He who has attained only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other than a wanderer on the earth—though not as a traveller to a final destination: for this destination does not exist. But he will watch and observe and keep his eyes open to see what is really going on in the world; for this reason he may not let his heart adhere too firmly to any individual thing; within him too there must be something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transcience […] when afterwards, if he relaxes quietly beneath the trees in the equanimity of his soul at morning, good and bright things will be thrown down to him from their tops and leafy hiding-places, the gifts of all those free spirits who are at home in mountain, wood and solitude, and who, like him, are, in their now joyful, now thoughtful way, wanderers and philosophers. Born out of the mysteries of dawn, they ponder on how, between the tenth and twelfth stroke of the clock, the day could present a face so pure, so light-filled, so cheerful and transfigured:—they seek the philosophy of the morning.1
Unlike travellers who, even when they go to a different place, never step out of their habitual world nor, thus, their habits, wanderers invite us to expose ourselves to the unusual, where it is possible to discover, but only for a night or a day, how the sky spans out over that land, how the night discloses unfamiliar constellations in the sky, how religion congregates hopes, how tradition makes a people, solitude a desert, inscription a history, rivers a meander, land a furrow, in that quick-fire succession of world experiences which elude any attempt to fasten them down and arrange them in an orderly sequence. For wanderers know, beyond every project to, that totality is elusive, that non-sense contaminates sense, that the possible exceeds the real and that every project that attempts to understand and embrace the whole is madness.
With no destination on the horizon so as to miss none of the figures of the landscape, wanderers discover the emptiness of the law and the slumber of politics which have not yet come to see that all people are people of the frontier. Here lies the abyss differentiating wanderers and travellers, whose sight range, taking in the destination alone, makes them oblivious to the interval between the beginning and the end.
For those whose desire is to get there, whose aim is the most remote, or whose target may even be close by, the journey is nought. The lands they cross do not exist. Only the destination counts. They travel to get there, not for travelling’s sake. Thus the journey dies during the journey, it dies in every stage that brings them closer to the destination. And with the journey, the experience disclosed to the wanderers along the way, able to inhabit the landscape and to bid farewell to the landscape, dies too. […]
Shaking off the destination means letting ourselves be swept away by the current of life, no longer spectators but sailors, in some cases, like Dante’s Ulysses, marooned. Nietzsche, who is perhaps the best interpreter of nomadism, writes thus: “if that delight in seeking that drives sails to the undiscovered is in me, if a seafarer’s delight is in my delight: if ever my rejoicing has cried: “The shore has disappeared—now the last fetter falls from me, ’the boundless roars around me, far out glitter space and time, well then, come on! old heart!’”2 […]
If we are willing to surrender our deep-rooted convictions, whose depth is but that of an old habit, then the wanderer’s nomadism offers us a cultural model that educates because it does not immobilize, because it dis-locates, because it never offers a stable, safe ground on which to erect our constructions, because the openness that it asks for nears the abyss. Here there is nothing reassuring, yet the monotony of repetition, of following the same road over and over, with the same travel companions, without anyone to encounter, is nevertheless avoided.
The period we are living in has seen a dominion crumble. At once, it has intimated that migratory process that will blur the boundaries of the territories which oriented our geography. Habits and customs are becoming contaminated and, if “morality” or “ethics” signify custom, it is possible to postulate the end of our property-, territory- and boundary-based ethics, in favour of an emerging ethics which dispels with enclosures and certainties: the ethics of the wanderer.
It is an ethics that does not cling to the law, but to experience. For unlike the territorialized subject whose certainty lies in property, boundaries and law, wanderers cannot live without processing the diversity of experience. They seek the centre not in the lattice of boundaries but in those two poles that Kant pinpointed as the starry heavens and moral law3 which have always been the expression of the two extremes of every wanderer’s tensed life span.
Without a destination and without fixed points of departure or arrival, wanderers, with their ethics, can be the point of reference for humankind to come, as soon as history accelerates the recently begun processes of de-territorialization.
The end of the juridical subject whose intrinsic weakness is bounded by the law, and the birth of the subject who is less and less bound to the country’s laws and has to increasingly appeal to values that transcend the guarantee of legalism. “Neighbours”, less and less a mirror of myself and increasingly “other”, will oblige everyone to reckon with difference, just as one day, now a long time ago, we had to reckon with territory and property. Diversity will be the ground upon which ethical decisions will be grown, while the territory’s laws will become twisted like the parched branches of an arid tree.
The end of legalism and therefore of the subject as we knew them under the mantle of property, boundaries and law, and birth of the subject whose place is more difficult to find, incessant wanderers in a space that is not even guaranteed by the Aristotelian “sky of fixed stars”, because this sky has set for us too.
And with the sky, the earth, having discovered it is a land of protection and place of shelter. After cutting the anchors, the horizon dilates, its dilating obliterating it as a horizon, as a point of reference, as a meeting of the earth with its sky: “We have forsaken the land and gone to sea!” writes Nietzsche. “We have destroyed the bridge behind us—more so, we have demolished the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean; it is true, it does not always roar, and at times it lies there like silk and gold and dreams of goodness. But there will be hours when you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that has felt free and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Woe, when homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there—and there is no more ‘land’!”.4
1 F. Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches: Ein Buch für freie Geister (1878), Eng. trans. Human All-Too-Human. A Book for Free Spirits (1878-1879), § 638: “The Wanderer”, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 203–4.
2 F. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen (1883–1885), Eng. trans. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, London, Penguin, 1974, Part 3, “The Seven Seals (or: The Song of Yes And Amen)”.
3 I. Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788), tr. it. Critica della ragion pratica, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 1955, “Conclusione”, p. 199.
4 F. Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (2nd ed. 1887), Eng. trans. The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Excerpted from L’etica del viandante © 2023 Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore.