‘The wild-goose is more of a cosmopolite than we’: encountering the untranslatable, becoming cosmopolitan

Abstract Taking Dewey's cosmopolitan call as a point of departure, this paper attends to another voice of American philosophy—that of Henry D. Thoreau, as revived by Stanley Cavell. I try to read Cavell's ‘Walden in Tokyo' as an exemplification of his ordinary language philosophy in its cross-cultural dimensions. Cavell's discussion invites the reader to reconsider what we mean by ‘understanding' ‘different' ‘cultures'. My hope is to show in the process the point of the title of Cavell's essay. Among the various entry points to cultural and cross-cultural matters I consider, a particular focus is given to Cavell’s idea of philosophy as translation. As a broader implication of this, I draw out an alternative possibility of becoming cosmopolitan: what happens in the very moment of encountering the untranslatable provides us with an occasion for the transfiguration of our lives. We cannot encounter different cultures as other cultures if we remain fixed within expectations of reciprocal interaction. The teaching of Walden is always indirect, and its purpose is not to moralize about the virtues of acknowledging differences and mutual understanding. This has implications for the education of global citizenship.