Author: Scotty Hendricks / Source: Big Think
- French philosopher Frederic Gros tells us that walking is a route to entirely being ourselves and experiencing the sublime.
- He has a bias towards the wondering hikes of Nietzsche and Kerouac but has a place for urban strollers too.
- His book reminds us that even something as mundane as walking can be a vital part of our lives when done for itself.
Walking is good for you. Regular walks can improve bone health, reduce blood pressure, and even prevent Alzheimer’s. You’re supposed to get in 10,000 steps a day, but millions of people across the United States don’t manage that. The average number of strides an American takes daily is just 4,774. This has dire effects on our health.
But a book by French philosopher reminds us that there is more to walking than exercise.
(Photo by Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Hikers in Slovakia pause to rest as they take in the beauty of the mountains. Gros tells us that they are getting more out of the trip than just exercise and a holiday.
In his book A Philosophy of Walking, French philosopher Frédéric Gros explores the surprisingly philosophical act of walking. He doesn’t mean the light exercise that people try to fit into their busy schedule or our pragmatic walking from point A to point B, but rather the long hikes in nature that give us a chance to escape the day to day.
For Gros, walking is a liberating act that allows us to reconnect with ourselves. Not ourselves as we are introduced at parties or as the face we put on to make it through a long day at the office, but our true selves liberated from worrying about time, social conventions, and our daily cares. A long walk through a forest allows us to connect with the sublime in a way that merely looking at it from a distance does not. Appropriately done, walking allows us to just be in a way that can be hard to come by in our modern, fast-paced lives.
He explains this in a very French manner when he says:
By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history. Being someone is all very well for smart parties where everyone is telling their story, it’s all very well for psychologists’ consulting rooms. But isn’t being someone also a social obligation which trails in its wake – for one has to be faithful to the self-portrait – a stupid and burdensome fiction? The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of…
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