Climbing - Philosophy for Everyone

Because It's There

Stephen E. Schmid, Fritz Allhoff

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444341461
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Climbing- Philosophy for Everyone presents a collection of intellectually stimulating new essays that address the philosophical issues relating to risk, ethics, and other aspects of climbing that are of interest to everyone from novice climbers to seasoned mountaineers.

• Represents the first collection of essays to exclusively address the many philosophical aspects of climbing
• Includes essays that challenge commonly accepted views of climbing and climbing ethics
• Written accessibly, this book will appeal to everyone from novice climbers to seasoned mountaineers
• Includes a foreword written by Hans Florine
• Shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, 2010

PART I

TYING IN

Why Risk Climbing

KEVIN KREIN

CHAPTER 1

Climbing and the Stoic Conception of Freedom

There are moments on high cold mountains, life enhancing moments … they are fragile transient times, when the borders between living and dying seem to overlap, when the past and future cease to exist and you are free.

Joe Simpson¹

Why climb? For the natural experience; for the danger that draws us ever on; for the feeling of total freedom; for the monstrous drop beneath you. It is like a drug.

Herman Buhl²

I’m in love with climbing because of the beauty of the moves, because of the sensations it gives me and the feeling of freedom I experience. And this is even more the case, the higher up I am!

Pietro Dal Pra³

The pursuit of freedom is often cited as a reward of climbing. Even a little thought, however, shows that it is difficult to make any sense of the idea that a person could be more free when climbing than they are in other aspects of their life. Most people would not consider themselves free in the situations in which climbers routinely find themselves – on small ledges or steep slopes, often tied to someone else or an anchor just a few feet away, where any kind of movement is constrained by a number of factors and where serious injury or death could result from even a small mistake. In this essay I attempt to explain how, even under such conditions, climbers can experience a rare and profound sense of freedom. In fact, I will argue that climbers experience the freedom they do in part because of the constraints imposed on them and the dangers they face while climbing.

One place to start is by asking what people usually mean by the term “freedom.” As a rule, when people say that they are free, they mean that they are unrestricted. That is, they have possible options that they can choose between as they wish. Often, the more options that exist, the freer a person is considered to be. But rather than talking in completely general terms, normally, people discuss more specific types of freedom. For example, one can have freedom of action or movement. A person who is free in this sense may go where he or she pleases and do what he or she wishes. To the extent that this is not the case, we say that a person is not free. A person who is trapped, injured, or is limited in his or her actions in any other way lacks freedom in this sense.

A second type of freedom that people often talk about is political freedom. In this context people are considered free if government or social controls do not inhibit them. It is worth noting that a person may lack freedom in the above mentioned sense (freedom of movement or action) but still be politically free. For instance, I have a friend who is currently spending time on the couch recovering from an ankle injury suffered while bouldering. While his freedom of movement has been reduced, so that he is not able to climb or ski, his political freedom has remained untouched.

A third context in which we speak of freedom arises primarily in philosophical discussions of free will and determinism. This is generally considered to be a metaphysical problem concerning whether or not human beings really make free choices, or are determined, either by mechanisms of physical causation or otherwise, to act exactly as they do. It is often said that people are free in this sense if, given a circumstance, they could act, or could have acted, other than they actually do or did.

As for the first sense, freedom of movement or action, when one is climbing, his or her options are more limited than in most situations in life on horizontal ground. Right now, I can get up, walk in any direction, decide to visit friends, go for a run, or even head out to go rock climbing. Once on a climb, however, my options are generally limited to a few possible ways of going up (if I can), going down, or staying put (for as long as I can). Part of climbing is putting oneself in situations where one’s movements or actions are limited, sometimes to the extreme.

In terms of political freedom, while there are rare cases in which a person might use his or her climbing skills to escape an oppressive government, in general, one is no more politically free on a mountain than in one’s home. It is even true that some climbers claiming to be seeking freedom travel from places where people enjoy extensive political freedom to places that are far less politically free in order to climb. It is fairly clear that the freedom associated with climbing is not political.

As for freedom of the will, it certainly seems to be the case that humans either have free will or do not. So, it is difficult to see how being immersed in a climb could have any influence at all on whether a being is free in this sense.

In fact, according to any understanding of freedom that requires many possible options, we are less free while climbing. Oddly enough, it is often when climbers have the fewest options that they claim to experience the most freedom. In the quote from Pietro Dal Pra above, he says that the higher up he is – where his actual options are most limited – the freer he feels. Often, it is when climbers talk about fully committing to a particular route – moving past the point where they have the option of retreating, and onto the portions of routes where the risks are commonly the greatest – that they claim to really feel free.

We might look at this situation and say that climbers, like many athletes, are just not very good at expressing themselves. When they say that they feel free, they mean that it feels good to do what they do. I don’t think that this is the case and will spend the rest of this essay trying to explain the sense in which climbers can be free. In order to do this, however, I will turn to a way of looking at freedom that is different from the common, contemporary understanding of it. The Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome had a conception of freedom that I will argue explains what climbers are trying to express. In order to present this conception of freedom, I am going to abandon talk of climbing for a short while and turn to Stoic philosophy.

Stoicism developed in Athens in the fourth century BCE and was one of the most influential philosophical schools in Greece and Rome. The school takes its name from the fact that its founder, Zeno of Citium, chose to meet on a particular stoa (porch or colonnade) overlooking the large public area in Athens. After Zeno, the next two heads of the school of thought, Chrysippus and Cleanthes, continued to develop Stoic ideas. These three philosophers formulated the foundations of the general positions of Stoicism.

Unfortunately, while the three principal Stoics produced books that were well known (Chrysippus is said to have completed 165 works), none of those books survived beyond the classical period. We know what the early Stoics thought because other philosophers, historians, and commentators whose work did survive paraphrased and quoted Stoic texts. Scholars have collected these fragments and have pieced together Stoic philosophical positions.⁴ Figuring out the details and development of early Stoic theory is a bit like trying to figure out what happened to Mallory and Irvine on Everest or to Maestre and Egger on Cerro Torre. Some events are generally accepted and agreed upon, others are the subject of much debate. And, every once in a while, someone digs around a bit more and a new piece of evidence is found. The topics I address in this essay are among those generally agreed upon.

The early Stoics felt that they were working out a complete philosophical system in which all parts were interconnected and consistent. So, in explaining the Stoic idea of freedom, I will also, by necessity, cover various other aspects of Stoic philosophy.

One thing that is very clear is that the Stoics were strict determinists – they held that every event in the universe is physically caused by the events preceding it and that things could not happen in any other way than they do. In an illustration that might make some climbers uncomfortable, the Roman philosopher Cicero explained that according to the Stoic position, “The passage of time is like the unwinding of a rope, bringing about nothing new and unrolling each stage in its turn.”⁵

What needs to be shown is how it is, according to the Stoics, that one can be free, though the events of his or her life could not turn out other than they do. And, for this essay, of course, what needs to be explained is how it makes sense to talk about feeling free when one is well above that last piece of pro and can barely make the next move, or one is pinned down by wind and unable to leave a tent for several days. My hope is that the answers to both of these questions will be fairly clear once I have provided more information on Stoic metaphysics.

Although the Stoics were determinists, they also felt that every event in the world occurs according to a divine plan or direction. The Stoics understood God to be that which guides all events in the universe to occur in accordance with reason. But rather than existing outside of nature and directing it, they held that God is reason and is contained in nature. Chrysippus is said to have claimed that “divine power resides in reason and the mind and intellect of universal nature” and that “God is the world itself.”⁶ And, importantly, the logos (reason or rationality) of humans is not entirely separate from the universal reason or logos of God, the determining force governing events in the universe. In fact, the early Stoics saw the rationality of humans to be part of the rationality that constitutes God. It is in this relationship of the reason of individual humans to universal reason that the Stoic notion of freedom can be developed.

Chrysippus held that the stated goal of the Stoic philosophers was “living in agreement with nature … which is in accordance with the nature of oneself and that of the whole.”⁷ Living in accord with oneself and the universe, they argued, was the result of living completely according to reason. Because the universe is governed by reason, living by reason will lead to the individual living a life in harmony with the events of the world. Stoics refer to a person whose understanding is in harmony with the flow of events in the universe as a wise man or sage. For the wise person, there is no inner conflict because his or her will is governed by reason, and no outer conflict because the world is also so governed.

With no conflict, the wise person only wants to do that which universal reason allows. Thus, while every event is determined, the wise person is free in the sense that his or her desires are not inhibited in any way. The world is governed by reason and the wise person acts in accordance with reason, so he or she can do all the things he or she wants to do. It would be difficult to say that a person who can do whatever he or she wants to do is not free. We can see why, then, the Stoics would claim that “Besides being free, the wise are also kings, since kingship is rule that is answerable to no one; and this can occur only among the wise.”⁸

In a classic illustration of the Stoic idea of freedom that is generally attributed to Chrysippus, we are asked to consider a dog that is tethered to a wagon. As the wagon moves along, either the dog may move along with the cart, in which case the dog’s will and necessity unite, or the dog may struggle against the motion of the cart. In either situation, the dog will move along with the cart. In the latter case, while the dog struggles, it is pulled along anyway, and the Stoics claim that it is not free. In the former case, though tied to the wagon, it is, according to the Stoics, free.

But it is important to remember that, according to the Stoics, the dog is not free because it has simply accepted its bondage and resigned itself to following wherever the cart goes. It is free because its will is in accord with the will that steers the cart, so that its own volition takes it to the same place the cart is going. In such a case, the tether becomes irrelevant, as the dog can and will go exactly where it wants.

If we take the cart to represent the flow of events and the dog to represent an individual human, the wise person is like the dog that moves along with the cart. With this in mind, the Stoic claim that only the wise person is free and all others, regardless of their political position, are slaves, makes sense.

We can also see a comparison to the world of climbing. As a climber moves up a route, he or she encounters changes in weather, various types of terrain, equipment failure at times, and different objective hazards. The climber who understands, acknowledges, and accepts these things, and willingly chooses to act in accord with his or her situation, can be said to freely choose his or her path. The climber who does not understand the situation he or she is in, or attempts to act without regard to the various aspects of his or her environment, will be restrained by these features anyway. In this case, like the tethered dog who fights the direction of the cart, the climber is not free.

While I think that there is wisdom in Stoic philosophy, my goal in this essay is not to convince readers that the Stoic worldview is correct. Instead, I focus on using the Stoic understanding of freedom to explain the freedom experienced in climbing. In addition, I will suggest that the activity of climbing, and the risks inherent in the activity, create settings that are conducive to the experience of that freedom. If my explanation is correct, Herman Buhl, Pietro Dal Pra, and Joe Simpson experience a type of freedom similar to that discussed by Zeno, Chryssipus, Cleanthes, and Epictetus.

There are times in climbing when all of the correct moves are obvious. Things go smoothly and everything feels solid. It feels, at these points, like everything works. But a large part of that success is in not attempting things that will not work – seeing the right moves rather than the wrong ones. In this situation, the climber becomes free in the sense that he or she is unrestricted – whatever he or she attempts, he or she can do. What a climber needs to do in order to experience freedom of this sort is to align his or her will with the relevant features of the mountain environment. Freedom in climbing is about knowing oneself and one’s environment well enough that one desires to do exactly what one can. This, then, is the basis of the climber’s freedom. As Chrysippus may have put it if he had been a climber: one may achieve freedom by climbing in accord with the mountain, that is, in accord with one’s own nature and the mountain’s nature. Like the Stoic sage, the climber who understands the mountains and his or her self, and whose will is in harmony with the mountain environment, is free. But the freedom does not result from having many options; instead, it is a result of desiring precisely those things the mountain allows.

This explains as well why it is only climbers who feel free in the kind of conditions I have been describing. Anyone who does not know the environment, techniques, and equipment of climbing will not understand the relevant features of that particular world. The non-climber’s will is not likely to be in accord with the mountain environment and the non-climber is not likely to see the appropriate responses to given situations.

On the other hand, it is more experienced climbers who will tend to feel free the most often. Experience generally means having a better understanding of the mountains from a climber’s perspective. Knowing mountains better, and knowing how to respond to changes in weather, snow, rock, and ice, allows one to do more – to push things closer to the edge. This knowledge also allows one to remain in harmony with the mountain environment under a broader variety of conditions.

The experience of freedom I am describing is precious and difficult to achieve. What is particularly interesting about climbing is that the mountain environment has certain features that almost seem designed to help climbers experience the Stoic type of freedom. The first of these is the simplicity of the climber’s world. The Stoics describe a way of being in which a wise person moves through life seemingly unimpeded by the things that cause distress to others. This is the result of coming, through reason, to a state of being in harmony with oneself and the world. Achieving this state is rare because the world is such a complex and difficult place.

But the world of climbing is a much simpler place than the world experienced in normal life. Or, to put it more precisely, while climbing, the relevant features of the world with which one must interact are greatly reduced. In comparison with life in general, the goals of climbing are very straightforward and the distracting features with which one must deal are eliminated. In most of our lives, we juggle long-term plans and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Halftitle page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgement
• Philosophizing Into the Void: An Introduction to Climbing – Philosophy for Everyone
• PART I TYING IN: Why Risk Climbing
• PART II QUEST FOR THE SUMMIT: Cultivating the Climber
• PART III CUTTING THE ROPE: Climbing Ethics
• PART IV MIXED CLIMBING: Philosophy on Varied Terrain
• Climbing Glossary
• Notes on Contributors