Abstract

An education for Cosmopolis is a kind of mediation between a cultural matrix and the meaning and value it confers on personal and communal self-appropriation, as genuine human beings, through history. The main strategy for a cosmopolitan educative integrates, around the notion of Cosmopolis, the tasks of an education conceived as a personal achievement and an education conceived as a legacy one generation shares with another. Cosmopolis, as a higher viewpoint of a culture, is based on the power of detachment and disinterestedness of human spirit; it is not an utopia nor an imaginative synthesis. A cosmopolitan education is radically emancipative. It involves a dialectical self-appropriation of the dynamic unit of human consciousness in the variables of development. Self-appropriation involves a fourfold conversion: psycho-affective, intellectual, moral, and religious. A cosmopolitan education also teaches us to think historically, to reach a world-cultural community, and to withdraw from practicality to save practicality. These thoughts are developed from the work of Bernard J. F. Lonergan.