Your complimentary articles

You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month.

You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

Philosophy Shorts

Philosophers on Walking

by Matt Qvortrup

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce’s 1976 hit ‘Car Wash’ are the exception.

Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) famously writes about life being ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ (Leviathan, 1652), but it wasn’t the latter for him. In fact, he lived a very long life. Back in his day, the average life expectancy was fifty. The Wiltshire man clocked up ninety-one years. Why? Perhaps because he insisted on taking a daily walk.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was a punctual man. It was reported that the citizens of Köningsberg would set their watches when they saw the philosopher pass by them on his daily stroll. The walking professor only missed his saunter once – when he was caught up in reading a book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). That Genevan-born philosopher was also keen on having a daily stroll. Indeed, Rousseau’s last book was The Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782) – in which he stressed that “I can only think while I walk” (‘First Promenade’).

This was not a new theme for him, but a recuring one. For in his unusually frank autobiography Les Confessions (1769) he wrote many things that shocked his readers (and which are unprintable here); but he also confessed “Walking has something in it which animates and heightens my ideas” (Book II).

Rousseau’s Enlightenment thinking inspired Kant. But his writing was more in the style of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). And sure enough, that existentialist Dane also liked walking around Sorte Dams Dossering, the artificial lake then at the edge of his native Copenhagen. In 1847 he wrote to a friend, “Do not lose your wanderlust. There is no problem in the world that cannot be cured by a walk” (Kierkegaard’s Papirer 47). Perhaps so; but it then seems a bit of a mystery that in the same year Kierkegaard also published the deeply pessimistic Sickness Unto Death. Surely he could just have taken a stroll to allievate said sickness?

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) had ideas that were rather different from those of Kierkegaard. The latter earnestly believed in God; the former declared the deity dead. But they also shared similarities: in his usually combative style, Nietzsche wrote, “Here, I’ve got you Nihilist. A sedentary life is really against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come from walking have any value” (Twilight of the Idols, 1889, p.34).

Nietzsche’s atheism might have been inspired by Charles Darwin (1809-1882), who also went for daily walks while he was writing On the Origins of Species (1859). He did not reflect on this in his work; but then again, he wasn’t a philosopher. Hannah Arendt (1906-1973) was. And she too liked to stroll – around the streets of her adopted home of New York City. It was after one of these promenades that she noted, “we walk in a world that is neither structured by authority nor kept cohesive by tradition” (The Crisis in Culture, 1954). So get your shoes on, go walking, and get thinking!

Matt Qvortrup is author of Great Minds on Small Things is published by Duckworth.