“Nevertheless, I am often struck by how many great thinkers have also been great walkers.”
“Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value,” so proclaims Friedrich Nietzsche in his 1889 work Twilight of the Idols. An assertion like this one might sound strange in a society today that mostly values and communicates ideas acquired while sitting. We now do not generally think of learning—especially at the highest levels—as involving physical exertion. Many of us seem quite comfortable in a world that separates thinking from doing.
Nevertheless, I am often struck by how many great thinkers have also been great walkers. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle famously walked up and down while teaching and founded the Peripatetic School in 335 B.C. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: “To travel on foot is to travel in the fashion of Thales, Plato, and Protagoras.” American author Henry David Thoreau wrote an essay titled “Walking,” in which he described the “art of Walking.” A philosophizing Ralph Waldo Emerson thought nothing of walking from town to town; Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth would walk together; and Zen Buddhists practice a kind of meditation specifically associated with walking. So, if, as Nietzsche insists, the relationship between walking and thinking is neither coincidental nor trivial, what is the nature of that relationship?
Ambulator nascitur, non fit. As far as Thoreau was concerned, walkers were born not made. “It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker,” he wrote. The mere physical act of walking, especially on untrodden paths, presents a perpetual opportunity to reconnect our minds to our bodies, as well as our bodies to nature. “Two or three hours walking,” writes Thoreau, “will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see.”
Human ideas that come from walking vary with how and where we direct our attention. Early humans lived in precarious realms of predators and prey. As such, their attention was intensely focused on the world outside of themselves. As humans created more stable environments, they could walk without immediate fear and not out of necessity alone. Thus, as time went on, they could direct their attention to contemplating the full relationship of mind, body, and nature. Ideas acquired through walking tend to affirm an interconnectedness with all of reality.
“[Y]ou must walk like a camel,” advises Thoreau, “which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.” Nietzsche would have agreed. A man who walked many hours per day “ruminating” in the mountains and forests of Alpine Europe, Nietzsche understood the organic and mysterious origins of human ideas: “One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives,” he writes in Ecce Homo, “like lightning a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form—I never had any choice.” Nietzsche thus reminds us: We do not just have ideas, ideas have us.
The modern world alleviates our need for walking, and, finally, we get to sit down. Thinking becomes an indoor activity inevitably separate from doing, something Nietzsche feared:
“Sit as little as possible; give no credence to any thought that was not born outdoors while one moves about freely—in which the muscles are not celebrating a feast, too…The sedentary life—as I have said once before—is the real sin against the Holy Spirit.”
Nietzsche’s observations would fall on the deaf ears of a contemporary civilization that has become quite comfortable in its faith in ideas not gained through walking and, thus, in concert with the world around us. While ideas that come from walking affirm an interconnected world of dynamic forces of which we are a part, ideas realized by sitting attest to a disconnected world. As we sit and think, we no longer know the world by poetic interpretations of our sensing bodies. Instead, the world has become an object revealed by the methodologies of science and is therefore subject to manipulation and control by other human notions. What we think of as knowledge is not embodied—as in a story or an image or even a walking human. Rather, knowledge consists of some kind of proposition. When Blake’s “Angels” of “systematic reasoning” triumph, we become ruled by ideas gained by sitting.
“What business have I in the woods,” Thoreau asks, “if I am thinking of something out of the woods?” Today, though even if we do happen to find ourselves finally walking in the woods, it is often with earbuds in, and these earbuds connect us to a world outside of the forest. So much for the authentic walking of the great minds of eras past.
Recent findings have confirmed what has been long suspected: that the mere act of walking stimulates brain activity and even creativity. From Nietzsche and Thoreau on down, many great thinkers have understood the power of putting one foot in front of the other. But only when our minds and our bodies connect to the world around us can we begin to trust ideas gained by walking. So we need only begin: The world is literally at our feet.
Chris Augusta is an artist living in Maine.
