Eco-ethica

Volume 9, 2020

Engagement and Philosophical Responsibility

Citizen of the World
Peter Kemp and the Hermeneutics of the Cosmopolitan Self

This text is dedicated to the memory of Peter Kemp (1937–2018) and his later philosophical project cultivating citizens of the world as a response to globalization. Inspired by Grundtvig, he developed world-citizenship from a post-post-national perspective, combining the aim for the equality of the people with equality of all mankind. In this presentation, Kemp is recognized as a “struggling” philosopher according to Ricoeur’s critical hermeneutics. As a horizon of understanding, the author brings in a discussion on the anthropological deficit of the new competition state (Ove Kaj Pedersen), generated by the shift from a moral determination of the self to an opportunistic economic man wholly motivated by self-interest and utility maximization. Conclusively, it is being argued that Kemp’s way of introducing Ricoeur into the field of education, by transforming his hermeneutics of the self into a hermeneutics of the cosmopolitan self, has simultaneously revealed how much Ricoeur is a profound universalistic thinker.