Cynical Cosmopolitanism

The Ancient Cynic Diogenes of Sinope was the first to call himself a cosmopolitan because the Cynic true life, as a living according to phusis rather than nomos (law), enabled the negation of the polis. The polis, which divides according to citizenship, was shown to be nothing and Diogenes became a citizen of the world (kosmopolitês) by default. I link this to the Cynic sense of phusis as ‘being’, rather than the usual ‘nature’, concluding that this cosmopolitanism by way of phusis was universal in a way that later cosmopolitanisms by way of kosmos (as in Stoicism) could never be.