From Kittens and Cats: A Book of Tales (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1911) | Eulalie Osgood Grover / Public Domain
We are delighted to publish the address delivered at the 2026 New School for Social Research Recognition Ceremony by Simon Critchley, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at NSSR. Minor edits have been made for brevity.
Well, it’s been another peaceful, happy and crisis-free year at The New School. We here onstage are all feeling very relaxed and assured in our continued employment at this fair institution. All in all, a year of spectacular positivity.
I’ve never given a speech at a recognition ceremony before. A word about that word: recognition. It is, as some of you know, a very loaded term for many people in this room. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel made an entire philosophical career out of it. Wars of varying scale have been fought over slightly different meanings of the word. There are graduate students within fifty feet of me who are still actively troubled by it and saying under their breath: no recognition without redistribution. Not Hegel but Marx. This evening, we’re using the word recognition to mean: There will be cake at the reception. Sadly, there won’t be alcohol because TNS banned alcohol from public events last summer, which is a deeply silly thing to do. I hope you brought a hipflask or a secret stash.
I want to speak today, briefly, about three things: about where you are, about what you have done, and about what—God help us—comes next.
Where you are. The New School is, as you know, an experiment that began in 1919, when a group of slightly cantankerous intellectuals decided that the universities of America were not quite up to the seriousness of the modern condition, and resolved to make a new one. Then, in the 1930s and 40s, when European thought was being thrown out of European windows, this place opened its doors and called itself a University in Exile—and welcomed in the people who would go on to define a century of philosophy and social thought. Hannah Arendt taught here. Hans Jonas taught here. Leo Strauss taught here. Reiner Schürmann taught here. Aron Gurwitsch, Agnes Heller, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, the list goes on, and it is—let’s be honest—a slightly intimidating list to inherit. But you should not be intimidated. You should be emboldened. Because what unites those names is not genius, although there was plenty of that. What unites them is that they each understood that thinking is a form of practical responsibility for the world. They thought, as Arendt would say and the man that hired me here two decades and more ago, Dick Bernstein, used to say, “without bannisters.” They thought without bannisters. And so have you.
Which brings me to what you have done. You have spent years—some of you for what feels like most of a decade—sitting in rooms on Fifth Avenue or somewhere between 11th and 16th Streets, and on Zoom in your kitchens and bedrooms, arguing about what a concept is, or what a community is, or what justice could possibly mean in a world that seems determined to misunderstand the word. You have read until your eyes watered. You have written sentences and then crossed them out. You have sat in front of seminar tables defending positions that, by week six of the semester, you were no longer entirely sure you held—and that is not a failure of conviction, that is what it feels like to think honestly. You have argued with your advisors. You have argued with your friends. You have argued, most importantly, with yourselves. And along the way, somewhere between the third espresso and the fourth draft, something happened. You became scholars. You became, in the older and grander sense of the word, intellectuals (and there is nothing wrong with that). You became people for whom the unexamined life is, as the person who founded philosophy two and a half millennia ago and who got executed by the city of Athens for his trouble insisted, not worth living. The unexamined life is simply not worth the trouble.
I want to dwell on this for a moment because I think it matters. The education you have received here is not, in any obvious sense, a marketable skill. What you have, instead, is something stranger, something stronger and more durable. You have a tolerance for difficulty. You have a suspicion of slogans. You have the patience to hold a question open long enough to see what it is actually asking. In a culture that increasingly mistakes speed for thought and noise for argument, this is not a small inheritance. It is, I would say, a form of citizenship—and right now a rather urgently needed one.
(And let me let you in on a secret, these are the virtues that employers are looking for, increasingly in an AI-dominated world. You have discrimination, you have critical judgment, you have taste, you have built in bullshit detectors. This is what any employer worth the name wants.)
And so—what comes next. This is the part of the speech where, traditionally, I am supposed to tell you to follow your dreams. I will not do that, because I am a philosopher, and I am suspicious of dreams. Dreams, as Freud knew, are mostly about anxiety and unresolved business with one’s parents. What I will say instead is this: Follow your seriousness. Follow the questions that have refused to leave you alone. The ones that woke you up at three in the morning during your first year and are, if you are honest, still standing at the foot of the bed. Those questions are not obstacles to your life. They are your life. They are the thread.
Some of you will go on to teach. Some of you will go on to write. Some of you will become therapists. Some will go into law, or into policy, or into organizing, or into the arts, or into business, or into work that does not yet have a name because you are about to invent it. Some of you, if I know New School for Social Research graduates at all, will do four of those things simultaneously and not complain about being tired. Wherever you end up, take the seminar room with you. Take what you have done here with you. Take the habit of listening before speaking. Take the willingness to change your mind when the argument is better than yours. Take the conviction—and this is a New School conviction, going all the way back to 1919—that the world is not finished, and that thought has something to do with refusing to let it finish badly. Thinking makes the world better. And you are thinkers.
I will end with something I have always loved from Wallace Stevens, the greatest philosophical poet in English in the last century. He wrote that “after the final no there comes a yes / and on that yes the future world depends.” That is, I think, the small, stubborn, unreasonable thing you are being asked to carry from here. Not a yes to everything—that could get you into serious trouble. But a yes underneath the no’s. A yes to the work. A yes to one another. A yes, ultimately, to the strange and unfinished and frankly improbable project of being a thinking person in a world that very often would prefer you weren’t.
