H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: MERCURIALE

 G.: Alfred Street first, then metaphysics. One should always inspect the apparatus before discussing the soul. S.: A very Mercuriale principle. De arte gymnastica before De anima. G.: Quite. Here we are, then, the Oxford Gymnasium, opened in 1858 and, if our chronology behaves, still with us until 1967. Long enough to have trained several generations into perspiring respectability. S.: And short enough to vanish before modern fitness discovered mirrors. G.: Oxford was wiser then. It still believed in exercise as a moral correction rather than a spectacle of self-courting. S.: You sound almost Roman. G.: Mercuriale would insist on it. He disliked the accidental body and preferred the body under regimen. Oxford did much the same, but with less Latin and more flannel. S.: And Alfred Street is your hinge because it is official. G.: Exactly. Parson’s Pleasure is older, but aquatic and half-antiquarian. This is the proper Victorian indoor claim: apparatus, instruction, routine, and a mixed urban-university placement. Town and gown were not exactly equal here, but at least they could perspire under the same roof. S.: Whereas Bath is too classical. G.: Too much ruin and steam. One wants something recognisably modern if one is to connect Mercuriale with Grice rather than with the emperor Hadrian taking the waters. S.: Though Hadrian’s Villa will return, I assume. G.: It always does. The better emperors leave one architecture enough to misinterpret. S.: Then this gymnasium stands for the semantic shift from gymnasium as a place of bodily discipline to gymnasium as a building one can point to in Oxford. G.: Yes, though “shift” must be handled with care. Not a change of sense, but a redistribution of emphasis. One should not multiply senses beyond necessity. There is a long semantic patience at work. S.: Between ginnasio and gymnasium. G.: Precisely. Mercuriale helps because he writes before the shrinkage. For him gymnastic art is not a room of rings and bars, but an entire discipline of bodily formation. The building is secondary to the practice. S.: Yet here the building has swallowed the practice’s name. G.: Swallowed, perhaps, but not digested it entirely. A gymnasium is still, in principle, the place of gymnastic discipline. The architectural particular has specialised the older function without abolishing it. S.: And that is where Bologna enters. G.: Ah yes, Bononia, alma mater, older than Oxford if one counts by honest chronology, and perhaps the only university that can do so without comic strain. S.: Sorbonne third, in your private ranking. G.: A decent bronze. But Bologna interests me more because of the Archiginnasio. S.: Which looks like a misnomer only to the modern English eye. G.: Exactly. If one hears “gymnasium” only as apparatus and exercise hall, Archiginnasio sounds ridiculous, like calling the Bodleian a wrestling shed. But historically it is not ridiculous at all. S.: Because ginnasio there means the schools, the studium, the place of formed learning. G.: Yes. Archi- there is ur-, principal, chief, overarching. The Archiginnasio is the principal ginnasio in the older learned sense: the chief place of studies, not the chief room of dumbbells. S.: So the semantic distance between ginnasio and archiginnasio is less than modern English supposes. G.: Much less. The continuity lies in disciplined formation. The bodily side becomes dominant in one line of descent, the educational side in another. Mercuriale sits exactly where the two still recognise each other. S.: Because for him gymnastics belongs to medicine and philosophy. G.: Indeed. Exercise is regimen, regimen is ethics, ethics brushes philosophy, and the whole thing remains respectable because the body is not yet a private cult but an object of rational governance. S.: Oxford liked that too. G.: Oxford liked anything that could be presented as character-building. Cricket is tolerable if it looks like ethics in whites. S.: And Grice fits because he was genuinely athletic. G.: More than many philosophers are willing to admit on his behalf. He liked games, college sport, outdoor life, and the institutional seriousness of play. Mercuriale would have found him less absurd than most of the profession. S.: Though perhaps too conversational. G.: Mercuriale might have replied that conversation itself needs lungs. S.: We are now in Alfred Street, then, with bars and apparatus around us, and you want to walk backwards to Athens. G.: One always does. Europe rarely invents anything without first remembering it badly. S.: Was the Academy a gymnasium? G.: Not simply. Hekademos begins as a sacred grove and associated area, but by the classical period the Academy is also entangled with gymnastic use, walking, training, and the broader civic life of education. It is not merely a room for exercise, nor merely a school in our sense. S.: So when Plato founds the Academy, he inhabits a space already mixed. G.: Precisely. The error is to imagine “academy” as if it had always meant only a disembodied school of thought. In Athens, bodily and discursive formation were not cleanly divorced. S.: Aristotle then leaves and settles near the Lyceum, which certainly had gymnastic associations. G.: Yes. The Lyceum was a gymnasium and sanctuary area before it became the Peripatetic school. Aristotle does not invent the place; he philosophises adjacent to an already civic-gymnastic institution. S.: So philosophy grows near exercise rather than away from it. G.: Often enough. The modern division between body-building and thought-building is more recent and more philistine than either side likes to admit. S.: And the Stoa? G.: There I am, like you, less certain in the bodily direction. The Stoa Poikile is a colonnade, not a gymnasium. Stoicism takes its name from an architectural site of gathering and discourse rather than from an overt exercise ground. S.: So if the Academy and Lyceum retain gymnastic neighbourhoods, the Stoa is more emphatically civic and ambulatory. G.: Exactly. Portico, not palestra. One may stand there and think, which many have done since. S.: Then when Rome receives Greek philosophy, why does the gymnastic side not take in the same way? G.: Because Rome admired Greek culture selectively and under conditions of class anxiety. The noble Roman, especially in the Scipionic orbit, preferred conversation, rhetoric, patronage, literary culture, and moral seriousness to public bodily display in Greek style. S.: So the Scipiones want a circolo rather than a gymnasium. G.: Very much so. Conversazione over calisthenics. Roman nobility could admire Greek philosophy, but the full Greek civic-gymnastic complex looked too plebeian, too public, too exposed, and perhaps too naked in more senses than one. S.: Rome liked baths, though. G.: Baths, yes, and eventually on a colossal scale. But baths are not the same as the Greek gymnasium as civic institution. Rome prefers thermal magnificence, military training, and aristocratic otium to the Greek integration of intellectual, civic, and bodily discipline in one public educational form. S.: So the Roman nobleman may discuss Plato but prefers not to do so after wrestling. G.: Precisely. He would rather recline and quote. The body is present, but under different ceremonial management. S.: Naples differs? G.: Yes. Southern Italy and the old Magna Graecia world preserve more of the Hellenic comfort with bodily and philosophical adjacency. Naples, with its Greek afterlife, remains more hospitable to the fusion than Rome proper, which makes philosophy pass through law, rhetoric, and elite sociability. S.: Hence your earlier contrast between Roman justice and Greek dialectic. G.: Quite. Rome institutionalises discourse differently. It legalises and politicises where Athens gymnasticises and philosophises. S.: And Hadrian’s Villa? G.: Ah yes. Tivoli is where Rome, in one of its more self-conscious moods, builds philosophy into imperial leisure. The Villa has spaces that look gymnastic, palaestral, library-like, theatrical, and bath-like all at once. It is the emperor’s private anthology of civilisations in stone. S.: So the palace on the Palatine yields to the villa. G.: Exactly. The palace is urban rule. The villa is reflective empire. Rome learns to philosophise architecturally only when it leaves the city enough to imitate Greece under imperial control. S.: Which means architecture becomes a surrogate for the missing Roman gymnasium. G.: Very good. Where Rome did not fully naturalise the Greek civic-gymnastic institution, it later aestheticised and appropriated its forms in villa culture, baths, libraries, exedrae, and controlled landscapes. S.: Otium replacing civic training. G.: Yes, though otium in the better cases still wants dignity and study. The Roman elite will not become Greek athletes, but they may become connoisseurs of Greek spaces. S.: Then Bologna’s Archiginnasio is the medieval and early modern resolution of all this. G.: In a sense, yes. It strips away the bodily emphasis and preserves the disciplinary one. Gynnasio now means the organised place of studies. Archiginnasio means the principal organised place of studies. The older root remains, but its energies have been institutionalised toward learning. S.: So the semantic shift is real but not a rupture. G.: Precisely my point. One ought not to say there are wholly different senses if one can explain the development by historical narrowing and reaccenting. Mercuriale himself would insist on continuity under transformation. S.: Because he still hears gymnastic art as part of the whole education of the human animal. G.: Beautifully put, though rather more zoological than he might like. S.: He was a physician. He must forgive zoology. G.: Physicians forgive bodies only when they obey. S.: Then here in Alfred Street one may say that Oxford finally builds, in 1858, a proper indoor embodiment of something that had long existed in looser form on fields, rivers, and college grounds. G.: Yes. Oxford had long cultivated athletic life in the open, but Alfred Street gives it civic walls, timetable, and apparatus. It is the Victorian domestication of a much older educational impulse. S.: And it lasts until 1967. G.: So far as our evidence runs, yes. Long enough to become almost invisible by familiarity, which is how institutions know they have succeeded. S.: Grice would have known it? G.: He certainly knew an Oxford in which official and semi-official spaces of exercise existed, though his own self-presentation leans more toward games and grounds than indoor apparatus. Still, the gymnasium belongs to the same moral weather. S.: Athlete or aesthete. G.: His own dichotomy, delightfully false and therefore useful. Oxford contrived to keep both in hall together and make each suspect he belonged to the better half. S.: Whereas Bologna, older and more urban, builds the Archiginnasio as the chief house of studies rather than the chief house of exercise. G.: Exactly. That difference is civilisational. Oxford preserves the college-field-and-river conjunction; Bologna monumentalises learned corporateness. One has more grass, the other more law. S.: And Sorbonne? G.: More Paris. Which is always both an advantage and a complication. S.: Then what would Mercuriale say if we pointed from Alfred Street to the Archiginnasio? G.: He would say that moderns have narrowed the body too much in one direction and learning too much in the other. Alfred Street remembers the body under regimen. Bologna remembers the discipline of studies. The old Greek root would prefer not to be forced to choose. S.: So the true ginnasio is where formation occurs, whether of muscles, manners, or mind. G.: Exactly. Formation is the invariant. The rest is institutional costume. S.: Then why did Rome resist the Greek form if it already valued formation? G.: Because Roman nobility preferred to control the visible means of formation. The Greek gymnasium was too public, too civic, too egalitarian in access, and too physically disclosed. Roman elites wanted conversation, patronage, and exemplary conduct under aristocratic supervision. S.: The Scipionic circle as anti-gymnasium. G.: Not anti-body, but anti-Greek-public-body. They wanted cultivated conversation, not shared naked instruction. One may almost say Rome spiritualised Greek sociability into elite conversational form. S.: So conversazione triumphs over palestra. G.: At least among the better families. The commoner and the soldier could sweat; the noble preferred to discuss virtue in a portico. S.: Which makes Grice oddly Roman after all. G.: In some moods, yes. He likes the disciplined game, but he likes conversation even more. He would rather make a point by implicature than by discus. S.: Yet you have brought him into Alfred Street. G.: Only to remind him that conversation too requires institution, architecture, and the occasional vaulting horse. Philosophers are always pretending they float. Most of them were carried there by buildings. S.: Then the final formula? G.: That Alfred Street, the Oxford Gymnasium of 1858, gives modern Oxford a visible body for an ancient educational impulse; that Mercuriale helps us see the continuity between bodily regimen and rational formation; that Bologna’s Archiginnasio preserves the same root under the aspect of chief study rather than chief exercise; and that the line back to Athens runs not through neat dictionary senses but through a long history of institutions in which body, speech, and schooling were never as separate as moderns lazily assume. S.: And Rome? G.: Rome delayed the synthesis, aestheticised it at the villa, legalised it in the forum, and left the real semantic patience to Bologna. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Mercurial, with an Alfred Street aftertaste.