Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are

by John Kaag

When I was four, and for the next six years, Jan occasionally told me that he’d never wanted children but that I was not always the burden he’d anticipated.

Only very lucky children got to be this uncomfortable and embarrassed. Subjugation had its pleasures. It was in Wagner’s company that Nietzsche learned a lesson that he would pass on to his readers—that our deep desires for beauty and affection often stem from deprivation, melancholy, and pain.

The question in each and every thing, “Do you want this again and innumerable times again?” —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882

“Sickness,” he explained, “detached me slowly [from society]: it spared me any break, any violent and offensive step … My sickness also gave me the right to abandon all my habits completely, it commanded me to forget.”

Instead of taking ethical norms—such as humility, pity, and self-sacrifice—at face value as guides to right action, Nietzsche asks the subversive question: Where did these values come from in the first place? What is their background? What is their forgotten history?

The revaluation of values gains traction in the initial, relatively simple insight that “humanity is not all by itself on the right way, that it is by no means governed divinely, that, on the contrary, it has been precisely among its holiest value concepts that the instinct of denial, corruption, and decadence has ruled seductively.”

WE DEPLANED IN ZÜRICH, the spiritual doppelgänger of Nietzsche’s Basel, which is to say wholly spiritless, and we left as quickly as possible.

Sometimes deviations from the past are necessary or preferable.

There was roadwork, so it was stop-and-start, which I found rather annoying until I realized that these interruptions were the only way a driver could actually appreciate the views.

When he walked this trail, skirting the water, Nietzsche wrote that he frequently wept “not sentimental tears, but tears of exultation.” When you read Nietzsche in a library or a coffee shop, it is possible to misinterpret this as hyperbole or the ravings of a madman. But not here. There is no such thing as hyperbole in the Alps.

The idea is a wonderful, awful one: What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself…” Indeed, “what if?”

It is a challenge—or, better, a question—that is to be answered not in words but in the course of life: “The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you want this again and innumerable times again?’ would lie on your actions as the heaviest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to long for nothing more fervently than for this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?” Are we, in the words of William Butler Yeats, “content to live it all again”?

Nietzsche suggests that the affirmation of the eternal return is possible only if one is willing and able to become well-adjusted to life and to oneself. To be well-adjusted, for Nietzsche, is to choose, wholeheartedly, what we think and where we find and create meaning.

As we pulled up in front of the Waldhaus, I thought about the symbol: puzzling but not necessarily disturbing—a bit like déjà vu.

“it would be a great pity if everything was practical.”

looked over the edge and, for the first time, realized that vertigo is the dizziness associated not with fear of falling but with fear of willfully jumping. In the sheer openness, one can choose so many things.

This one went out like a hero in quest of truths, and eventually he conquered a little dressed up lie. His marriage he calls it. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883

It was 3:16 a.m. In my youth, my mother called me “the prowler,” a small nocturnal creature that would creep through the halls of our house at all hours of the night.

The friend of the hermit, Nietzsche tells his reader, is always the third one, a bobber that keeps I and me from “sinking into the depths.” For many years my mother had been that friend and life preserver, but as I edged toward adulthood, my prowling became more surreptitious—furtive.

Three thirty-eight. Over the years, I’ve slowly learned how to use, or at least appreciate, insomnia. For a parent, it provides a blessed calm in an otherwise scattered existence. This was, in fact, the first solitary moment I’d had in days. Fatherhood is, by definition, a matter of togetherness. Even when you step back from the kids—which one hopefully does due to exhaustion or good judgment—they are with you always.

When my brother and I couldn’t find anything productive to do during the summer doldrums, she would trundle us into the car and take us somewhere new to walk. Walk, not run—my mother is not one for running. These were slow meanders, with nowhere in particular to go. At first the pace infuriated me, but she explained—and then showed—that it really was the best way to see things.

WHEN NIETZSCHE CONCEIVED OF the eternal recurrence in the summer of 1881, he also began to think through a figure who might be able to shoulder its infinite responsibility, who would be able to own up to the decisions of life once and for all time. This wasn’t Nietzsche himself—far from it—or even Zarathustra. It was the Übermensch, or Overman.

In 1882, as Nietzsche began to direct his attention to this grand philosophical goal, he encountered a number of practical impediments that had to be addressed first. One of these obstacles was the difficulty of enduring love.

close, at least for the comfort of the Wagners. “The Jew,” throughout the nineteenth century, was quickly becoming the scapegoat for a host of cultural and political ills. Wagner’s anti-Semitism ran deep.

To love in spite of appearances can be one of the signs of true affection.

To throw caution to the wind, to love with utter abandon (which amounts to the same thing), to endure the rumors of fair-weather friends, to almost intentionally form a relationship that is forbidden—this, Nietzsche learned from Rée, is to have succeeded.

He met Salomé, for the first time, in an empty confessional booth. “From what stars have we fallen to meet here?” According to Salomé, these were the first words Nietzsche uttered.

Nietzsche is not alone in his twofold nature. For most human beings, the gap between the real and the possible occasionally opens to reveal precisely this bifurcation. But it was, I can only assume, a chasm for Nietzsche.

Early commentaries on Nietzsche and Salomé suggest that she was his secretary and disciple, but the letters tell a different story. She was Nietzsche’s muse and constant challenge, the force that drove him to contemplate the true meaning of free-spiritedness. But Salomé, in the process, decided to free herself from him. And later she explained that her escape was just in the nick of time.

relationship often involves lying to the ones we love—speaking half-truths that suit our beloved. We measure, carefully, what we say and what we don’t. This is part of the game of love, and Nietzsche was a horrible player.

had no idea till this year how distrustful I am. Namely, of myself. My dealings with my fellows have ruined my dealings with myself…” This danger—that companionship could destroy selfhood—is at the core of Zarathustra.

His lunacy was not the consequence of a brain tumor, or syphilis, or even manic depression. It was a necessary consequence of his philosophy. To delve too deep into Nietzsche’s individualism, skepticism, perfection, and iconoclasm is to flirt with psychological pathology and to run as quickly as possible from the comforts of lasting companionship. This is what a reader discovers in Zarathustra.

Butterflies, clouds, angels, faces passed me in the hall. A moving Rorschach test.

The elision of love and need is a disastrous one for Zarathustra in the early moments of the book. He feigns to love, but in truth, his is a crass need for companions who are fashioned in his own image.

Zarathustra is not alone in confusing love and need or in experiencing the heartache of this confusion. On some level, a reader realizes that this quest for friendship or communion is fated from the start.

There is another way of interpreting the “prologue” of Zarathustra, another explanation why Zarathustra is unable to make friends or fall in love. It’s so obvious that I’d not even noticed it on my first reading. His isolation has nothing to do with the deficiencies of his companions and everything to do with the message he forces them to hear: God is dead.

God didn’t stand a chance. His death is no cause for celebration; at best it has created a vacuum that needs to be filled. As Dostoyevsky first remarked, in His absence, anything is permitted; something new can, or must, be done.

In a post-theological world, self-overcoming remains one of the few remaining goals. It is an exciting, terrifying possibility that can place unsustainable weight on budding relationships.

Noldi reflected, “You are very close to the sky up here, you feel like a monarch, but you don’t rule over anything. You are close to the place where you work but still very far away, as were the issues that we discussed.”

It is best to pace oneself, to let the body adjust to the strenuousness. But I didn’t have time for that. I had to be back by lunch. “Sit as little as possible,” Nietzsche instructed in 1888, “do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement—in which the muscles do not also revel.”

Since Nietzsche’s death, the mountain has attracted a number of other pilgrims, most recently Alain de Botton, who makes the point, echoing Nietzsche, that breathtaking vistas are reached only through arduous climbs: “Fulfillment is reached by responding wisely to difficulties that could tear one apart. Squeamish spirits may be tempted to pull out the molar at once or come off Piz Corvatsch on the lower slopes. Nietzsche urged us to endure.”

Self-inflicted wounds—these were the ones I wanted to cause. My nineteen-year-old self was still, after all these years, alive and kicking somewhere, desperately wanting to slaughter me or pitch my body into a very dark hole. I smiled for the camera. A grinning domesticated animal. By the time we reached the bottom, the picture would have been posted to Facebook and “liked” dozens of times. I’d be expected to “like” the “likes,” and the friendship of sheep would continue unabated.

My friend Clancy, one of the few father-philosophers I know, and one of Nietzsche’s best translators—says that parenting is like breaking rocks, only more grinding. Historically, men have opted out of this drudgery, excusing themselves by pretending that “making a living” was somehow as difficult as raising the kids. Of course, this is a grand farce, a convenient cultural myth that effectively keeps women in the home. As patriarchy declines in the coming century, more men will come to feel the painful truth of parenting—that it is frequently beyond difficult.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates comments that the reluctant ruler is the only one who should lead the polis. Governing well is nearly impossible, and those who think it is easy or pleasant end up falling well short of the task.

“Of necessity,” he writes in the Genealogy, “we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in ourselves we are bound to be mistaken, for each of us holds good to all eternity the motto, ‘Each one is the farthest away from himself’—as far as ourselves are concerned we are not ‘knowers.’” Perfect self-knowledge is methodologically impossible—a dog in hot pursuit of his bobbed tail—but Nietzsche’s Genealogy entreats readers to look back long enough to understand what they might become.

Master morality, according to Nietzsche, developed by the lords of late antiquity, the Romans and the Greeks, was, by its very nature, straightforward. The “good” for the master is the power to advance, to assert oneself, to make progress. That which is “bad” is the opposite: weak, slow, cowardly, and indirect. Nietzsche gives the masterly or “aristocratic value equation”: to be good is to be noble; being noble necessarily means that one is powerful; power is beautiful (although it can also be terrible); and anything beautiful is both happy and loved by God.

WHEN ONE SPENDS TIME ALONE in the mountains, where the air is thin and pure and the ground is cold and sharp, there is an inclination to make oneself equally perfect: thin, pure, cold, and sharp. And this perfectionism—measuring oneself against the grandeur of the mountains—can make the return to the lowlands, and life with others, difficult.

“Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering,” Nietzsche writes in the Genealogy of Morals, “does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering … and the ascetic ideal offered man meaning!”

The Buddha, Jesus, Augustine, Rousseau, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, Thoreau, James, Rimbaud—all of them, and many more, were walkers. Thoreau, one of the truly great wanderer-thinkers, writes, “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”

Nietzsche thinks there is something heroic in this volition to suffer, but he suspects that the whole story becomes dysfunctional in the mouth of the Christian priest. Instead of a simple and honest explanation—that a very long walk is, in some way, a form of owning up to suffering—the priest gives his pilgrims a story of depravity and restoration.