Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are

"This is a book by John Kaag . I mentioned his book American Philosophy: A Love Story last year—only I came across it relatively late, because it wasn’t widely circulated in England for some reason. It was very popular in America. John Kaag is a really interesting writer. He’s an academic philosopher by training and profession, but his writings are very strongly autobiographical and highly revealing. In this book, he goes back to his days as a graduate student, when he was just beginning his studies and writing about Nietzsche. He gets a grant to go and revisit some of the places where Nietzsche lived in his life as a wandering scholar, Switzerland in particular. He goes to the mountains. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Hiking With Nietzsche a very skillful combination of narrative about Nietzsche’s life intermingled with John Kaag’s past, but also his present, where he’s found a different kind of satisfaction. If you really want to fill in the details, you need to read American Philosophy: A Love Story because that explains some of the story about where he is now, who he’s married to, and how that came about. What I love about this book is that Kaag takes Nietzsche’s thinking very seriously as a philosophy for life. He’s fascinated by Nietzsche’s personality, where he actually spent his time and the mountains that he walked in. It’s quite a shocking book, in some ways, because Kaag is so confessional. I would put it in the same category as Rousseau ‘s Confessions, as he too openly discusses things other people might want to conceal about themselves. He talks about his psychological vulnerabilities, his anorexia, even his suicidal tendencies. These are quite raw emotional aspects of the book. But this isn’t a misery memoir or anything like that. This is a serious discussion of how philosophy relates to life, told through part of the author’s own life. It takes a very skilful writer to weave those things together in a way that is readable and interesting without seeming indulgent. Clearly it’s very dangerous. In John Kaag’s case, he’s literally looking into the abyss. He’s not just talking about looking into the abyss: he’s actually on a mountain looking down the very precipice that may have inspired Nietzsche to write certain passages as well. As I said earlier, nearly everyone has their own way of interpreting Nietzsche, so in a way it depends on which version of Nietzsche you adopt. There is the existential Nietzsche, which is a popular interpretation. Nietzsche is a proto-existentialist who says that you have to become who you are. You have to discover who you are and actually pursue the things that really resonate with your soul, the things which you love. What in your life has truly moved you? Find those things, focus on them, become who you are and celebrate life with all its imperfections so that you would live this life again and again without ever regretting an instant. Affirm everything that has happened to you. That’s a positive story of self-creation and self-realization. So you could live that. “Nietzsche loved other people, but they didn’t love him back. He was probably sexually frustrated.” But if you want to emulate Nietzsche more precisely, you’re going to have to be troubled, to be brilliant, to be sick, to experience unrequited love. Nietzsche loved other people, but they didn’t love him back. He was probably sexually frustrated. He didn’t have children. I have to mention that John Kaag isn’t like this. He talks about his second marriage, his young child, and how in fact this whole book is initiated by his three-year-old daughter seeing a scar on his ear—a scar acquired through possible frostbite from spending a night on a mountain, an ill-equipped, young graduate student exploring Nietzsche’s landscapes in Switzerland. This leads them back to revisit, as a family, the haunts of Kaag’s own quite traumatic period spent in the mountains. Ultimately, we see how far his life has changed and how different he’s become. Becoming who you are is something that Nietzsche advocated, and it’s a very common way of interpreting him. It means treating your life as a work of art, really—bringing the parts together in a way that is aesthetically pleasing. That’s another strong theme in Nietzsche: that only as an aesthetic phenomenon is life justifiable. You shape your life to become something that’s stylish and integrated, with your genuine commitment to the things you truly value at its core. Yes, if there is something that you truly value, or a way that you truly are. Going back to Sue Prideaux, I think that’s the aspect of Nietzsche’s writing that she picks up and sees as highly positive. Yes. Obviously, that’s not true. Many great thoughts have been conceived in other circumstances. But that’s the kind of thing Nietzsche does: he turns autobiographical idiosyncrasies into universal truths. In a way, that’s demonstrating, again, this ability to be a yes-sayer to life. Whatever befalls you, you find a story. He did a lot of walking, possibly because he loved walking, possibly because it was therapeutic for him, given his sickness, to be in the Alps breathing the mountain air and being outdoors. He’s not alone among philosophers for doing a lot of walking. Rousseau, famously, was a great walker. Hobbes was a great walker. There are many philosophers who were great walkers, who did their thinking while walking. In terms of philosophical creativity, there probably is something in it. If you’re just sitting down facing a blank sheet of paper, it may be quite difficult to generate ideas. But when you’re going somewhere, you’ve got the rhythms of walking. There’s a style of meditative thought that lends itself to that rhythm. “But that’s the kind of thing Nietzsche does: he turns autobiographical idiosyncrasies into universal truths.” Not so much Nietzsche, but some other philosophers such as Socrates and Kierkegaard walked and talked to people. They held intellectual conversations as they walked. The fact that two people face the same direction when they walk together is relevant. I think it liberates a different way of communicating from face-to-face discussion. According to Nietzsche, in a deeper way, maths is just a waste of time. How convenient. Again, that’s this autobiographical thing: whatever Nietzsche is like becomes a universal and a good way to be. Taken to extremes that’s ridiculous, of course. But with Nietzsche I think it’s often slightly tongue-in-cheek. Going back to the biography, when you see how witty and self-deprecatory he could be, there’s some sense in which he’s not always boasting, really. He’s just playing with you, teasing you."