Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are

by John Kaag

Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves. —Hermann Hesse, Zarathustra’s Return, 1919

Set for yourself goals, high and noble goals, and perish in pursuit of them! I know of no better life purpose than to perish in pursuing the great and the impossible: animae magnae prodigus. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Notebook, 1873

I had been drawn to the Alps, to the hamlet of Sils-Maria, the Swiss village that Nietzsche called home for much of his intellectual life. For days, I wandered the hills that he’d traversed at the end of the nineteenth century, and then, still trailing Nietzsche, I went in search of a parent.

Corvatsch, Bernina, Mont Blanc, Everest—the road to the parent is, for most travelers, unbearably long.

For many years I thought the message of the Übermensch was clear: become better, go higher than you presently are. Free spirit, self-conqueror, nonconformist—Nietzsche’s existential hero terrifies and inspires in equal measure. The Übermensch stands as a challenge to imagine ourselves otherwise, above the societal conventions and self-imposed constraints that quietly govern modern life.

At nineteen, on the summit of Corvatsch, I had no idea how dull the world could sometimes be. How easy it would be to remain in the valleys, to be satisfied with mediocrity. Or how difficult it would be to stay alert to life.

In midlife, the Übermensch is a lingering promise, a hope, that change is still possible. Nietzsche’s Übermensch—actually his philosophy on the whole—is no mere abstraction. It isn’t to be realized from an armchair or the comfort of one’s home. One needs to physically rise, stand up, stretch, and set off.

When I first summited Corvatsch, I thought that the sole objective of tramping was to get above the clouds into open air, but over the years, as my hair has begun to gray, I’ve concluded that this cannot possibly be the only point of hiking, or of living. It is true that the higher one climbs, the more one can see, but it is also true that no matter the height, the horizon always bends out of view.

How high is high enough? What am I supposed to be looking at or, more honestly, searching for? What is the point of this blister on my foot, the pain of self-overcoming? How exactly did I reach this particular mountaintop? Am I supposed to be satisfied with this peak?

This is a story of trying to lean in just the right way, to lean one’s present self into something unattained, attainable, yet out of view. Even slipping can be instructive. Something happens not at the top, but along the way. One has the chance, in Nietzsche’s words, to “become who you are.”

“The educated classes,” Nietzsche explained, “are being swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy.” The prospects for life in modern capitalist society were lucrative but nonetheless bleak: “The world has never been so worldly, never poorer in love and goodness.”

Tragedy, according to Nietzsche, had its benefits: it proved that suffering could be more than mere suffering; in its bitter rawness, pain could still be directed, well-ordered, and even beautiful and sublime.

“What was once done ‘for the love of God,’” Nietzsche suggests, “is now done for the love of money.” In truth, what was once done “for the love of God,”

At the age of fifteen—when other teenagers were sowing their first wild oats—young Fritz established an exclusive book club called Germania. There were a handful of members: Nietzsche and a few other boys who were bookish enough to satisfy him. At their inaugural meeting they bought a ninepenny bottle of claret, hiked into the ancient ruins of Schönburg outside Pforta, swore their allegiance to arts and letters, and hurled the bottle over the battlements to sanctify the pact.

When he joined the Burschenschaft Frankonia, the equivalent of an American fraternity, he reached the limits of his willingness to conform. He actually didn’t like beer. He liked pastries. And he liked studying—a lot. When he left Bonn for Leipzig after only ten months, it was with the distinct sense that being normal was a waste of time.

“There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do not ask,” Nietzsche instructs, “go along it.” The path of self-reliance would become the high road that would eventually lead him to the Alps.

For Emerson, self-overcoming was realized in summer moments of joy and sadness, the moments at high noon when one realizes that the day is in decline, already half over.

Published in 1841, Emerson’s essay “Compensation,” the sister essay to his more famous “Self-Reliance,” promised that “every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.” Nietzsche spent most of his life trying to internalize this message, echoing it repeatedly, most famously in The Twilight of the Idols: “What does not kill me,” he asserted, “makes me stronger.”

Hiking like this doesn’t make much sense—especially to a culture that prides itself on ever more painless ways of getting from here to there. Nietzsche had a word for such a culture: decadent. The word comes from the Latin dēcadēre, “to fall off”—as in off the rails.

With the help of Christianity and capitalism, human animals had been allowed to go soft. When one “went to work,” it was rarely for the joy of exercising free will, but rather for the sake of some future paycheck. Life was no longer lived enthusiastically—only deferred.

I was left by myself in the station, gasping the thin air, wondering where I would spend the night. But it was only three in the afternoon, and the mountains beckoned. With flip-flops on my feet and a thirty-pound pack on my back, I set off on my first Alpine trek.

Walking is among the most life-affirming of human activities. It is the way we organize space and orient ourselves to the world at large. It is the living proof that repetition—placing one foot in front of the other—can in fact allow a person to make meaningful progress.

The history of philosophy is largely the history of thought in transit.

The Buddha, Socrates, Aristotle, the Stoics, Jesus, Kant, Rousseau, Thoreau—these thinkers were never still for very long. And some of them, the truly obsessive walkers, realized that wandering can eventually lead elsewhere: to the genuine hike.

In fact, Nietzsche often sounds as though happiness is at best a kind of secondary goal. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s most famous character, having spent his life in the mountains, concludes: “Happiness? Why should I strive for happiness? I strive for my work.”

Most of the demanding trails through the Alps aren’t really trails at all. Just faint whispers marked by scuffs in the earth and misplaced stones. Here it is possible to realize the hidden essence of walking—that where to go, and how to get there, is entirely up to you. “Each soul,” Emerson wrote in his lecture “Natural History of the Intellect,” “walking in its own path walks firmly, and to the astonishment of all other souls, who see not its path.”

I spent the early evenings in the halls of the Nietzsche-Haus, contemplating the Richters that had been left behind on the walls: shimmering photos of skulls overlaid with splatters of paint. “Perish in pursuing the great and the impossible”: the words haunted these pictures. The painter had followed Nietzsche in making Sils his home away from home, and this is what he’d found.

Some of the most dramatic summits, I learned, are the best places to view the gorges and chasms of life. Exploring Nietzsche’s life—vibrant and productive—is also to confront his recurring desire to escape it.

For a surprising number of people, the most frightening part of suicide is the idea of not succeeding. The outcome seems preferable to life, but the deed is difficult and very risky.

As he wrote his Zarathustra, he measured one’s strength by the willingness to stand face-to-face with these forbidden possibilities: “He who seeth the abyss, but with eagle eyes, he who with eagle’s talons graspeth the abyss: he hath courage.”

Whatever it is—demon or God—it is waiting for you. Nietzsche insists that “if thou gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.”

One hundred feet? Two hundred? I could never figure it out. If I went headfirst, it would work, or I would break my spine and never walk again. More likely, I’d succeed—but not in the way I intended—by bleeding out slowly. Self-inflicted pain was one thing, but dying in some botched attempt seemed to defeat the purpose. So I waited.

“Companions, I need,” Zarathustra admitted, “and living ones—not dead companions or corpses I carry wherever I go. But living companions I need who follow me because they wish to follow themselves—and to the places whither I wish to go.” Perhaps I’d go to Turin next time. And next time, I wouldn’t come alone.

In Zarathustra, Nietzsche explains that a child gives voice to a “sacred Yes,” a rare moment of permission in the restrictiveness of adult life. For a child, there is no such thing as a forbidden question.

It was, as it is for many philosophers, an arduous trek: through a ten-year relationship that ended in divorce, through what most of my family and friends took as a scandalously sudden remarriage, all the way to a delivery room at Mass General Hospital, where I met a small, helpless stranger who became our most intimate companion. And now to the nursery and a choice that led me back to the childless Nietzsche.

“I used to be happy,” one of my students informed me halfway through the term, “then I started reading Nietzsche.”

Bears are robust—but also solitary—creatures, and Nietzsche spent his final days as a university student perfecting the art of being alone. He wrote in his journal that he wandered through the streets of Leipzig lost in thoughts that shuttled between anxiety and depression.

Becoming who you are meant, at least at first, becoming deeply depressed.

Marrying,” Schopenhauer tells us, “means to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find an eel amongst an assembly of snakes.”

She and I fought as only philosophers can: incessantly, intimately, bordering on erotic passion. And this is what carried us into marriage.

When it came to romance, Kierkegaard had only slightly better luck than Nietzsche. The Dane was engaged to a beautiful and intelligent woman, Regine Olson, but as their marriage approached, Kierkegaard had second thoughts and decided that his melancholy made him unsuited to a long-term union. My wife and I should have come to that decision. Instead, we were married in a little church in central Pennsylvania.

Carol is a Kantian, and Immanuel Kant is usually considered the German philosopher, but Nietzsche called him a “catastrophic spider”—a system maker who spun a web of idealism that had entangled too many good thinkers.

The shift in philosophical focus was a decision, or an attempt, to change myself. American philosophers—Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, Josiah Royce—continued the tradition of intellectual wandering and took to the mountains of New England in search of inspiration and concentration. But they often hiked together—with kindred intellectual spirits who could share in their philosophical projects. With their help, I slowly, haltingly learned to walk leisurely with someone else.

Carol might have thought that Nietzsche was an idiot, but my onetime admiration for him mattered to her. She was more than curious: she wanted to understand.

When I was nineteen, I hadn’t known, or noticed or cared, but the hotel had a name, a famous one: Das Waldhaus Sils. This grande dame of a hotel—the “house in the woods”—had attracted a century’s worth of Nietzschean pilgrims: Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, Carl Jung, Primo Levi, and, by far my favorite, Hermann Hesse.

According to Nietzsche, there are two forms of health: the futile type that tries to keep death at bay as long as possible, and the affirming type that embraces life, even its deficiencies and excesses.

The Greeks understood beauty in its most robust sense—as a way of transforming agony and drudgery into something creative and enrapturing. There was no such thing as “art for art’s sake” for the Greeks;

UNZEITGEMÄSSE BETRACHTUNGEN, often translated as Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations, consumed his thirties. He would later reflect that these essays served to vent “everything negative and rebellious that is hidden within me.”

The world that the Wagners created in Lucerne, in stark contrast, was extraordinary, mythological, imaginary—populated by muses and angels. Wagner’s realm was pointedly antimodern, built on the belief that the only way to save the hideous present was to worship the beauty of the distant past.

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes that “if you do not have a good father, you should procure one.” A good father: this is what he tried—and ultimately failed—to find in Wagner.