Wanderlust: A History of Walking Read Online Free PDF Page A

Aristotle was ready to set up a school in Athens, the city assigned him a plot ofland. “In it,” explains Felix Grayeff’s history of this school, “stood shrines to Apollo and the Muses, and perhaps other smaller buildings. . . . A covered colonnade led to the temple of Apollo, or perhaps connected the temple with the shrine of the Muses; whether it had existed before or was only built now, is not known. This colonnade or walk (peripatos) gave the school its name; it seems that it was here, at least at the beginning, that the pupils assembled and the teachers gave their lectures. Here they wandered to and fro; for this reason it was later said that Aristotle himself lectured and taught while walking up and down.” The philosophers who came from it were called the Peripatetic philosophers or the Peripatetic school, and in English the word peripatetic means “one who walks habitually and extensively.” Thus their name links thinking with walking. There is something more to this than the coincidence that established a school of philosophy in a temple of Apollo with a long colonnade—slightly more.
    The Sophists, the philosophers who dominated Athenian life before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, were famously wanderers who often taught in the grove where Aristotle’s school would be located. Plato’s assault on the Sophists was so furious that the words sophist and sophistry are still synonymous with deception and guile, though the root sophia has to do with wisdom. The Sophists, however, functioned something like the chautauquas and public lecturers in nineteenth-century America, who went from place to place delivering talks to audiences hungry for information and ideas. Though they taught rhetoric as a tool of political power, and the ability to persuade and argue was crucial to Greek democracy, the Sophists taught other things besides. Plato, whose half-fabricated character Socrates is one of the wiliest and most persuasive debaters of all times, is somewhat disingenuous when he attacks the Sophists.
    Whether or not the Sophists were virtuous, they were often mobile, as are many of those whose first loyalty is to ideas. It may be that loyalty to something as immaterial as ideas sets thinkers apart from those whose loyalty is tied to people and locale, for the loyalty that ties down the latter will often drive the former from place to place. It is an attachment that requires detachment. Too, ideas are not as reliable or popular a crop as, say, corn, and those who cultivate them often must keep moving in pursuit of support as well as truth. Many professions in many cultures, from musicians to medics, have been nomadic, possessed of a kind of diplomatic immunity to the strife between communities that keeps others local. Aristotle himself had at first intended to become a doctor, as his fatherhad been, and doctors in that time were members of a secretive guild of travelers who claimed descent from the god of healing. Had he become a philosopher in the era of the Sophists, he might have been mobile anyway, for settled philosophy schools were first established in Athens in his time.
    It is now impossible to say whether or not Aristotle and his Peripatetics habitually walked while they talked philosophy, but the link between thinking and walking recurs in ancient Greece, and Greek architecture accommodated walking as a social and conversational activity. Just as the Peripatetics took their name from the peripatos of their school, so the Stoics were named after the stoa, or colonnade, in Athens, a most unstoically painted walkway where they walked and talked. Long afterward, the association between walking and philosophizing became so widespread that central Europe has places named after it: the celebrated Philosophenweg in Heidelberg where Hegel is said to have walked, the Philosophen-damm in Königsberg that Kant passed on his daily stroll (now replaced by a railway station), and