We run so that we could hunt, so that we could eat animals and not just plants. And, as Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham and others have argued, the resulting increase in protein in our diet played at least some role in the significant expansions our brains underwent during this time. It may not have been the driving force behind this ‘encephalization’, but without this increase in protein it could not have happened. Running, in other words, removed an important constraint on our development as a species. Others have postulated an even closer connection between our ancestral running and our impressive contemporary cognitive abilities. Our ancestors’ hunting strategy was based not on speed but endurance – on the ability to keep track of a single animal, even if it was a member of a large herd, and track it mile after mile, keep up the pressure on it, to force it to keep running until it eventually died of overheating. Bernd Heinrich, a biologist at the University of Vermont, has argued that this necessity of focusing on one animal to the exclusion of all others, keeping that attention focused as the animal disappears towards the horizon, and maintaining it during the hours or even days to come, was the foundation of all our cognitive powers.
I think these stories, like many of the stories we tell about ourselves, are important not so much because of what they say but what they show. In saying this, I do not mean to suggest that the stories are necessarily false. On the contrary, I think there are important elements of truth in them. But an element of truth mistaken for the whole truth is sometimes more damaging than a lie. These evolutionary explanations of the significance of running attempt to account for this significance in terms of the usefulness that running has for the species Homo sapiens. There is nothing wrong with this: that is the way evolutionary explanations do and must work. But implicit in this – and this is what the stories show – is the assignation to running of value of a certain sort. Running is valuable because of what it does. Running is valuable because of other things it has brought us.
The assignation of this sort of value is reiterated at the level of the individual when we explain the significance of running in terms of the reasons people have for running. Individual people run, it is assumed, because it is useful for them to do so, in one way or another. Philosophers often refer to this value that derives from usefulness as ‘instrumental’ value. Something has instrumental value when it has value as an instrument – as a means to an end. Money has instrumental value: its value lies in the value of the things it can buy you. Medicine has instrumental value: its value lies in the value of the health to which it can restore you. When something has merely instrumental value, it does not have value in itself – its value always lies elsewhere, in something else. It is this other thing that is the real locus of value.
Running does have instrumental value. But the error implicit in both accounts of running, individual and evolutionary – an error that is perhaps great enough to be considered a monstrous historical lie – is to suppose that this is the only value running has. It is not – it is not even the primary value running has.
We live, in certain respects, in a monstrous age. This instrumentalist way of thinking about running is a reflection of the narrowly utilitarian era in which we have grown up: a time where everything must have a use – must be ‘good for something’. In his seminal essay, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, Martin Heidegger, perhaps the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, argued that implicit in the modern age is what he called a Gestell – an ‘enframing’. That is, the modern age embodies a way of seeing or understanding the world around us and, as such, precludes other ways of seeing this world. The modern age is by no means unique in this regard: all the ages of humans have their defining Gestell. The characteristic of the modern age is a Gestell of a singularly instrumental or utilitarian form. In the Gestell of the modern world, everything is reduced to a resource of some or other sort. We encounter and understand things only in terms of their use – broadly speaking, in terms of what they might do for us, whether for good or ill – and we fail to even understand that there might be anything else of value to them. Even the world of nature is now described as a collection of natural resources. Heidegger, with his characteristic penchant for ungrammaticality, described this instrumentalizing tendency of modern thought as a ‘darkened of the world’. Reality itself is understood in narrowly technological terms.
Perhaps it is too strong to say that we have become constitutionally unable to think of value in any other terms than as a function of use. But we do find it difficult. Certainly, that is the way that activity of running is typically justified, both to oneself and others. One runs, so one says, to stay healthy, to stay thin, to relax, to stay alive. The implicit assumption in these answers is that if running is a legitimate way of spending one’s time, then it must be ‘good for something’: that is, it must be useful in some way. That running may have a value that is independent of what it can do for us – that it might have a value that cannot be understood in instrumental terms – is an idea we find difficult to even understand. I say this from experience. I had to overcome many years of confusion, decades in fact, before I understood this.
I will spend much time in this book describing the experience of running – conducting, as philosophers sometimes put it, a ‘phenomenological’ investigation. I do not do this just for the sake of it, or because I enjoy it – in fact I find it a difficult, exacting, often wearying thing to do. Rather, I describe the experience of running because, I shall argue, it is the experience of a kind of value that is quite different – value that is not instrumental, not a function of usefulness. And in this value one can discern, at least in broad outline, something that is important in life. In this book, I shall defend a claim that many, I think most, will find strange. It is true that running has multifarious forms of instrumental value. However, at its purest and its best, running has an entirely different sort of value. This is sometimes known as ‘intrinsic’ or ‘inherent’ value. To say that something has intrinsic value is to say that it is valuable for what it is what it is in itself, and not because of anything else it might allow one to get or possess. Running, I shall argue, is intrinsically valuable. And so when one runs, and does this for the right reason, one is in contact with intrinsic value in life.
This has a significance that is far broader then merely understanding the essence of running – what running really is. Living amidst the darkened of the world, our lives are marred by the inability to recognize intrinsic value when we encounter it. Our lives are lived doing one thing for the sake of something else, which is in turn done for the sake of another something else. Three score years and ten, or twenty, of an endless for-the-sake-of-which: decades of chasing what is valuable but only rarely catching it. To be in contact with something that is important for its own sake, and not merely for the sake of something else, would be to end this chase, at least for a while. For a time at least, one does not chase value, one is immersed in it.
People sometimes ask – this is after all what philosophers are supposed to do, though few of us these days do it – what is the meaning of this life? The question is unfortunately constructed in at least two respects. First, the word ‘meaning’ has suggested to some people that the answer we are looking for is a mystical one, of the sort that might be supplied by a guru. Secondly, the use of the definite article suggests that the question permits only one answer – a sort of existential magic bullet that will tell us unequivocally what life is all about. But, in reality, the question is more familiar and less ambitious: a question that almost everyone will ask himself or herself at some time or other. What is important in life? Alternatively: what is valuable in life? Or: what should I cherish in life? Or, if we assume that the way I live will reflect the things I value: how should I live? Mystical answers to these questions are of little use: an answer would be useful to the extent it can be understood, and to the extent it can be understood it is not mystical. Moreover, there is no reason to suppose these questions admit of only one answer.
Running, I shall argue, is a way of understanding what is important or valuable in life. It is a way of putting oneself in contact with intrinsic value as it shows itself, or makes itself known, in a human life. Running is by no means the only way of doing this. But it is one way: and as such it is a way of answering the question of the meaning of life, in the only reasonable sense this question can have – however mundane and unambitious that may be. The answer to this question is, at least for me, always tenuous and shifting. It is something I understand only in moments, and then it is gone. But these may be the most important moments of my life. Fundamentally, I shall try to convince you that there is a type of knowledge embodied in running. When I run, I know what is important in life – although for many years I did not know that I knew this. This is not so much knowledge newly acquired as knowledge reclaimed. When I was a boy, I also knew what was important in life. I suspect we all did, although we did not know that we knew it. But this is something I forgot when I began the great game of growing up and becoming someone. Indeed, it is something I had to forget in order to play this game at all. It is one of life’s great ironies that those least in need of understanding its meaning are those who most naturally and effortlessly understand it. On the long run, I can hear the whispers of a childhood I can never reclaim, and of a home to which I can never return. In these whispers, in the rumours and mutterings of the long run, there are moments when I understand again what it was I once knew.
Thoughts sit on a printed page, but they echo through a life – the echoes of a bell that tolls slowly in the distance. But rather than simply replicating the peal that produced it, the echo is always subtly transformed: always transformed because life is always moving. This is the Doppler shift of thought as it occurs in a life; the mutation of thought that is lived and not merely thought. A book about running, I slowly came to understand, must have the structure of running; if not, the thoughts that make it up just will not fit and so will not make sense. Running is undifferentiated activity. Every movement – every stride of the long run, every swing of the arms – flows into the next. The thought that make up this book are like that. They flow into each other, never constant, never stable, always changing, shifting as the run goes on.
The separation into chapters is, in some respects, nominal. The chapters are organized around runs, discrete episodes in my life and the life of the pack that ran with me, but the thoughts that animate these runs flow into each other. From the perspective of thought, if not life, each chapter begins where the last chapter ends – even though the runs they describe might be separated by many years. Ideas that I thought I had left in the dust miles back, years back, insist on reappearing in new and subtly mutated forms. Logic: that is still there, but not so much as the legs and arms that drive the run as the signposts that direct it. The book does not unfold as a logical argument should, with premises that neatly, efficiently and decisively yield conclusions. Rather, this book is the record of someone struggling to run – as on many of my runs, often slowly and painfully – in the general direction of a conclusion. I will get there in the end. But on this run, there are many dead ends, no through roads and blind alleys. Sometimes, even on the roads that actually go somewhere had to be run and rerun over and over again before I understood where they led. I apologize if there may sometimes appear to be repetition. In reality, the routes are always subtly changing, both in landscape and destination, and that is one of the most important things about them. In the end, the run always takes us home, back to where we started. But sometimes, if we run long enough, that home will have become transformed. The end of this book is also its beginning. But if the book has worked, that beginning will have been decisively changed.
I sometimes think that running may be a place where I channel my history. Running is a place where I really do stand on the shoulders of giants – or, more appositely, run in the conceptual slipstream of thinkers older and better than I – a place where things that I have read and seemingly forgotten, things that have become buried long, long years in the trivialities of life and the life of the trivial, once again have their moment on the conscious stage, to strut and pout and remonstrate: why did you forget me? This stage they enter and exit, changing nothing or changing everything, and I have little say in any of it. Running is a place where I remember. Most importantly, it is a place where I remember not the thoughts of others, but something that I once knew, a lifetime ago, but was forced to forget in the process of growing up and becoming someone. I knew this although I did not know that I knew it; and in this I was just like everyone else. Running is a place for remembering. It is in this place that we find the meaning of running.