Kant's Weekly Mileage

Kant was the type of runner known as a walker. I read on this website that every day at 3.30pm he would emerge from his lodging, wearing his cocked hat and a long-coat and carrying a rattan cane and would walk up and down his street exactly 8 times, covering a distance of 4 miles. That makes 28 miles per week, further - I would hazard - than many present-day runners.

Let's not discuss Kant's heart rate while he racked up the miles. For the sake of argument let's assume that he wasn't going at 90% MHR, but that it was raised by his exertions. He might well have chosen to cover 4 miles because it took him around an hour, which would make him a 15 minute miler. Respectable for a 5 footer with a bad back and a non-wicking long-coat.

Read any biography of Kant and it will mention his walking as a quirk, a remarkable feature in an otherwise unremarkable life, by which the citizens of Königsberg could set their clocks. With few exceptions, Kant's biographers have never been able to reconcile his sheltered existence with his revolutionary philosophical works. It is interesting, they say, that the life of the philosopher who effected a 'Copernican Revolution' and totally reshaped modern thought should be so dull in comparison.

But is Kant's commitment to 28 mpw merely a comparative dullness? Is his mileage not, rather, the key to his entire transcendental philosophy? What else could have constantly reminded him, as he broke into a sweat and increased his breathing rate, that there was more to being than abstract thinking, and more to philosophy than Wolffian rationalism. David Hume may have awoken Kant from his dogmatic slumbers, but I'll wager it was his daily exertion that kept Kant alive to the possibility of human thought transcending itself and grasping the empirical world.

Of course, as runners we know that thinking is bound to the respiration process, and that the noblest of theoretical enterprises is tied - somehow - to the acts of moving and breathing. As runners we are philosophers. Each time we lace up we take the first few steps along the Kantian road.