{"id":13134,"date":"2023-07-21T16:04:03","date_gmt":"2023-07-21T20:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/?p=13134"},"modified":"2023-07-21T16:05:35","modified_gmt":"2023-07-21T20:05:35","slug":"bruce-baugh-philosophers-walks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/2023\/07\/21\/bruce-baugh-philosophers-walks","title":{"rendered":"Bruce Baugh. Philosophers\u2019 Walks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bruce Baugh. <\/span>Philosophers\u2019 Walks. <\/span><\/i>London: Routledge, 2022; 252 pp. ISBN: <\/span>978-0367333133.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reviewed by James Crooks, Bishop\u2019s University\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Bruce Baugh\u2019s <\/span>Philosophers\u2019 Walks <\/span><\/i>aims at analysis of a diverse group of thinkers\u2014Descartes, Gassendi, Breton, Sartre, Beauvoir, Coleridge,Woolf, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. He accomplishes this aim by the novel means of retracing their walks, that is, by reconstructing and often actually repeating the rich variety of country hikes and urban strolls recorded in their works or attributed to them in biographies, letters, diaries, and other forms of commentary. While articulating and enacting these reconstructions, Baugh also weighs the activity of walking itself as an embodied mode of thinking. The result is a book with many moving parts\u2014philosophical arguments, travel diaries, bits of biography relevant to the main players, and personal reflections. It is a credit to the author\u2019s talent as a writer and his maturity as a philosopher that he conveys their complex interactions so seamlessly.<\/span><\/p>\n

The story begins with a reflection on Baugh\u2019s own habits as a walker. He takes us on a tour of some of his regular jaunts in Kamloops, B.C. (Chapter 1). This exercise culminates in two seminal insights. First, for the attentive walker\u2014the embodied thinker\u2014every neighbourhood is wondrous. Baugh finds as much food for thought in crossing the boundary between the old town and its suburbs or in the modes of selfhood projected by Wendy\u2019s and Walmart as in the objectively more attractive nature trails that run through and divide the city\u2019s human settlements. \u201cInvested by social meanings,\u201d he observes, \u201cinhabited, vital space is never merely a set of coordinates that can be plotted on a map\u201d (13). Secondly, the wonder of the Kamloops neighbourhood provides a foretaste of the dimensions of philosophers\u2019 walks to be developed in subsequent chapters. The introductory remark concludes: \u201cWith these investigations of my home ground, we have already glimpsed some key themes of this book…The trail-markers are in place\u201d (13).<\/span><\/p>\n

It is a clever strategy with an impeccable philosophical pedigree. The scene Baugh constructs strolling the streets of Kamloops lets him preview more in-depth analyses of the walker\u2019s embodied encounter of the environment, of walking\u2019s wide range of affective states, of its capacity for invoking the powers of memory, of its back-stretched connection to the work of imagination, and its allied tendency to carry us to places we did not originally intend to visit. As with a Platonic dialogue, there is a sense, reading <\/span>Philosophers\u2019 Walks<\/span><\/i>, in which the most important thematic material is there from the beginning; that subsequent argument or development amounts to saturating intellectual spaces already available in Baugh\u2019s hometown\u2014and, by implication, ours too.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What forms does that saturation take? In the chapters that comprise the body of the work, Baugh serves up a feast of philosophical commentary in seven courses. Walking a trail near the now abandoned village of Roche-Rousse (Gassendi\u2019s hometown), for example, he reflects on the mind-body problem at the centre of Gassendi\u2019s disagreement with Descartes (Chapter 2). The hike itself acquires the form of a deliberation\u2014beginning in error and ending in disclosure. Baugh literally sees things coming back down the trail that he missed on the way up. Interpreting those sights and insights, he inhabits the positions of Descartes and Gassendi. Eventually, driven by the vivid and undeniable experience of his own embodiment as a walker, he sides with the latter. Here, walking becomes a decision rendered against rationalism (at least as widely conceived). It provides a grounded point of departure for thinking in contrast to the abstraction of the <\/span>ego cogito\u2014<\/span><\/i>sufficient, perhaps, for someone snoozing in front of his fireplace but not for philosophy put on its feet.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Or, to take a contrasting second case: Prowling around Copenhagen (Chapter 6), Baugh tries to evaluate the Kierkegaardian art of hiding in plain sight, of \u201cgadding about on the streets and being a nobody…while thoughts and ideas were working within [him]\u201d (Kierkegaard 217). As with the forest path deliberation on mind and body, Baugh\u2019s city walks lead him directly to a main intersection of his subject\u2019s philosophy. In <\/span>Fear and Trembling<\/span><\/i>, Kierkegaard describes the ideal spiritual life in terms of a movement\u2014a walk, a dance\u2014at once outwardly plain or unassuming and inwardly marvelous. His Knight of Faith turns out to be precisely the person capable of expressing the sublime in the pedestrian. Digesting this lesson and its attendant writerly responsibilities, Baugh arrives at what is, in my view, the central question of <\/span>Philosophers\u2019 Walks<\/span><\/i>: How do we repeat a movement the substance of which is a kind of inward, spiritual transformation? Or more pointedly, perhaps: How, retracing the footsteps of Kierkegaard and other philosophical pilgrims, do we avoid a scholarship that is mere tourism? I\u2019ll come back to this issue in a moment.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chapters 2 through 6 fill out a kind of template present at every stage of Baugh\u2019s discussion. He goes to the site of his subject\u2019s hikes or strolls in order to uncover, re-walking their paths, a dimension of embodiment that might otherwise remain concealed. The fruits of this consistent practice are surprisingly various. Revisiting the spaces of Breton\u2019s novel, <\/span>Nadya<\/span><\/i> (Chapter 3), Baugh finds himself haunted by the Paris of 1926. To walk in any neighbourhood or on any path, he learns, is to absorb the traces of past generations still present there. Contemplating Sartre\u2019s few reluctant ventures into the mountainous French countryside (Chapter 4), Baugh finds a model for the vertigo so essential to his account of existential anxiety in <\/span>Being and Nothingness<\/span><\/i>. At a certain height, the destabilizing abysses of the human heart are powerfully externalized; the temptation to plunge into them real and terrifying. Following the Coleridge Way from Nether Stowey to Porlock (Chapter 5), Baugh ponders the back-stretched connection between the walker\u2019s gait and the poet\u2019s meter. Both measures, as it turns out, frame the work of imagination, and, in Coleridge\u2019s case at least, the former is an indispensable propaedeutic to the latter.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It is in Chapter 5, that the issue of tourism I tagged above (commenting on the treatment of Kierkegaard) makes a first, significant appearance. Baugh\u2019s walk on the Coleridge Way begins at the poet\u2019s house\u2014now a National Trust museum renovated and preserved in a state its most celebrated inhabitant might barely have recognized. The subsequent hike is marked by wrong turns and apparent dead ends that frustrate and interrupt the attempt to reconstitute Coleridge\u2019s exercises in imagination. Near the end of his journey, Baugh observes: \u201c[Coleridge\u2019s] mind and his feet were free to wander, hovering in that medium and mediating position between sensory receptivity and active thought occupied by the poetic imagination. My mind, by contrast, was very much preoccupied with the practical aims and cognitive tasks involved in following a path laid down by someone else\u201d (93). He then asks, rhetorically: \u201cHad the whole thing been a cheat? Wasn\u2019t the Coleridge Way just some inauthentic, contrived tourism promotion?\u201d (93).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Here, as throughout the book, the challenges of walking mirror those of thinking. \u00a0 Philosophical scholarship, too, runs the risk of simply \u201cfollowing a path laid down by someone else\u201d\u2014of simply looking on at what Descartes or Kant, Rousseau or Nietzsche, Woolf or Beauvoir accomplished. For me, the most compelling dimension of <\/span>Philosophers\u2019 Walks <\/span><\/i>is its embodiment of this temptation and its resistance. There are moments in his book where Baugh seems very much the philosophical tourist sunk in \u201cthe practical aims and cognitive tasks\u201d involved in repeating the walks of others; summarizing and clarifying philosophical backgrounds like the tour guide every professor of philosophy must play, to some extent, in the classroom; making of biography a kind of map on which to plot the location of philosophical and literary monuments. But these touristic elements are always, at the same time, undermined and surpassed by the book\u2019s capture of the indomitable spontaneity of walking itself. Indeed, Baugh <\/span>qua <\/span><\/i>narrator is at his best when things don\u2019t go as planned: when he gets lost or discovers something by accident. The reason for this is that walking can be embodied thought in the truest sense precisely because it is, in its very nature, open to discovery, reversal, epiphany, and chance; because it harbours, as a possibility of its very nature, an inward transformation, a movement from the consumerist pleasures of tourism to spiritual fulfillment of pilgrimage. Just shy of the midpoint of his walk with Coleridge, Baugh gathers all of this up beautifully in a statement that might be a one-paragraph epitome of his project as a whole:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00ab\u00a0Time and time again, I would lose my way literally or metaphorically, often failing to find what I was looking for: some idea, some insight into the person in whose footsteps I was walking, some way of connecting my walking with their thinking. Yet it also seemed that this process of going astray, doubling back, regaining the path, sometimes gaining the perspective I was seeking and sometimes not, was exactly what it means to be on a philosopher\u2019s walk: a walk that is open-ended, exploratory, and follows thoughts where they lead, even if that is not to a conclusion\u00a0\u00bb (89).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My own sense is that this spirit of exploration will appeal to a wide and diverse readership. <\/span>Philosophers\u2019 Walks<\/span><\/i> is a substantial addition to the literature on pilgrimage and other modes of reflective walking. It opens up, from that angle, new perspectives on the life and work of virtually all the philosophers and writers treated\u2014and so contributes to the scholarship in those subfields. Most importantly, perhaps, it makes walking itself\u2014its discipline, its irreducible physicality, its open-endedness, its risks and unexpected epiphanies\u2014a model for thinking.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

References<\/span><\/p>\n

Kierkegaard, S\u00f8ren. <\/span>The Corsair Affair<\/span><\/i>, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 1992<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bruce Baugh. Philosophers\u2019 Walks. London: Routledge, 2022; 252 pp. ISBN: 978-0367333133. Reviewed by James Crooks, Bishop\u2019s University\u00a0 Bruce Baugh\u2019s Philosophers\u2019 Walks aims at analysis of a diverse group of thinkers\u2014Descartes, Gassendi, Breton, Sartre, Beauvoir, Coleridge,Woolf, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. He accomplishes this aim by the novel means of retracing their walks, that is, by reconstructing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[304,38,303],"class_list":["post-13134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-embodiment","tag-phenomenology","tag-walking","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-27 19:13:12","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13134"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13136,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13134\/revisions\/13136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}