No disembodied philosophers

It's the birthday of an old sourpuss who didn't believe in happiness or the ultimate value of life. But paradoxically perhaps, he is nonetheless a great pleasure to read.

"Schopenhauer believed that we live in a world of continual strife and that the "will," our inner nature, inevitably leads to pain and suffering unless we are able to renounce desire and assume an attitude of resignation. He was a great influence on the literature of Thomas Mann, the music of Richard Wagner, and the psychology of Sigmund Freud." WA

And he was a peripatetic who loved dogs. He walked with a series of poodles he called Atman.

Rousseau, who's on our agenda in CoPhi today, was another peripatetic some thought pathetic. Like Schopenhauer, he was a complex and  damaged personality probably better appreciated from the distance of decades or centuries rather than up close and personal. Our Socrates Express chapter on him is entertaining (and owes something, I suspect, to Gymnasiums of the Mind). I hope it inspires a few of us to go outside, as lately-- in this mild (and yesterday marvelous, at 70 degrees) mid-TN February-- I've been doing after every morning class before lunch. One of these days soon we'll all get out there during class. "Doing and not-doing" is well worth doing.

"When we walk, we are simultaneously doing and not-doing. On one level, our minds are engaged: focusing on the terrain ahead, cognizant of the periphery. Yet none of this thinking occupies much cerebral space. There's plenty left over for meandering, and freak following.

No wonder so many philosophers walked. Socrates, of course, liked nothing more than strolling in the agora. Nietzsche regularly embarked on spirited two-hour jaunts in the Swiss Alps, convinced "all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking." Thomas Hobbes had a walking stick custom made with a portable inkwell attached so he could record his thoughts as he ambled. Thoreau regularly took four-hour treks across the Concord countryside, his capacious pockets overflowing with nuts, seeds, flowers, Indian arrowheads, and other treasures. Immanuel Kant, naturally, maintained a highly regimented walking routine. Every day, he'd eat lunch at 12: 45 p.m., then depart for a one-hour constitutional—never more, never less—on the same boulevard in Königsberg, Prussia (now Russia). So unwavering was Kant's routine that the people of Königsberg set their watches by his perambulations.

Good walkers, all of them. None, though, compares with Rousseau. He'd regularly walk twenty miles in a single day. He once walked three hundred miles from Geneva to Paris. It took him two weeks.

For Rousseau, walking was like breathing. "I can scarcely think when I remain still; my body must be in motion to make my mind active." As he walked, he'd jot down thoughts, large and small, on playing cards that he always carried with him. Rousseau was not the first philosopher to walk but he was the first to philosophize so extensively about walking.

The walking philosopher gives the lie to one of the discipline's greatest myths: that it is a mental pursuit wholly divorced from the body. From Archimedes's eureka moment in the bath to Descartes's masterful fencing to Sartre's sexual escapades, philosophy has a swift corporeal current running through it. There are no disembodied philosophers, or philosophies. "There is more wisdom in your body than in all of your philosophy," said Nietzsche."

Nietzsche, another bumptious and somewhat deranged peripatetic whose personality, we can only imagine, would have been so much harder to stand had he remained seated.