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.