Book Review: A Philosophy Of Walking

Guest Author: Julian Maalouf

As odd as it sounds for such a basic act, walking has seen somewhat of a resurgence in recent years. This revival has taken myriad forms and draws from disparate corners of society. There are people tracking their individual steps via wearable tech in service of weight loss, a trend that seemingly only accelerated with the dawn of COVID altering our routines and pushing many to explore their own neighborhoods on foot. It seems that the practice of tracking steps is not merely a modern phenomenon; however, with Da Vinci, Leibniz, and Jefferson all having had interest in them with Jefferson even having had one commissioned for himself.

There is also the burgeoning New Urbanist movement calling for pedestrian friendly “walkable cities” as a way to restructure and revitalize our urban life. Part cultural, part economic, advocates argue that some combination of zoning reform and more contextual architecture would create more humane and intuitive cities. This goes hand in hand with the re-emergence of the romantic “flaneur” figure, the solitary urban wanderer exploring the yet unchartered and unspoiled corners of his city, taking in used book stores, family run cafes and all that still has any resemblance to the golden age of urban living while dreaming of what Baron Haussemen could have down in his own polis.

Outside of our metropoles, hiking and long distance treks have grown in popularity as people seek escapes to something true, natural, and grand apart from the stress of city life or the mundanity of the surrounding sprawl. Visits to National Parks have hit record highs and people will travel thousands of miles by plane, car, and train for the privilege of walking under a new sky and seeing stars for the first time in years. It seems our inclination for traveling by foot cannot be so easily dislodged even in our age of mass transit.

In “A Philosophy of Walking” by Frederic Gros, the accomplished editor of Michel Foucault, writes what feels like a timely volume to help those interested in the pedestrian renaissance get to the core of what makes walking such a distinctly human activity in our era of high speed travel. Gros details the role of walking in the lives of many celebrated thinkers, writers, poets, and religious traditions while weaving in his own reflections and experiences as a veteran walker himself. He portrays walking as the human activity par excellence, one that in its multitude has influenced and shaped the thought of figures as distinct as Nieztche, the Church Fathers, and Gandhi. Through about a dozen short biographies of our walkers, Gros reveals the ways that walking figured centrally in their lives and is represented (if only obliquely) in their work. 

For Nieztche, walking was his tonic to the psychic pain that consumed him for so much of his life, the clean air of Turin his only medicine for his increasing psychic break. Rimbaud walked to escape and dream, to travel to the ends of the earth while broke (many recent college graduates backpacking through Europe will relate). Walking for Kant it seems was nothing more but another thing to categorize, to easily fit within his capacious system, his routine marches most closely resemble those of our modern step counters. Then there’s Nerval, the aimless, melancholic walker fleeing from problems he can’t quite name, feeling that he must go somewhere, anywhere. You can still see his ilk today in some quaint mid century neighborhood floating in and out of pale street lights just off the main drag. Directionless and alone, peeking into single family row houses and making up stories about the simple family life inside. Refugees of increasingly lonely, digital lives, these walkers live among us, and near the so called “third spaces” that we’re told will fill the community shaped hole in their hearts. Many of Gros’s walkers cut a lonely figure, and it seems that many of history’s prolific walkers suffered from a restless heart that spurred them to wander.

It may be slightly mythologized, but Kierkegaard is undoubtedly the figure conjured up when thinking of a moody, nocturnal walker meandering through the lamp lit streets of his city. Gros tells us about Kierkegaard’s (now famous) solitary strolls through Copenhagen and reflects that “Walking is something other than a way of relaxing after a hard day’s work, something other than a remedy for ennui, a health regimen, a social ritual or even a source of inspiration. It is a matrix, paradigm, metaphor and question of style. The three stages of life described by Kierkegaard (the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious) - the ‘stages on life's way’ imply in each case a certain way of walking.”

Aside from his bi-pedal biographies, Gros writes well about the place of walking in religious life and spiritual traditions. He discusses pilgrimage, and describes the Church Fathers’ belief that “Every man is an exile, for his true dwelling place can never be placed below… the Christian passes through life like a walker in any country: without stopping.” It is hard not to think that Gros is truly right to emphasize the role of walking in the Christian life. The Exodus journey, the Via Dolorosa, the roads to Emmaus and Damascus and the apostles traversing much of the Eastern Mediterranean in the name of the risen Christ are just a few of the key episodes of Salvation history to have been realized on foot. In fact, the earliest Christians referred to themselves as Hodos, or the “the way” in Greek, meaning both a physical road and a spiritual path, a way of life. It seems that long, uninterrupted walks produce especially sweet fruit in the order of the soul. Maybe Gros is not wrong to write of walking with the almost religious reverence that he does, it was the mode of transportation of many holy men and women of yesteryear. 

For all the rich examples of walking that Gros describes, he doesn’t ever try to define the act. He works backwards and shows us what it does to us, what it's not, and how it shapes our lives, but he never attempts to truly judge the act in itself. Gros seems to see walking as akin to breathing, something so intrinsic as to defy any one purpose or end. For Gros, walking is not a solution to urban planning, or a health initiative, but it seems to be the way in which we inhabit and move around the world most authentically, and a mode by which the world and our own souls are revealed to us slowly.

A Brief Introduction to Walking DC

The beauty of a city like DC is that the more efficient route is often public transportation or walking rather than driving. The nightmare of parking downtown, traffic, and the general boredom that comes with speeding up and then stopping at a stop sign every block lends itself to alternative options.

I am lucky enough to be fully ambulatory and exercise this ability almost every day, crisscrossing the city on one of my habitual jaunts. If I lived somewhere else, say a medium-sized Midwestern city or out in the suburbs, I doubt I would walk as much, if at all. Like most people, I default to the most efficient activity, and for the most part, DC’s density and design lends itself to walking or biking versus owning and driving a car.

Photo produced on a Sony a6000 on an abnormally warm winter day

The act of walking has experienced a surge in popularity over the last 15 year or so. There are now entire books about walking like Craig Mod’s Kissa by Kissa or The Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gross. Even the New York Times published an article on the merits of walking, boldly titled Whatever the Problem, It is Probably Solved By Walking. The author, Andrew McCarthy, managed to succinctly demonstrate the merits of walking while also plugging his most recent book about a 500-mile pilgrimage along the Camino Del Santiago in Spain. It turns out that Andrew was not alone. There has been a marked increase in interest and activity in the Camino Del Santiago. In 2024, approximately 440,371 people applied for their pilgrim badge, certifying they had completed at least 100 miles of the pilgrimage from any of multiple routes, the longest of which stretches just over 600 miles. The number of pilgrims has increased every year post-COVID and is 25% higher than pre-2020 levels.

Even the productivity hacks have latched onto walking as an activity in and of itself, rather than a cost-efficient way of getting from A to B. In conjunction with turning off notifications on your phone, taking time to meditate, and of course “deep work” (whatever that means), authors like Cal Newport have extolled the virtues of walking as a way to slow down, reflect, recharge, and optimize your lifestyle.

“I walked without any destination in mind, working my way slowly around my neighborhood. I loved it. It was surprisingly difficult on the legs.”

I have an argument to make about the whole thing that hopefully doesn’t fetishize the experience of doing something utterly and innately boring - namely, that walking without external distractions is a damn good way to get a better sense of a city. I started this when I lived in Chicago. I had been reading about Craig Mod’s walks across Japan (mentioned above), which he does without headphones or his phone, leaning into a slower pace in order to see what he can find. He had worked in tech and had rejected a traditional path in favor of the slower approach: letting things come to him rather than serving as a black hole of content consumption to distract from the small screen-based type of production that today’s white-collar worker produces. Craig was inspiring, mostly because he convinced me that I was missing things, small things, that I would never find if I was just traveling from point A to point B as efficiently as possible. When I started walking, I felt like I knew a lot about my neighborhood and Chicago itself. I had found a bunch of cool restaurants dotted across the city, had biked to trendy coffee shops, and identified neighborhood dive bars that were tacky and weird but sold domestic lite beer for $3.50 a can. I could have told you my cross streets and the cross streets of those cross streets, the restaurants near me, and the cross streets near them. I didn’t have a car (I still don’t) since it just wasn’t necessary. But whenever I walked, I did so with my headphones in, focused only on getting to a place rather than the walk itself.

I walked about 26 miles over the course of 3 days: 2 hours on a Friday evening, 4 hours on a Saturday morning, and 4 hours on a Sunday. I was done in the span of one weekend with time each day to spare. The goal was to slow down and try to look deeper at my neighborhood. I followed some of the rules that Craig had established on his own walks: no headphones and no phone use. I walked without any specific destination in mind, working my way slowly around my neighborhood and then further out. I loved it. It was surprisingly difficult. My legs were tired and the amount of thought it took to not unconsciously pull out my phone when I got bored was almost scary. I didn’t walk away fundamentally changed or more efficient or anything like that. But, at the same time, I didn’t feel like I was deluged by content and struggling to stay afloat. All of my emails were fine; none demanded an immediate response, and it turns out that I am not so essential that someone needs me over the course of 10 hours in one weekend. In fact, I am sure multiple people were quite happy to have me not present for those hours.

I don’t want to assign any substantial changes to my being that resulted from the walk, nor do I want to fetishize the experience as something a self-help book might refer to as “transformative” (it wasn’t). Instead, I would just point to the fact that it did require that I look closer at where I lived and engage with it in a physical way. Partially, I would think, this was due to the sheer boredom from removing the numerous stimuli that seem to easily steal my attention. Whenever I open my phone or computer, I find myself three apps or windows away from my original task, mindlessly consuming some piece of content that I will immediately forget. The walk itself, and the rules surrounding the walk, were simply a forcing function. I couldn’t just drive silently past, insulated by a pane of glass within a climate-controlled vehicle. Nor could I put my headphones in and pass the walk as if I were simply not there, picking the optimal song for the optimal moment and entertaining myself regardless (and irrespective) of anything that was happening outside my little sphere. It was cool in the sense that it was boring, and by being boring I noticed things I would have previously walked right past. There is value in looking closely, seeing more, and slowing down.

“Being bound by the physical constraints of the place, whether its weather, bad sidewalks, or stately tree lined side streets, provides a sense of place that can’t be replicated in a digital manner. ”

I moved back to DC about a year and a half ago. I had gone to college here but never truly ventured outside of my little bubble of campus life. In school, I interned with a large bureaucratic federal agency. I would take the red line directly to my stop before walking into work, only to sit in a cubicle and read my book or pretend to work on some inane Sisyphean task like entering data into a 2000-line Excel spreadsheet. At precisely 4:35 p.m., I would surreptitiously glance at my boss’s office before putting my headphones in and completing my morning journey in reverse—traveling from point A to point B with my only exposure to the city coming from the blur rushing by when the metro was aboveground.

Traveling in this way muted the city and all that it had to offer, simultaneously reducing the friction while silencing any real sense of the city. To truly commit to the theme of this magazine, concentrating on what it means to be “Rooted in the District” demands physical engagement with the place itself. Being bound by the physical constraints of the place, whether its weather, bad sidewalks, or stately tree-lined side streets, provides a sense of place that can’t be replicated in a digital manner. Leaning into the sense of place means celebrating the cracks and chips that comprise the city. It means meandering past the beautiful homes and architecture, walking through the parks, and looking closely where commerce meets community.

I don’t believe that a good walk needs to be a big walk. Of course, it's easier to write a book about a 500-mile walk than it is about a 20-mile walk. Five hundred miles intuitively sounds much cooler and has a sort of heft to it that a long stroll doesn’t. But walking a city in shorter increments still means covering ground, and since DC is easy to walk, that is what I am going to do.

Goal:

I want to look closer. DC is beautiful, anyone can see that, but I want to look for the cracks, the areas where beautiful meets not so beautiful, where the newly built all glass townhouses with only 4 total geometric lines abut beautiful 1900’s townhouses that have been here for almost a century.

Walk Rules:

No headphones.

No phone.

Attempt to focus, to cut through the boredom and look closer.

Write about it.