The Itinerant Posture

On the place from which I write

I have a name for where I stand when I write. I call it the itinerant posture. This piece is an attempt to describe it precisely — not as a method, which I have described elsewhere, but as a place. The ground beneath the argument. The existential location from which the words come.

It is not a comfortable place to describe, because describing it risks converting it into a doctrine, which would be the one thing it is not. But the risk of not describing it is greater. Without a name, the posture gets mistaken for things it resembles but is not: detachment, relativism, ironic distance, perpetual seeking. It is none of these. And the confusion matters, because what it actually is has consequences — philosophical, civic, personal — that the impostors do not.

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The philosophical tradition has several versions of the wanderer.

Socrates moves through Athens asking questions he already knows will disturb the answers. His itinerancy is a method, not a posture — the questions are instruments of the argument he is already making. He knows where he is going. The wandering is Socratic irony wearing sandals.

Diogenes sleeps in a barrel and tells Alexander to get out of his sunlight. His itinerancy is a performance of contempt for the world’s attachments. He moves through the world as proof that the world cannot touch him. The detachment is the point.

The Zen pilgrim walks from monastery to monastery, sits with each teacher until the teaching is exhausted, and moves on. Closer — but the movement is still oriented toward arrival. Enlightenment is the destination the pilgrim refuses to name but is nonetheless walking toward.

The postmodern ironist moves through frameworks the way a tourist moves through countries — collecting impressions, committing to nothing, maintaining the superior position of the one who sees through every claim without being taken in by any. The movement is a form of protection. Nothing can hurt you if nothing is real.

None of these is the itinerant posture.

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The nearest antecedent is Montaigne. The essay as a form of walking — the self encountered in motion rather than established in advance. Que sais-je? What do I know? The question asked without irony, with genuine open hands. Montaigne moves through ideas the way the itinerant moves through traditions: fully inside each one, genuinely changed by the encounter, not captured by it.

But Montaigne’s itinerancy is private. The tower, the library, the self turning on itself in the long afternoon. The movement is inward. What I am describing moves outward — toward the leper, the Samaritan, the anomalous datum, the political crisis, the friend whose prior needs to be tested, the reader who came looking for something they couldn’t name.

The itinerant posture is not a retreat from the world into honest uncertainty. It is a movement into the world from honest uncertainty. The difference is the direction.

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Here is what it feels like from the inside.

You enter a tradition — a philosophical framework, a religious text, a political argument, a body of scientific literature — without being told in advance what you will find. You bring your full attention. You stay long enough to find what is real there. You do not protect yourself from being changed by the encounter. And when the encounter is complete — when you have found what the tradition was pointing toward beneath the institutional accretions — you move on. Not because you were disappointed. Not because you found nothing. Because the real thing was never the institution housing it, and staying inside the institution would mean mistaking the container for the contents.

This is not relativism. The itinerant is not saying all traditions point to the same place or that no tradition is better than another. Some traditions have more signal than others. Some frameworks are more coherent, more honest, more willing to subject themselves to their own scrutiny. The itinerant has criteria. The itinerant gives ground when the argument requires it. The itinerant holds a falsification condition for every prior, including the ones they are standing on.

What the itinerant refuses is capture. The moment a tradition stops being an instrument of inquiry and becomes the object of protection — the moment the institution asks you to defend the framework rather than follow the evidence — is the moment to move.

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Heidegger named the condition the itinerant responds to: thrownness. We are always already inside a situation before we can reflect on it. We do not choose our language, our culture, our historical moment, the body we inhabit, the prior that was operating before we knew we had one. We find ourselves already here, already oriented, already caught in a web of meaning we did not choose and cannot fully see.

The usual responses to thrownness are two. The first is to deny it — to insist that through sufficient rigor, sufficient method, sufficient detachment, you can achieve the view from nowhere and examine your situation from outside it. This is the Cartesian response. It produces cathedrals: frameworks that protect themselves by claiming to stand outside the condition they are describing.

The second is to be paralyzed by it — to conclude that because you cannot get outside your situation, you cannot say anything reliable about it. This is the postmodern response at its weakest. It produces irony: the posture of the one who sees through everything and therefore cannot act.

The itinerant posture is a third response. You cannot get outside your situation. You are inside it, and it shaped you before you could question it. But you can move within it. You can bring full attention to the specific place you are standing, find what is real there, and then — and this is the move — keep walking. Not to escape thrownness. To inhabit it honestly. To be genuinely inside each encounter rather than hovering at a safe remove from all of them.

Presence without capture. That is the phrase I keep returning to. Not detachment — full presence. Not capture — the willingness to move when the evidence calls for it.

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There is a political dimension to this that I do not want to pass over.

The authoritarian personality — and I mean this in the precise psychological and political sense — is the person who cannot move. Who has found the tradition that answers all questions and now must defend it against the data. The strong man is necessarily wise. The nation is necessarily chosen. The hierarchy is necessarily natural. These are not conclusions. They are priors that have been elevated to sacred constants precisely because the person holding them cannot afford to let them be questioned. The framework is the identity. To question the framework is to dissolve the self.

The itinerant posture is the opposite of this — not as a political position but as an existential one. The self that can move is the self that is not staked on any particular framework being true. Which means it can follow the evidence. Which means it can look at the leper, the Samaritan, the anomalous datum, and ask what it is actually being told rather than what it needs to be told.

Dewey understood that this is not just a philosophical virtue. It is a democratic one. The republic is a community that can question its own priors. That can absorb the anomalous data of its own history — the founding compromises, the excluded populations, the gap between the declaration and the practice — and revise accordingly. A community of itinerants, in this sense. Pilgrims who have not yet arrived and know it, sailing in the night toward home, moving closer together without leaving anybody behind.

The enemies of the republic are people who have stopped moving. Who have arrived, declared themselves home, and are now defending the perimeter.

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I want to say something about what the itinerant posture costs, because I have not been honest about this yet and honesty is the point.

It costs community. The person who moves through traditions without being captured by any of them does not fully belong to any of them. The academy did not credential me. The church did not ordain me. The party did not endorse me. The institution did not promote me. These are not complaints — they are the structural consequence of the posture. You cannot be fully inside an institution and fully willing to question its foundations at the same time. The institution knows this. The excommunication of Spinoza was not an accident.

It costs certainty. The itinerant does not get to be sure. Does not get the comfort of the framework that has answered all the questions. Carries the falsification condition everywhere, including into the arguments they most believe. This is not modest performance. It is the actual condition of the posture. The compass points toward magnetic north, not true north. The navigator knows this and sails anyway.

What it does not cost — and this is the thing the tradition of detached wanderers always gets wrong — is care. The itinerant cares about the republic. Cares about the person in the encounter. Cares about the argument, the evidence, the anomaly that the framework cannot absorb. The movement is toward, not away. Presence, not distance.

This is the place I write from. Not above the argument. Inside it. Moving through it. Genuinely here, and genuinely not yet arrived.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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