A Philosophy of Walking (15 page)

The Cynics' philosophy is linked with the condition of the walker by far more than the superficial impression of rootlessness: the dimensions of experience inherent in those great peregrinations become dynamite when imported into towns.

The Cynic's coarse, boorish lifestyle featured a primary experience of the elemental. Remember that he was confronted by the elements in all their power and even brutality – freezing wind, lashing rain, burning sun. He was exposed to them by walking, and by his destitution, devoid of a dwelling place and possessions alike. But by the same token he could rediscover a
truth
in that primitive condition. The elemental is the truth of what holds fast, resists, is unmoved by passing circumstance. Elemental truth is wild, and shares in the energy of the elements.

Philosophers of the type one might call sedentary enjoy
contrasting the appearance with the essence of things. Behind the curtain of tangible sights, behind the veil of visibilities, they try to identify what is pure and essential, hoping perhaps to display, above the colours of the world, the glittering, timeless transparency of their own thought. The palpable is a lie, a shifting scatter of appearances, the body is a screen, and the real truth is assembled in the soul, in thought, in the mind.

The Cynic cut through that classic opposition. He was not out to seek or reconstruct some truth behind appearances. He would flush it out from the radical nature of immanence: just below the world's images, he was hunting for what supported them. The elemental: nothing true but sun, wind, earth and sky, their truth residing in their unsurpassable vigour. For the tangible, avoided by the deskbound philosopher aiming to find refuge in eternal intelligibility, was still too complex and diverse. It was a mishmash of everything: houses, forests, monuments, precipices. There was no hurry to go beyond appearances. The authentic ascetic should plunge into things, dig into the tangible to find the absolutely elemental as energy, until resistance is felt.

But the reason this discovery energizes the Cynic (who is not a hermit living solely on the breath of Being) is that it is political: it should serve to shatter the derisory grand postures of the stoop-shouldered philosopher, hunched over his internal wealth; to burst open the poverty of his hidden essential truths, expose the superficiality of his lectures and books. Truth is the elements taken in all their savage vigour; the wind that buffets the skin, the dazzling sun, the
storms of thunder and lightning. To experience those is also to grasp a primitive energy that makes a mockery of the sage and his solemn rictuses.

The second experience raised by the nomad condition is that of the raw. Writers of the time often mentioned the scandalous behaviour of the Cynics in devouring raw meat. Is not Diogenes said to have died from trying to eat a live octopus? It wasn't only their diet that was raw, but their language and manners too.

That rawness, that rusticity in their behaviour and condition, is again a battering ram against another great classical opposition. The sedentary philosopher liked to distinguish between the natural and the artificial. What the Cynics called Nature was the marshalling of each thing to its essence, each being coinciding with its definition. And that transparent identity with the self can be shuffled through artifice: the artifice of discourse, of social arrangements, of political laws. So it's necessary to find each time, just behind what is presented, the calm truth of each thing.

Just as the Cynic had released the essence of the elemental, so he had subverted the natural. Nature to him was rawness. The raw was Nature on the level of elemental need. Nature, but not the dreamy utopian Nature of a sojourn among quiet truths. The raw is uncivilized Nature, wild and tempestuous, Nature impolite, scandalous, shameless, inhuman. The body functions without reference to
conventions or rules. Nudity is raw; defecation and masturbation are raw. Eating is a matter for the stomach, nothing more, to fill and empty it. The dog has no manners when he sleeps or satisfies his needs: he just does it. When Diogenes, hanging about near a banquet one day, started imprecating loudly against the idiocy of the gathering, someone tossed him a bone still covered with meat, contemptuously as if feeding a dog. Diogenes seized the bone and gnawed it greedily, then climbed onto the table and pissed over the revellers. ‘I eat like you, gentlemen, and I piss like you'.

The Cynic was not immoral. But he used the simple assertion of his body, on the level of its biological functions, to denounce and expose men's tawdry good education, received values and hypocrisies when they speak of Nature. The fact is that it had become, via those sedentary sages, a sort of diplomatic bag for social conventions and cultural moulds: everything had gone through on the quiet. The raw was revolutionary.

Thirdly, the Cynic lived, obviously, out of doors. So then sometimes, of course, a providential barrel was put to use; but in the end he had no home. He slept in ditches, or against walls, wrapped in his cloak. He was permanently exposed not only (as we have seen) to the great forces of nature, but to the public gaze. He ate in public, frolicked amorously too in the open air, as Crates and Hipparchia did.

The ‘outside' espoused by the Cynics destabilized the traditional contrast between public and private. The distinction was of interest only to the sedentary: a choice between two closed circles, both shielded from the great outdoors. Private meant the intimacy of family passions, the secrets of desire, the protection of walls, property. Public meant ambition and reputation, the scramble for recognition, the regard of others, social identities.

But the Cynic was
outside
. And it was from that elsewhere, that exteriority to the world of men, that he could equate low private acts and public vices. It was from that outside that he barracked, mocked and threw together the private and the public as a brace of petty human expedients.

A final dimension of the travelling Cynic's life was necessity. The necessary isn't imposed, like something inevitable; it is discovered, it unveils itself, it is conquered. Here again, a traditional system of oppositions is subverted: the contrast of useful and futile. The philosopher bent over his desk thinks he has reflected a great deal, when he deems that a bed is useful, but that it is futile to require a canopied bed if all one wants is to sleep; or that it is useful to drink from a glass, but that it doesn't take a gold goblet to refresh oneself. These were vain distinctions to the Cynics, because they fell short of the test of the necessary.

At the fountain one day Diogenes saw a child drinking from the joined palms of his hands. The Cynic stopped
short, thunderstruck, and declared: ‘Diogenes, you have been outdone!' Then he took a wooden goblet from his meagre bundle and flung it far from him with a smile of triumph. Happy, because he had found another way to disencumber himself.

That is the necessary: an ascetic's conquest. It is not a question of saying, like the desk-bound philosophers, that you have to be able to detach yourself from all the useless possessions that burden us, but of digging a little deeper, past the useful, down to the necessary. It's more than frugality: being content with little, being careful. The task here is more arduous, difficult, demanding: to accept only the necessary. This transition takes us well beyond resignation, and leads to the assertion of an absolute sovereignty. For the necessary, conquered beyond the useful, overturns the meaning of destitution.

The walker is king, and the earth is his domain
. The necessary, once conquered, is never lacking, for it is everywhere and belongs to all, the property of none. Whence comes this final reversal, from poverty to wealth.

After all – as the Epicureans had shown – he is rich who lacks for nothing. And the Cynic lacked for nothing, because he had discovered the pleasures of the necessary: the ground to rest his body, what he found to eat during his wanderings, the starry sky for a ceiling, springs to drink from. Well beyond the useful and the futile, the necessary
suddenly made the entire world of cultural objects appear trivial, alienating, cumbersome,
impoverishing
.

I am richer (the Cynic said) than any great landowner, for the earth is my domain. My properties are unbounded. My house is bigger than any other, or rather I have as many as I want: hollows among the rocks, caves in the hills. I have in store more food and drink than any man, I gorge on spring water.

Nor did the Cynic recognize frontiers, being at home wherever he could walk. A citizen of the world, not because, having nothing left to lose, he could finally imagine gaining everything, but because the elemental quality, the bare necessities, and the rawness of the world are there in limitless profusion. His was not a projected, ideal, future cosmopolitanism, a regulatory idea, a fictional world or promise. It was achieved absolutely in his rootlessness. The Cynic held to nothing, was attached to nothing. Absolutely free, he displayed his provoking health, his unlimited and endlessly shareable sovereignty. Who are you, he said, to be giving lessons? I am a citizen of the world, and it is from that outside that I address you. Epictetus makes him proclaim: