In 1966, Hannah Arendt defined modernity as an era with a “crisis character.” Speaking of “breakdowns of all traditional authorities,” of the “many crises in almost all fields of human endeavor,” Arendt wrote books such as Between Past and Future – between a past that “has lost its unquestioned validity” and a radically contingent future – in which she presented essays on The End of Tradition, The Crisis in Culture, The Crisis in Education. Her work as a whole can be understood as a response to these crises.

In these years, I witnessed “with others” these crises intertwining: there is even a crisis of tourism. The tourist is tired of dates. And the guide is tired of commercializing history to earn 5 stars. More broadly, there is the crisis of attention, of the “eye that never rests” (N. Postman). And there is the crisis of anxiety (despite the modern promise of “control” and “predictability”), of loneliness, labor, ecology, politics, and the reactions – above all nostalgic reactionarisms of mythical “traditions” – that accentuate the crises: tribalisms, neo-imperialisms, militarisms.

So: to stop and think, itinerantly, physically, humanly.

And I think of two insufficiencies:

Insufficiency of the academic tradition. I owe my formation to the academy, to supervisors, professors, and colleagues. I hope that universities, assaulted by the crises of our time, preserve their scholastic rigor, theoretical diversity, nuanced thought, and freedom of research. Its virtues and contradictions make it vulnerable. Sliced into technical specialties, many academics lack the resources to see the “whole,” to speak with the “public,” and to imagine criteria different from their own. Grounding its authority in “typography” (texts, contexts, books, monographs, papers), the academy runs the risk of being left without a language to communicate its own crisis. I wish for the academy to be like the “past” defined by Arendt: even losing legitimacy, let it continue to exist. For these and other reasons, I seek lines that are anchored in the academy, but actualized outside of it.

Insufficiency of techno-optimism. On the other hand, there is the utopian fervor about this future that is always coming to save us, this time not as divine eschatology, but as a “solution” to the “problems” of the human condition, education included: “Learn,” I read in an online advertisement, “like watching Netflix.” Between molding myself to the vision of men like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, I prefer to listen to “white men” like Aristotle (not so white), for whom practical thought (ethical-political-existential) can only be “learned” in practice, that is, in life, acting, suffering, day after day, year after year – learning mathematics and living are different activities; like Kant, for whom (on behalf of almost all philosophers) the questions of philosophy – what it is to be human, how to live a dignified life, how to be free – cannot be answered in a “scientific,” objective manner; like Nietzsche, who associated thinking with “learning to see,” and “dancing,” with the “feet,” “concepts,” “with the pen.”

Perhaps it is still worth revisiting Victor Klemperer, who defined totalitarian language as a “language that thinks and feels” for us. Do we want a language that thinks and feels for us?

So, along with speculating on what AI can do for us, I also propose thinking about what we can do for ourselves.

To continue reading about an itinerant education, return to the manifesto here.