Philosophers’ Walks by Bruce Baugh (review)

Baugh, Bruce. Philosophers’ Walks. Routledge, 2022. 252pp.

Yesterday evening, much to my satisfaction, I finished reading Bruce Baugh’s Philosophers’ Walks. The author ends by putting down his pen. It is time, he declares, “to put my boots on and walk out into the world” (236). For me, it was bedtime, but knowing that I was to write this review, I resolved to sleep on it. On waking, I set out, as is my wont, for the short walk I take every morning before breakfast. The walk itself is nothing special: it takes in the streets of my neighborhood and a nearby park. Yet every day is different as the weather changes, trees come in and out of leaf, blooms flourish and wilt in front gardens, children on their way to school throng the streets in term-time only to vanish in vacations. Lately, a nineteenth-century fountain in the park has been lovingly restored, and every morning I am refreshed by its water-jets and tinkly sound. Most days I am writing in my head, on whatever I have on the go at the time. Walking briskly and on my own, I find that words that had tied me in knots the day before miraculously straighten themselves out with a rhythm and fluency matching my pace. I cannot, however, walk and write at the same time. It is physically impossible. So as the words come, I have to keep repeating them to myself, until I make it home. With no time to lose, I seize notebook, pencil, and spectacles to jot them down. Only when I have done so can I finally sit down to breakfast. And that’s exactly what happened this morning. With my hastily scribbled notes, some good words, and the odd finished sentence, I am ready to write this review.

I am not, of course, the first to have discovered the benefits of thinking-while-walking. Countless predecessors have done so before me, including some of the most celebrated figures of the past four centuries of European intellectual history. And so has Baugh. The idea behind his book is that if by walking, philosophers have arrived at many of their most cherished insights, then perhaps we could better take the measure of these insights not merely by reading their words but by retracing their steps, walking the same paths as they did. And this, precisely, is what [End Page 131] Baugh, often accompanied by his wife Diane Lindsay, set out to do. Each chapter, barring the introduction and conclusion, is devoted to one or sometimes two characters, and each blends reflection on their ideas and life-histories of walking with the author’s recollection of attempting to follow in their footsteps, and of the experience and even self-knowledge gained from doing so. Some walks are in verdant countryside, or more spectacular Alpine scenery, others are in big cities like London and Paris. Baugh does not pretend that the walks of his chosen characters can be replicated exactly when so much has changed, in both rural areas and the urban fabric, since their heydays. Nor can we ever know exactly what was going through their heads at the time. It is nevertheless surprising how many echoes you can pick up from the past, so long as you keep your ears to the ground, and Baugh is an astute listener. For us, his readers, the book is an invitation to join in his travels, albeit at a distance, and by doing so, to enrich our understanding not only of his characters and of how they thought, but of ourselves as well.

Though the book is called Philosophers’ Walks, Baugh has cast his net wide to include characters for whom the epithet “poet,” “artist,” or “writer” might sooner come to mind than “philosopher.” No matter: all such labels are a touch arbitrary, and it’s the thought that counts. So here they are, in chronological order (not the order in which they appear in the book): Pierre Grassendi, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf, André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir. Judging by this roll-call of intellectual celebrity, both Baugh and I, along with all other ambulatory thinkers, are in pretty good company. Or are we? It is only to be expected that Baugh admits to a certain admiration for every one of them, since he would not have chosen to follow their wanderings otherwise. As a reader, however, I am not obliged to follow suit. And going by what Baugh has to say about them, and even by passages from their writings that he selects for quotation, there’s not a single one whom, had the opportunity for time-travel arisen, I would willingly have chosen for company. Would I really want to join the increasingly paranoid Rousseau, the garrulous Coleridge, the misanthropic Kierkegaard, the insufferably hubristic Nietzsche, the depressive Woolf, the sexually predatory Breton, the pathologically self-centered Sartre? Only the unjustly neglected, “misanthropic Kierkegaard, the insufferably hubristic Nietzsche, the depressive Woolf, the sexually predatory Breton, the pathologically self-centered Sartre? Only the unjustly neglected, “I-walk-therefore-I-am” Grassendi, and the eminently sensible, country-walk loving Beauvoir, come out looking remotely tolerable. Reading this book, I could not help wondering how men and women who have reflected at such length and depth on how to live virtuous lives have managed to make such a hash of their own. For the most part, they seem to have finished up sick, mad, or suicidal. Heaven forbid that we should follow their example! [End Page 132]

What is it, then, with philosophers? The problem seems to be that they want to have their cake and eat it, too. On the one hand, they want to be human like everyone else, to be a part of the universal pattern of worldly existence. But on the other hand, the sight of their fellow human beings, especially en masse, fills them with disdain bordering on revulsion. In the city, they shrink into their own inner thoughts from the crowds that surround them; in the countryside, they roam as if the people who lived and worked there, when acknowledged at all, were mere rustics, part of the scenery. Together, the urban crowd and rural peasantry make up what our philosophers superciliously dismiss as a mindless mob. They, to the contrary, aspire to be great minds, and to this end, they are not beyond embellishing their claim to genius with a generous helping of mystique. The dilemma, for them, is this: how can you be a great mind and an exemplary human being at one and the same time? If all humans are in possession of great minds, then greatness ceases to mean anything. But if greatness is reserved for the few, then how can it be achieved save by overcoming one’s base humanity?

In this, of course, it helps to be of independent means. Not having to work for a living frees the mind from drudgery in order to indulge in higher things. While the owner of the great mind is typically beset by financial woes, these are the woes of one unaccustomed to gainful employment. More often than not, he (or rarely, she) is of a class that wouldn’t think twice about having one house in town and another in the country, the former for managing the affairs of higher society and the latter for solitary meditation. This last observation points to another contradiction, to which Baugh frequently and instructively returns throughout this book. It is between the balm of solitude and the pain of loneliness or isolation. Again, our walking philosophers–who tend to be shy or socially awkward at the best of times–hanker for solitude, but they also crave the company of fellow literati. Hence their compulsive shuttling, back and forth, between town and country, or between street and study. All philosophizing, as Hannah Arendt once observed, depends on solitude. In solitude we talk to our self. But the self we talk to has periodically to be affirmed in the presence of others. We depend on them to restore the ‘two-in-one’ that makes it possible for the internal dialogue to continue. Left too long without such affirmation, it atrophies, and solitude gives way to the utter loneliness of having no other part of the self with which to converse.

This is not, however, the only conundrum facing philosophers who would fain keep their feet on the ground even as their heads are swimming in the clouds. After all, just about all adult humans get around by walking, unless some physical disability compels them otherwise. What, [End Page 133] then, distinguishes the philosopher’s high-minded walk from that of the lowly shepherd in the countryside or the street vendor in town? Could the answer lie in what Coleridge called the “shaping power of imagination?” (100). It is the task of imagination, Coleridge thought, to piece together fragments of on-the-ground experience culled from here, there and everywhere into an all-encompassing picture of the whole. And no one scales the heights of imagination more than poets and philosophers. They are summiteers, whose exalted vision raises them to within touching distance of divinity, while everyone else remains in the foothills, bound to a mode of thinking that is merely associative.

That, broadly, is Baugh’s view as well, but it lands him–as it landed the philosophers whose walks he follows–in a quandary. For it presumes that the work of imagination can proceed only after the fact, in recollection, as it looks back on the experience of a walk already done. He even cites a study to this effect by a team of Danish scientists, who claim to show that walking lays only the groundwork for the creative task of synthesis that can begin only once the walk itself is over. The humdrum foot-beat of the pedestrian body, in this view, has no more power to bring forth a world for the philosopher than it does for the layman. It is what happens afterwards that counts. Indeed, the Kantian premise–that it is the imagination that integrates the raw material of sensory experience into a vision of the whole–runs like a leitmotif throughout this book. What, then, is left for a body to do, save to serve the higher powers of imagination? Its role, as it passes from place to place and time to time, is passively to register the sensory impacts meted out upon it, and to relay them to the imagination for processing. Despite all the lip service paid to walking and embodiment, our philosophers remain resolutely head over heels, and in this, for Baugh, lies the measure of their greatness.

So deeply embedded is the great-mind theory of intellectual history in the Western academic canon that it is hard for those of us raised in it to escape its grip. This accounts for why scholars are so invested in arbitrating on matters of fame, and why they devote so much effort to debating over who was “arguably the greatest” or “perhaps the most important” philosopher, artist, writer, or poet of their time. As if it mattered! The hall of fame, after all, is but a house of cards. The fate of its select occupants–exclusively white, principally European, and mostly male–is of little concern to us. What matters, for now and for generations to come, is that we should still have a world to walk in. And while I would not willingly choose to walk with any of the characters in this book, I could hardly imagine a more congenial walking companion than its author. He is generous with his ideas, and more than willing to listen, to try out alternative routes or to take on different perspectives. As I read [End Page 134] on, I dream that I am walking with him, and that we are deeply engaged in discussion over the relation between perception and imagination. He sees these as distinct and sequential; I insist, to the contrary, that imagination is itself a moment of perception that lies on the cusp of the world’s perpetual coming-into-being. “The thing about walking,” I put to him, in my dream, “is that it brings together perception and imagination in a singular, rhythmic movement that, with each step, alternately opens to a worlding world and enfolds our existence within it. What would you say to that?” [End Page 135]

Tim Ingold
University of Aberdeen