A pair of pathetic peripatetics

Last week, as Rita's sister Sandra was looking after Helena Iara, she lifted our baby's hands above her head as she stood up, and the little girl began to walk.  With a lot of help, of course, but even so, it is quite striking to watch a baby as small as she is stepping along the ground, shouting with joy at each step.  The day afterward, Rita and I took some pictures of these steps:

I have always found it fascinating that one of the most influential schools of classical philosophy called itself the "Walkers": the Peripatetics, founded by Aristotle in the 4th Century BC.  Many of the philosophical schools started with rather strange names, including the stoics (because they met under the stoá, or common porches) or the cynics (who took the kuon, or dog, as their symbol as a way to symbolize their affront to authority.  Some people say that the Peripatetics took their name because Aristotle liked to walk as he lectured, others because their members were to wander the world to teach others.  Regardless, it is strange that the most establishment and staid of the schools would choose a name having to do with movement.

I didn't start off talking with Helena about Aristotle, though.  I told her a joke from Calvin and Hobbes: "What if someone calls us a pair of pathetic paripatetics?" Calvin asks his friend.  After the pause (one of the most important innovations Bill Watterson brought to the cmic strip was the idea of dead time), Hobbes responds, "I've never heard of anyone taking the time to rhyme weird insults."  "But shouldn't we have a ready retort?"

The joke is even more clever than it seems, given that "pathos" (the root of pathetic), which meant both suffering and passivity, was the thing that the Peripatetics, the Stoics, and many of the rest of the philosophical schools of the ancient world were trying to avoid.  A pathetic peripatetic isn't just a weird insult: it's a metonymy for failure.  The Peripatetic's philosophy, it appears, was insufficient to guard him from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, which was the whole point of philosophy: to be a shield against the suffering endemic to the world.  Of course I explained all of this to Helena, but what she really liked was the alliteration and rhythm of the words.

It's interesting how often walking comes up as a philosophical or religious practice: I told Helena about mendicant monks in Theravada Buddhism, about the vision quests of Native North Americans, and about the way that the prophet Micah summarized the message of the Hebrew religion: "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"  (The King James translation doesn't catch the heavy political tones of Mishpat and Hesed, the words translated as justice and kindness, but that's for me to explain to Helena Iara another day)  Jesus called his philosophy the 'hodos, the path or way, and he's hardly the only thinker to do so.  Walking, wandering, wondering, all of them seem to get mixed up as a way to talk about philosophical reflection, but without a mirror.  Perhaps it's a way for us in the west to think through the shift in perspectives that is so central to Tupi-Guaraní philosophy.

After all of these digressions with Helena, I finished with the story of Justin Martyr, who's confessions are also about walking... walking from one philosophical school to another as a way to find truth, happiness, and some kind of justice in an unfair world.  Though we don't generally associate Justin with a good sense of humor, one of the things I remember from my attempts to translate his writing in grad school is how he made fun of the cynics and stoics, the epicurians and the peripatetics.  What's interesting, however, is that the last philosophical school he found, the one that gave him the most useful way of thinking, was Christianity.  We see it as a religion today, but in the 2nd century, it was a philosophy: a powerful one, one that made people willing to rise up in revolution against the Romans or be martyred in hundreds of icky ways, but a philosophy.  Away to walk, we might say.

It's pretty exciting that Helena Iara ca walk and think every day a little more, and with a little more autonomy.