WS102: On Walking

Solvitur ambulando (“it is solved in walking”) is one of the great Weird Studies mottos. Some problems can be solved by planning and mapping — getting somewhere high up and surveying the whole landscape at a glance. But some situations call for keeping your feet on the ground and exploring the landscape from the inside: solvitur ambulando. Walking can be a metaphor for doing philosophy at the thin end of the wedge.

But walking isn’t just a metaphor for philosophy. For millennia, walking has been a way of doing philosophy. Aristotle and his followers were known as the Peripatetic school for their habit of philosophizing while strolling around the Lyceum grounds. Nietzsche tells us that we should “put no trust in any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement,” and Thoreau, Rousseau, Kant, and Heidegger (among others) would have agreed. There is not only a philosophy of walking; there is also a walking of philosophy.

And walking isn’t just about thinking. It is also about sensing, feeling, and imagining. Walking is the handmaid of art. It may even be an art in its own right, an act of co-creation in which the soul and earth conspire to bring forth a world — psychogeography. From the beginning of literature, the walk has been a vehicle for enchantment: some of our oldest stories — “Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Riding Hood” — are built around a journey into the unknown. The French Situationists knew this well. For them, the exploratory walk — the dérive, or “drift” — was always a venture into strangeness, even when it threaded through familiar streets. The medieval troubadours spoke of a similar movement, casting the knight’s quest as a form of errancy.

Finally, walking has likely held religious significance for as long as we’ve been upright. In Genesis, to “walk with God,” as Enoch and Noah did, is to live in alignment with the divine. Across cultures, the act of pilgrimage — from the walkabouts of Australian Aboriginal peoples to the Camino de Santiago and the Zen practice of kinhin — stands as a spiritual archetype. To peregrinate is to walk towards a destination while suspending the logic of ends and means. It is to give oneself over to the path — to step, quite literally, into mystery.

A Participatory Experience

More than a disquisition on walking, this course seeks to embody its theme. Having chosen a destination — a deeper understanding of what walking means — J.F. and Phil will proceed without a fixed itinerary, discovering the path through their signature style favoring close reading, exploration, and exchange. Participants are invited to join them in a series of participatory exercises and “event scores” designed to engage thought, feeling, and perception as only walking can. For six weeks, we become the Walking Weird.