Of Walkers and Talkers
Historical postscript to The Wonders of Walking
In The Healthy Jew’s previous column, I rhapsodised about walking.
Today I’m excited to share a charming historical anecdote about walking which will accompany us throughout our travels to wellness with purpose.
Chances are you’ve heard of Aristotle (384–322 BCE), the fellow who taught most of wisdoms of the ancient and medieval worlds: science, philosophy, ethics, and pretty much everything else. Although modern scientific inquiry has rejected many – but not all – of his premises, the fact that his ideas remained unchallenged for 1500 years proves this fellow was no fool. If anything, he knew how to think.
How were Aristotle’s writings and teachings transmitted from antiquity to the Middle Ages? To make a long story short, Aristotle’s intellectual tradition survived mostly due to schools of Islamic philosophers who studied Greek philosophy in Arabic translation. Many Arabic speakers became prominent Aristotelian philosophers in their own right, such as Al-farabi (c.872-c.950), Averroes (1126-1198), and, to a large degree, Maimonides (c.1135-1204). In this environment, the arts of the mind flourished, but along with them came some more dubious schools of thought, as we’ll see soon.
The next stage in the saga was transferring Aristotle’s work from Muslim countries to Christian Europe. For Jewish scholars, the central figures were three generations of the illustrious Ibn Tibbon family. Originally from Muslim Spain, they relocated to southern France and were promptly drafted by the learned locals to translate the Arabic works of Maimonides and other scholars into Hebrew.
Rabbi Shmuel ibn Tibbon (c.1150-c.1230), the second generation of the dynasty, translated Maimonides’ epic Guide to the Perplexed. He knew that many of his readers weren’t experts in Aristotelian philosophy, so he appended a small glossary to his translation. Although less known than Maimonides’ Guide, this glossary is itself an important work.
Here is one entry:
Masai’im – name of a school of philosophers who followed Aristotle’s tradition in all his views. Aristotle himself was the first of the masai’im. The term masai’im means walkers, because they learned while walking outside the city, not while sitting. They did this to exert themselves to maintain their health.
Ibn Tibbon refers here to what modern scholarship calls the Peripatetic School, a Greek word that also means “of walking.” There are other theories why Aristotle and his cohort were called “walkers,” but Ibn Tibbon is known to be trustworthy and meticulous, so I have no reason to doubt his version. He was also an exceptionally insightful man – the authorized translator of Maimonides, after all – so it’s fair to ponder the meaning of the tradition he told.
Isn’t it odd to call some of history’s greatest minds by the way they kept their bodies healthy? Shouldn’t their school be named after their wisdom and science that remained unsurpassed for over a millennium?
Yet readers of The Healthy Jew won’t be overly disturbed. Maimonides taught us in How to Become a Person that choosing health on purpose is a person’s most elementary good choice, because by using his mind to guide his actions he has exchanged animalhood for humanity. Aristotle and his wise men understood that choosing to live by the mind must come before abstract philosophy; otherwise, their thinking would be fantasies about what they imagine things to be. To ensure their thinking minds were grounded in the reality of human life, the Walkers built their wisdom on the mind in action, quite literally.
Let’s compare the Walkers with another school of philosophy, a Medieval Islamic group that Maimonides panned whenever he got the chance. They were known as the Kalam, an Arabic word with the same meaning as their Hebrew name, the Medabrim. Meet the Talkers.
Here is what Ibn Tibbon has to say in his glossary about the Talkers:
Medabrim – the name of the group of pretenders of wisdom who lack wisdom. They fix reality not according to the intellect, and therefore not aligned with reality, but according to their imagination. They astonish people with masses of words that are from the type of lectures with no truth. Therefore, their wisdom is called “wisdom of words,” meaning that it’s not wisdom of intellect.
The Talkers set reality in their imaginations. As Maimonides reports, they believed that anything a person can envision is possible. By casting off the bonds of the intellect, their thinking was unhinged. They talked, but without wisdom.
Contrasting the Walkers with the Talkers reveals a profound message, a medieval antecedent to my paratrooper friend’s “You talk too much.” We all want to know wisdom and live wellness. And the source of human action is, of course, the mind. But the mind, when alone, is a vessel in troubled waters. It’s all too easy to be a Talker, imagining all sorts of esoteric and inspirational insights that make good talk but don’t line up with reality. The solution is to become a Walker. Put the mind to work on living well in real life by walking for your health. Walking down the road, you’ll surely discover true wisdom.
Learn more about how to become a genuine walker in these two posts:
