If you say that someone talks the talk but does not walk the walk, you mean that they do not act in a way that agrees with the things they say.
Well, we walk and talk, walking the talk. Walking is philosophical practice itself.
The transliteration of ancient Greek word περιπατητικός (peripatētikós), which means "of walking" or "given to walking about" define the term "peripatetic". The Peripatetic school, founded by Aristotle, was actually known simply as the Peripatos. Aristotle's school came to be so named Peripatetic school because of the peripatoi ("walkways", some covered or with colonnades) of the Lyceum where the members met. The legend that the name came from Aristotle's alleged habit of walking while lecturing may have started with Hermippus of Smyrna.
Philosophers, writers and artists have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, writing and painting.
Among the walking philosophers are Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and some of the great composers - Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mahler. They all loved taking long daily walks.
In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.”
The idea behind philosophical practice via "philosophical walks" is well presented in the book A Philosophy of Walking. The author is the French philosopher Frederic Gros. He tells us that walking is a route to entirely being ourselves and experiencing the sublime. He has a bias towards the wondering hikes of Nietzsche and Kerouac but has a place for urban strollers too.
“None of your knowledge, your reading, your connections will be of any use here: two legs suffice, and big eyes to see with. Walk alone, across mountains or through forests. You are nobody to the hills or the thick boughs heavy with greenery. You are no longer a role, or a status, not even an individual, but a body, a body that feels sharp stones on the paths, the caress of long grass and the freshness of the wind. When you walk, the world has neither present nor future: nothing but the cycle of mornings and evenings. Always the same thing to do all day: walk. But the walker who marvels while walking (the blue of the rocks in a July evening light, the silvery green of olive leaves at noon, the violet morning hills) has no past, no plans, no experience. He has within him the eternal child. While walking I am but a simple gaze.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
“Think while walking, walk while thinking, and let writing be but the light pause, as the body on a walk rests in contemplation of wide open spaces.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
“Walking: it hits you at first like an immense breathing in the ears. You feel the silence as if it were a great fresh wind blowing away clouds. There’s the silence of woodland. Clumps and groves of trees form shifting, uncertain walls around us. We walk along existing paths, narrow winding strips of beaten earth. We quickly lose our sense of direction. That silence is tremulous, uneasy. Then there’s the silence of tough summer afternoon walks across the flank of a mountain, stony paths, exposed to an uncompromising sun.”
― Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
There is, however, a long and rich history of walking as a subject of, as well as an inspiration and technique for, writing: from Socrates to Basho to William Wordsworth, Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin.
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