Futures.

Of Philosophy

Plato compared philosophy to a second navigation, the one that starts when favourable winds stop blowing and the ship remains immobile. That is to say, when sailing has become impossible. Philosophy is the art of navigating what is incomprehensible, what is ungovernable. The philosopher is a navigator who gazes at the stars to find a way at sea, to take new, unprecedented directions.

Thereafter, we have become used to perpetuating our present. Until very recently, it had seemed that our future has been lying ahead of us, already mastered or progressively masterable. However, in the rough seas of contemporary existence, we are carried by waves that threaten to submerge us in increasingly unthinkable and unprecedented world, marked by outbreaks of pandemics, planetary ecological disasters, and large-scale extinctions. The navigator has fallen off the deck and is now adrift in the open sea.

The Planetary Conversations seek to activate practices of thought that aim at embracing the sea and making the earth ungovernable, decolonizing the future from our present with its belief that everything will be decided by us, that everything has to do with us and has to respond to us. Futures swarm. They become multitudes when freed from the tyranny of a unique, totalitarian present, which has dared to englobe the time to come.

Giovanbattista Tusa, Fall 2020