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, alongside 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 (Neil Postman). And there is the crisis of anxiety (despite the modern promise of control and predictability), of loneliness, labor, ecology, politics, and the reactions 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 conditions to see larger world-pictures, and to speak outside of their know-how. Grounding its authority in print culture, 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 problems of the human condition, education included: “Learn,” I read in an online ad, “like watching Netflix.” Between molding myself to the vision of men like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, I prefer to listen to Aristotle, for whom practical thought (ethical-political-existential) can only be learned in practice, that is, in life, acting, suffering, day after day — for learning mathematics and learning to live are fundamentally different activities; like Kant, for whom the questions of philosophy – what it is to be human, how to live a dignified life, how to be free etc. – cannot be answered in a scientific manner; like Nietzsche, who associated thinking with “learning to see,” and “dancing,” with the “feet,” “concepts,” “with the pen.”

Language, too, can be an instrument of paralysis. So it is worth revisiting Victor Klemperer, who defined totalitarian language as a language made “to paralyse” us “as personalities”, to think and feel for us.

Do we want a language that thinks and feels for us?

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