Walking and Thinking

“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.”