Francuski
What is the point of travelling? Although the question no longer comes up today, it was the subject of serious quarrels for three centuries: at the time, it was not self-evident that people could travel for no particular reason – merely for the pleasure of “going somewhere else.” From the mid-16th century until the end of the 18th century, the Republic of Letters thus became the theatre of a controversy over the usefulness of travelling, particularly as a means of education. Are there any good reasons to travel without being obliged to do so? Of what use is a practice which is also motivated by this ambiguous pleasure known as curiosity? Modern times have seen a rise and decline of the debate over travel, whose philosophical challenges are obvious: it shows the importance given by the “new culture” to the issue of education and its correlation with a concept of humanity “in the making,” whose education demands an experience of the world and taking a detour through all the things that comprise it – a requirement manifested by the presence of such metaphors of the world as “book” or “theatre.”
