The wrath of the Do-Gooders
Are bien pensant observers the most hateful people in politics?
Gary Hayden
WALKING WITH PLATO
A philosophical hike through the British Isles
224pp. Oneworld. £12.99.
978 1 78074 656 2
Friedrich Nietzsche used to walk for up to
eight hours a day, often rising well before
dawn. “I am always on the road two hours
before the sun comes over the mountains,” he
wrote from Switzerland in 1877, “and especially
in the long shadows of afternoon and
evening.” His fellow philosopher Søren Kierkegaard
was of a similar disposition, writing to
his niece thirty years before: “every day I walk
myself into a state of well-being and walk
away from every illness. I have walked myself
into my best thoughts, and I know of no
thought so burdensome that one cannot walk
away from it”.
It is no coincidence that these two men, each
physically and mentally tormented, were both
keen walkers.
As Gary Hayden, the author,
previously, of You Kant Make It Up!: Strange
ideas from history’s great philosophers (2011)
observes in his latest book Walking with Plato:
A philosophical hike through the British Isles,
there is something about walking that soothes
the spirit and frees the mind, especially for
those with a less than cheery temperament.
Walking with Plato has the appearance of a
semi-serious travelogue, in which the author
and his wife make the sometimes arduous and
often dreary hike from John O’Groats to
Land’s End. One might expect Bill Bryson
with a dash of Alain de Botton. But Hayden, by
his own admission, isn’t very interested in the
landscape. He hasn’t even taken a notebook
with him. It’s mostly an inventory of damp
campsites and nondescript hotels, where “we
lounged on the bed, ate crisps and chocolate
and watched Strictly Come Dancing. But,
apart from that, it’s all a blank”.
Candid throughout about his own sombre
constitution, Hayden is here, rather, on an
inward journey. The physical act of trekking
becomes a challenge in itself, the landscape a
sideshow. He introduces us to other characters
for whom the simple act of perambulation was
an end in itself. The cast includes Bertrand
Russell (“The secret of happiness is to understand
that the world is horrible, horrible,
horrible”), Charles Dickens, who composed A
Christmas Carol in his head in a series of nocturnal
ramblings in the winter of 1843, and
Plato, who came to learn that physical vigour
promotes intellectual vigour, and that the two
promote psychological vigour.
The author emerges at the end a happier man
in this affable affair. “I did take pleasure in pitting
myself against these obstacles, day after
day, and overcoming them.” At Land’s End he
surfaces as a naive, everyday Nietzsche – the philosopher who proposed that life was about
accepting strife in order to overcome it.
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