The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“What compelled me to write the book was thinking through my relationship to both cycling and philosophy. There are competing threads to the narrative: one is personal—my experience as an athlete, the friendships I formed, and how I started to ride again in order to prepare for a ride down the California coast.

The other thread of the book is essentially a history of Western philosophy and how a specific tradition of metaphysics is at once tempting and dangerous—the sort of critique that Nietzsche makes that philosophy is “life denying” is something I wanted to explore against the backdrop of something as physical and embodied as cycling is. I was really influenced by road trip books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, which I’ve always had a real affinity for, and also Jack Kerouac’s On the Road—the sorts of books that fuse a very California ideal, the road trip, with philosophical reflections and an understanding of the role played by the landscape.

All of these things are commingled. My intent was a rather ambitious one, which is to describe what feels to me like the deep failure of Western metaphysics. That’s what I wanted to attack—this more cerebral view of what it is to be human by having this immediate lived experience as a counterpoint, of being on the bike and all of its visceral physicality. I wanted to address this through the work of not only Nietzsche, but also Heidegger, Carnap, Beauvoir, Camus, and other figures who show how thinking, when divorced from the physicality of our existence, fails—because I very much felt that it failed me.”

James Hibbard on the best cycling books, Five Books interview, Feb 28, 2023