Wandering thoughts

“My thoughts sleep if I sit still, my fancy does not go so well by itself as when my legs move it” — Montaigne

I lost the ability to walk in the Spring of 2024 when, owing to several decades practising the Dionysian spiritual exercises, my liver decided enough was enough and quit on me. This allowed toxins into my brain which caused what the consultant called “neurological decompensation”, which affected the ability to use my legs.

This was inconvenient, but there was an upside. Physical incapacity can turn your life into a gift to other people, by activating or energising in them an instinct to offer the “spiritual and corporal acts of mercy”. Helplessness invites others to love you (where love means what St Paul calls agape — an act of the will, rather than mere feeling), for their sake more than yours. This is an axiom in what people of faith might call the “physics of grace”, and such truth as there is to it can’t be captured in the grimly pagan/utilitarian language of “burden” or “choice”. There are low points in the life of all of us, and it is in crisis that we come to understand that we are not atomised executors of an individual autonomy, but participants in a communion of souls.

I figured that if I couldn’t walk, then that freed up time to think about it. A Philosophy of Walking, Frederic Gros’s provocative collection of speculations on the cultural, philosophical and literary significance of pilgrimage and wandering, was a charming consolation. I’ll say a couple of things about the book and follow up with some thoughts of my own.

Gros writes beautifully about how thinkers routinely brought walking into their lives, sometimes as inspiration, occasionally as escape. I knew that Immanuel Kant inserted a Prussian fastidiousness into his daily walk, and I have long suspected that Rousseau would have been even more insufferable if he hadn’t fallen in love with music and solitary adventures on foot.

The world you recover into seems different from the one you lost

I didn’t know that Nietzsche, correctly now I think about it, believed that philosophers should write on the move and in their heads, thereby avoiding the temptations of the library, where the creative process risks contamination by the mildewed books scattered therein, and you are likely to be tempted into the composition of unnecessary and disruptive footnotes. 

Nietzsche famously became insane, by the standards of his day, but this might have more to do with syphilis than his habit of taking very long unaccompanied walks. Gros has nothing to say on this historical question.

But he does have fun with the concept of “walking as a form of madness”. In the late 19th Century, the medical establishment indulged its evergreen preference for aggressive reductionism by pathologizing the practice of “repetitive and intensive walking” and classifying it as a form of mental illness (so perhaps it wasn’t the syphilis after all). 

Gros mentions the 1890s case of Albert Dagas, an “automatic walker” who would traipse for miles in a hypnotic state and arrive at well-known landmarks with no clue as to how he got there or why. The doctors did then what they do now when presented with something they couldn’t quite explain and invented a new medical category: the “itinerant insane”.

Philosophers, of course, also go mad. Not through syphilis necessarily but because they spend too much time meandering in their own heads, thinking about thinking, and coming up with syllogisms which relate conclusions to premises in ways that win the approval of other philosophers, and the indifference of everyone else. Gros has done us a favour by flagging up that the everyday activities — dance, sex, walking — offer rich source material for the more interesting of my former colleagues, those who have avoided the mistake of assuming that all meaning takes the form of a proposition.

My own doctoral and later research interests were in the philosophy of mind, and it occurs to me, a mere thirty years later, that the phenomenon of walking has something to say here. What philosophers call the “hard problem of consciousness” is one of reconciliation. How is thought, and thoughts about thought, consistent with a rapacious materialism that asserts there is nothing more to the human mind than what is going on the brain? What specific brain state just is this intention to visit Rome? Or this pain? Or that general existential angst?

But this is metaphysical sleight-of-hand, an Enlightenment seizure of the terms of reference of the debate, the introduction of an unnecessary dualism if you like. The truth is that we are not bodies that happen to think, but embodied thinkers, and our embodiment is relevant to how we think, and not just to that we think.

Walking, along with physical movement in general, is a kinetic affirmation that our minds and bodies are not quite the same, and yet at the same time not quite different from each other.

It’s taken over a year, but I can walk about unaided and outside. And because the recovery has been so slow it’s sort of confirmed the thoughts above. The loss of movement is the loss of a world, and the world you recover into seems different from the one you lost. There is something precious about movement that goes beyond the merely physical, because for human agents, the merely physical is not a thing.