Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are

by John Kaag

The best stories of pilgrimage are those that end in a flood of cathartic tears as the sojourner finally approaches the sanctuary and a monk meets him at the threshold to wash his festering feet. There is, in this mythic moment, a transcendental communion in which the lowly searcher and the divine goal become one. But how many pilgrims reach the sanctuary and collapse, how many cry tears of despair in discovering that the sanctuary is, in fact, a grave? We typically don’t hear about these pilgrims, but perhaps we should.

I just wanted to go back. Not back to the Waldhaus, but way back: to a time before these thoughts. Where are the stories of the disaffected pilgrim, the one who never finds what he is looking for? Or the pilgrimages that simply repeat, in caricature, all the heinous futilities of life? I’m sure they occur, more often than one might like to consider.

After discovering that pain is just pain, that the tomb is completely empty, that a single foot-washing can’t scrub away the dirt of human existence, some dejected pilgrims still get to go home. Maybe this is salvation. Perhaps the failed pilgrim wants nothing more than a bit of tenderness, an immediate, simple sense that the world isn’t completely and utterly hopeless.

In many respects, the second half of a pilgrimage, the trek back to society, is much harder than the first. The fatigue is undoubtedly worse, and the wounds from the first days of the trip are scarcely healed. Abraham famously took his son up Mount Moriah and was willing to sacrifice him to God. That’s difficult, but imagine the journey home with Isaac by your side, the boy you were willing to kill. How much harder is this trip?

I made toward my family, walking away from the site of pilgrimage toward what Becca fondly calls “softing.” One doesn’t have to go anywhere to experience softing. Softing is usually performed with the back of a hand or, if you’re Becca, her nose. It is the softest of strokes. Softing can’t be done at a distance. It usually takes place in the early mornings or late at night, almost every day, preferably with all the members of her family, in bed. One can soft spontaneously or ask to be softed, and the request is always granted. In the midst of softing, uncontrollable laughter is not only permitted but expected. It is the opposite of hardship. These are love’s true conditions.

In Turin, Nietzsche finally saw that “Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence.” This isn’t just the realization of a thinker who suddenly discovers that his philosophy has been about an unspoken topic; it’s the admission of a man who has finally uncovered the underlying ethos of his life.

He was a man of letters and languages, a person who could truly understand the words of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes: “leisure is the mother of philosophy.”

These rugs, more than a dozen of them, puzzled me at first. Each one was about the size that would fit in a small family room in the States. Why hadn’t they just bought one large rug and been done with it? Because—in the words of Urs Kienberger, the Waldhaus “innkeeper,” who now approached me at a deliberate stroll—it would be a pity if everything had to be practical.

Adorno began to theorize where Nietzsche had left off in Twilight of the Idols, attempting to answer a series of very difficult questions: What are the possibilities for human existence in an age that seems intent on destroying itself? What retards its power and limits its reach? What hastens decadence? How can a culture or a person overcome the decline that appears almost destined to occur?

The critical theorists—following Nietzsche—attacked popular culture in all its forms. They objected to the commodification of beauty and the sublime and the leveling out of difference and individual taste. Like Nietzsche, Adorno both abhorred and was riveted by herd mentality.

Unlike many psychologists, Adorno asserted that this mentality wasn’t a natural social impulse but a grand performance orchestrated by a priestly master (he came of age in Nazi Germany and wrote against fascism in all its forms). The sheep that comprised the herd could, at any time, opt out of the performance, but the theatrics of culture combined with the necessities of capitalism had given it an almost irresistible draw. Still, Adorno wrote in 1951, “If they would stop to reason for a second, the whole performance would go to pieces, and they would be left to panic.”

The unique existence of anything—what Nietzsche had searched for his entire life—was nowhere to be found. Just repetition, complicity, and frustration.

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge—and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves—how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? —Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887

Decline was inevitable, but how one went out was decidedly not.

Nietzsche’s room wasn’t always locked in those days. I’d checked. It looked and smelled pretty much like my room across the hallway. An almost mirror image. This was where great thoughts, great creations, had taken place.

“I am no man. I am dynamite”—this was the place where this thought first arose. Dynamite from the Greek dunamis, meaning “power.” How could one become dynamite, become the will to power? The point of art, according to Adorno, is to bring chaos to order. How much chaos could even the smallest bit of dynamite create?

THE DYNAMITE HAD BEEN CAREFULLY removed from the Nietzsche-Haus in my absence. After seventeen years, the interior was clean, new, and sterile. Nietzsche might have found it revolting. It was no longer a house where an occasional troubled visitor could rest his or her head before trekking out into an unforgiving nature: it was now a proper museum and writers’ retreat. The anxiety

This was not some Roman Catholic cathedral, I thought in hasty impatience; this was the site where a man—not a saint—tried his best to make peace with the tragedies of life. Where were my smudges and dynamite?

I walked past two photographs of Hermann Hesse peering out severely behind black frames. He looked, as always, thoroughly skeptical about something. Perhaps his suspicion was justified. Maybe the dissonance between mundane reality and infinite possibility, between one’s social life and stark authenticity, was a source of profound concern, or worse.

Becca at this point was racing again across the high grass, hands outstretched to show us her budding collection. When she reached us, we each got a handful of petals to keep safe, with the quiet request, “Make sure you don’t lose them, please.” She was polite, but unmistakably insistent. Carol and I settled on a nearby rise and watched our child play. “In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play,” Nietzsche said.

I considered the petals in my hand. Historically, thinkers have overlooked such things, but Ella Lyman Cabot, a nineteenth-century American philosopher, once wrote of a moment not unlike the one Carol and I were having with Becca and her flowers. Cabot had taken a group of children (she used her family fortune to foster dozens) to pick cherries, and one of the little ones had handed her three of them, not to eat but just to see. At first Cabot didn’t even know what she was looking at, but then it struck her: “And again, I knew that we were dull, stupid, and blasphemous not to see the overwhelming joy of three cherries all in a row between our fingers.”

Fatherhood has traditionally been about limiting a child’s sense of possibility. The expression “father knows best” has a correlate: “child does not.”

Children occasionally explore possibilities that are harmful—physically and psychologically—and as parents, it is our place to keep tabs on the threat that existential freedom poses to our kids. But existentialists, following Nietzsche, suggest that our overblown risk aversion doesn’t track the actual danger of a particular situation but rather our own sense of anxiety.

Imagine all the possibilities you have in life, multiply them by a power of ten and then another power of ten, and finally let yourself consider the many options you have, from a very young age, forbidden yourself. Now, whatever you are feeling—that is something like a weak, attenuated sense of freedom’s infinite possibility. The routine of adulthood usually numbs us to this sort of dread, but children do their best to remind us of its force.

The more we argue that it is about the child’s safety, the more obvious it is that it is all about us. Children remind us, in delightful and painful ways, what it is to be a person. Becca’s untethered curiosity, naïve bravery, and complete lack of shame reminded me that I too, at one distant point, possessed these possibilities—and that I had no small amount of trouble doing away with them.

It was serene, calm, altogether pleasant. The house had become something I could never have imagined on my first trip—an accommodation for lovers and friends.

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not—that one endures. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1888

At eighteen gorgeous hands, the animals were stately, otherworldly creatures. She wasn’t scared at all and, clambering up my back onto my shoulders, pleaded for me to “Get clo-ssss-er, Papa.” I moved in cautiously and let her little hand take hold of the dark mane. The beast didn’t move, save for the hoof, which nearly crushed my foot. Becca is a lovely child—to me, the loveliest: affectionate, even-tempered, curious, playful, so like her mother.

Adorno explains that “a human being only becomes a human at all by imitating other human beings.” This might be descriptively true, but the truth was, at least in this case, painful and frustrating. “Today self-consciousness,” he writes, “no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.”

The last decade of Nietzsche’s life reveals many things: that life itself outstrips philosophy, that one can really live on in dreams and fantasies, that life and story are inseparable, that degeneration is often regarded as an embarrassment worthy of covering up, that dying at the right time is the greatest challenge of life, that the line between madness and profundity is a faint thread high in the mountains that eventually disappears.

Empedocles believed that the world operated under exactly two principles of order: love and strife. His cosmology envisions a dynamic cycle that, in turn, pulls things apart in strife and draws them together in affection, eternally. This is the heart and soul of all creation, according to Empedocles.

There are two rules to Alpine scrambling (probably more than two, but I haven’t learned them yet). The first one is to “find a line”—that is, find a route you can take without dying. One could use a detailed topographical map, but I have always regarded that as cheating. Scramblers should look for paths with minimal loose rock and avoid any vertical ascents of more than ten feet. Beware of slippery surfaces—slime- or ice-covered rocks—and use good judgment about placing one’s boots or, in my case, old sneakers. The second trick to scrambling is not to be deceived by the innocuousness of the term. It might seem that it should be considerably less dangerous than technical climbing, and it would be, if a person were actually roped in on a scramble. If one falls on a technical climb, a belay will (hopefully) catch the person. But scrambling is done with no strings attached.

This was high enough. Plucking Ecce Homo out of my largely empty pack, I promised myself that I’d read only a few pages and then scramble down before darkness fell. Just a couple of pages: “Those who can breathe the air of my writings know that it is an air of the heights, a strong air. One must be made for it. Otherwise there is no small danger that one might catch cold in it. The ice is near, the solitude tremendous—but how calmly all things lie in the light. How freely one breathes! How much one feels beneath oneself.”

Irony allows one to say two things at once, indeed to express two mutually exclusive realities in a single utterance. It allows one to give voice to love and strife, to indebtedness and ingratitude, to salvation and guilt, triumph and utter defeat all in one breath. “I am the world’s best philosopher,” “I am the perfect parent,” “I have absolute self-knowledge”: these impossible instances of hyperbole actually indicate, very honestly, how far they are from the truth. Irony is the language of the two-faced. It allows one to be a decadent and its opposite.

Ecce Homo was about “exposure,” drawing oneself out into the open and revealing the parts that are typically off-limits. Rock climbers talk about “exposure” with a distinct mix of admiration and horror, and they should. There is a sort of deadly triumph in confronting it. Quoting Ovid, Nietzsche writes, “Nitimur in vetitum.” “Strive for the forbidden.”

“One must pay dearly for immortality,” he writes, “one has to die several times while one is still alive.” The Roman poet Horace regards Empedocles’s death as the quintessential act of creation, the exception that proves the rule—artists have the tendency, but also the permission, to destroy themselves for the sake of originality.

Carol’s temper had been cool and pleasant at the beginning of the journey, but in recent days, as my trips to the mountains had become longer and more frequent, her patience had waned. Now it was gone. She came back into the room and let me have it as only a Kantian can—quietly, brutally, irrefutably.

I’d not told her the story of Nietzsche’s lion, the free spirit who says “No” to authority, or Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” a short story written in 1853 that considers the Nietzschean possibility that freedom is realized in a self-destructive refusal to submit. But some children are born with these lessons, and she now was using them against me.

Becca helped me understand that this short story is disturbing precisely to the extent that it reflects a deep and unsettling truth about ourselves, one that nineteenth-century authors like Melville and Nietzsche had begun to tap into: beneath the reasonable habits of our lives hides a little inexplicable something that has the ability to opt out, even against our better judgment. And I wanted nothing more than to quash this little something in Becca.

Freedom allows us to act as responsible agents, but it also allows us to do otherwise. The very thing that we are to cultivate in our children—a free will—is the very thing that can, at least sometimes, make us lose the little person we love so deeply and painfully. The prospect of which is beyond terrifying.

It has everything to do with the fear that comes along with being inextricably bound to a little creature who willfully, gleefully can disregard what is obviously in her own best interest.

Becca was still biting down and laughing, and I knew, remembering Hölderlin’s mask and my own father’s parenting tactics, that adjusting a body by force could be life-altering. I wouldn’t do that. At least not today. She slipped away and skipped off into the bedroom. She’d won: her teeth could rot exactly as she pleased.

How did Empedocles or Nietzsche cultivate the existential defiance or courage that led each of them up the mountain? It probably started something like this—in a very simple refusal to act on behalf of one’s obvious self-interest. There remains a life-affirming glee in such a refusal—a quiet temptation that even the most well-adjusted person feels at various points. It is the freedom to be otherwise, to act against all odds. Turnin...

Many of Nietzsche’s writings express an enduring worry about the future, the claim that his philosophy would be understood only and always “the day after tomorrow.”

The problem with being understood posthumously, however, is that it is vastly easier to be misunderstood. And Elisabeth did misunderstand—or, more likely, misuse—her brother. That his writings on nonconformity and freedom, shot through with self-reflective irony, could be appropriated by the Nazis remains one of the true tragedies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy.

So instead of fixating on Zarathustra’s speeches, the literal content of the sermons, which were filled with vainglory, Hesse focuses on the complexity of the character himself, the way that Zarathustra, and Nietzsche, represented the internal struggles of a multifaceted nature. Is it not possible, Hesse asked, that to possess such enduring tensions is the lot of being human?

Hesse was married three times, and Demian is a coming-of-age story, so I thought it might provide a bit of insight. At the time, I’d already fallen in love with Carol (that happened long before the divorce) and I was beginning to think through what was, for me, a difficult question that could be voiced in two registers: How can one love in the right way while being so quietly dissatisfied with life? or How can one love while being so mired in oneself?

AS WE REACHED THE TRAILHEAD to the valley, I arrived at a conclusion that I’d tried to avoid for weeks: this trip had been a failure. A search for the Übermensch had become a family affair—brimming with tender moments, routine tasks, and playdates. The attempt to be free, to retrace a path that I’d taken in my youth, had been cut short by my family obligations, and the journey had slowly morphed into a holiday taken in honor of Nietzsche’s memory rather than anything genuinely, authentically Nietzschean.

Harry Haller had similar thoughts, but he, unlike most of us, gave them free rein: “A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me,” he writes, “a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages.”

The only clue that the ridge was actually far away were the tan insects that roamed around its base, insects that could have only been cows. Losing all sense of proportion is one of the inevitable consequences of hiking in the mountains for any extended period of time.