History of the European
Alpine Academy
The European Alpine Academy has had a long gestation period. In the late 1980’s I was a member of a research group on modernity at the University of Tel Aviv. Our select group of fellows was intellectually competitive, self-confident and sure of itself. We confronted our teachers head on, distinguished professors, like George L. Mosse and Gert Mattenklott. They quickly brought one point across to us: True learning begins with Socratic humility. As we walked down the palm-lined streets of Tel Aviv, deep in conversations or even heated discussions, it came to me that this is how Plato’s academy must have been. Many years later, I met Gert Mattenklott by chance in Berlin, at the Café Einstein. As I waxed wistful about the bygone era of our Platonic Academy, Mattenklott replied in his famous gravelly voice: The past is always, also now. Don’t just talk about the past, do something. This admonition stung, and left a deep impression on me. Decades later, I became enthralled by a philosopher who did something. The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler was not content with merely interpreting the world, he wanted to change it. He was deeply concerned with the direction that contemporary society was taking.
In his many books, he described our present age as a Hyper-industrical epoch, destined to lead to the de-emancipation of individuals caught in webs of media and digital technology. In 2010, he then founded his own school of philosophy, not in fashionable Paris, but in a silo of a former flourmill near Epineuil-le-Fleuriel, a town of some 400 inhabitants, centrally isolated in central France. Deeply impressed by his magnum opus, La technique et le temps (1994, English: Technics and Time, 1998), I contacted him to learn more about his philosophical academy. As a philosophical “calling card,” I then set down to write a declaration of love to philosophy (Metalogicon, 2016), dedicating it to Bernard Stiegler. I was eager to go to Epineuil-le-Fleuriel to experience his summer academy first hand, but in the summer of 2017, I had a previous engagement. Being not so well conversant in French, I did not get his hint that I should come sooner rather than later. Already a major thinker in France, he was becoming famous, travelling the globe. Then in 2020, he suddenly died. In 2021, the European Alpine Academy was founded in the town of Ettal, a town in upper Bavaria, population ca. 827 and dwindling.
