Umberto Galimbereti will be at the Santa Chiara Auditorium in Trento on Wednesday 21 February 2024 with "L 'ethica del Viandante"
The West has two roots: the Greek world and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Although they open up completely different horizons, both describe a world endowed with order and stability. But we live in the age of technology. The enchantment of the typical world of the ancients is over. The disenchantment of the moderns, who still acted according to a horizon of meaning and an end, is also over. The technique does not tend to a purpose, it does not open up scenarios of salvation, it does not reveal the truth: the technique works. Ethics, as a form of acting in view of ends, celebrates its impotence. The world is now regulated by doing as pure production of results. The only possible ethic, writes Umberto Galimberti, is that of the traveller. Unlike the traveller, the traveller has no destination. His nomadic path, far from being a wandering anarchist, takes charge of the absence of a purpose. The wayfarer pushes his steps forward, but no longer with the intention of finding something, the home, the homeland, love, truth, salvation. Walk so as not to lose the figures of the landscape. And so he discovers the emptiness of law and the sleep of politics, still oblivious to the one condition common to humanity: like the Dantean Ulysses, all men are frontier men. Today man knows that he is not in the centre. The ethic of the traveller is opposed to the anthropological ethic of the domination of the Earth. It denounces our model of civilization and highlights that its spread throughout the planet is equivalent to the end of the biosphere. The humanism of domination is a humanism without a future. The traveller, on the other hand, travels the earth without owning it, because he knows that life belongs to nature. This is how Galimberti guides us: "The ethic of the traveller initiates these thoughts. They are all thoughts still to be thought, but the landscape they unfolded is already our unstable, provisional and unfinished home".
