Geography of Creative Thought: Walking with Freud and Nietzsche

The disciplines of Philosophy and Geography emphasize different aspects of human experience, with the former concerned with argument, rational and creative thought and the latter with places and relationships between people and their environments. Such divisions overlook the interconnectedness of these disciplines and their concerns for shaping and informing human experience. This paper bridges the two disciplines by proposing a perspective of ‘geographical philosophy’ to explore the relationships between ideas and places, and between thinking and walking in different environments. I elaborate on a notion upheld by many philosophers that a walk outside helps one to think and to think well. I demonstrate how the reported walks of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud provide useful case studies for shedding light on the cognitive advantages of walking in different environments by explaining how the places they walked in directly influenced their ideas.