build institutions that respect this fact better, but the moral task is daily: the contraction of Hierocles' circles, performed by individuals, in their actual lives.

The doctrine is also not equality-of-care. The circles remain circles; the differentiation is real. The kosmopolitēs owes more to his child than to a stranger; more to his neighbour than to a person on another continent. What he refuses is the further claim that the outer circles owe him nothing. They do. The duty diminishes by distance, but it does not vanish at any radius.