A Necessary Man - 5

PART V: THE PHILOSOPHER OF GEOGRAPHY
[From the text "Milton Santos (1926-2001), A Necessary Man" (2001), by Miguel Panadero Moya Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha]

For some time already, the health of professor Milton Santos, called the philosopher of Geography by some colleagues, had required serious care. Finally his health became worse in the last weeks of last June, and on the twenty-fourth he passed away. The sun, in its apparent annual displacement, had fled to the other tropic, leaving Sâo Paulo with the "friagem" of its subtropical winter, at the time his burial was taking place in the Cemetery of Peace, in the first hours of that Sâo Paulo afternoon, accompanied by many friends and colleagues. The press of the great city gave testimony of his disappearance. The network of internet users immediately covered the planet with the news of the event. The Brasilian Association of Geographers would thank later the messages of sympathy received from all parts of the world. Milton Santos left an incomparable body of work in the geographical and humanistic environments. He was an intellectual committed to society and the excluded, a citizen that gathered the knowledge of the world of his time to think of the needs of his country, of the role of intellectuals and of the contribution of geography to the comprehension of our material and social environment. A hopeful man, he wrote a few days before dying that "By definition, an intellectual life and the refusal to assume ideas do not combine… The true intellectual is the man who seeks, tirelessly, the truth, but not only to enjoy it intimately, but to tell, write, and support it in public", and therefore "intellectual activity is never comfortable"

He noticed that "observers of the university, in the past and in the present, fear for their present destiny, since protest demonstrations derived from its practices are rare, leaving, at times, the impression that the academy may prefer the situation of mere witnesses of history, instead of assuming a role of guide in search of better roads for society"; "when the intellectuals reject that duty, whatever the circumstances, a cloak of darkness covers social life, as the possible debate turns, by nature, false"; and finally, "the authentic strength of the university comes from the academic spirit shared by professors and students…" and "the outer strength of the university… is fatally injured if the ideas and practices of the academic spirit are abandoned in favour of pragmatic considerations".

The above lines belong to his article called "O intellectual anónimo", published at the beginning of June in the Sâo Paulo press as a contribution to the needed university reformation, when he was fighting against the progress of his illness. Milton Santos was a necessary man. The reproduction of his words here, as a small sample of his message, a universal message in so far as it transcends the territorial context where they were written, seems to us a small testimony of the homage he deserves.