Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are

by John Kaag

As I’d come to enjoy adulthood, this worry had only intensified. Privilege and leisure did nothing to mitigate the effects of existential crisis but rather heightened the sense that despite one’s best attempts, life was still largely unfulfilling.

I lay down on the rock with my head in Carol’s warm lap. And everything slowly went dark. In “Assorted Opinions and Maxims,” Nietzsche writes, “What we sometimes neither know nor feel during our waking hours … in dreams we understand absolutely, unequivocally.”

Wiping the blood from my ear one last time, I bend down to check that the ground at the lip of the abyss is firm. I don’t want to slip. Empedocles, Nietzsche, Rée, Nino: I want to make sure my sudden descent is not mistaken for an accident.

Carol joked that it would be somehow appropriate if they trampled us to death—two philosophers stampeded by the herd. The whole idea was so surreal and funny it could only be the truth. Jesus, was it funny. I laughed until I cried. At some point Carol realized that I was actually just crying, more than I ever had. She held me, and let me let it go.

Nothing—not the valley, not the trail, not the river, not the sheep, not loving, not living, not dying—had changed in seventeen years. It never would. Or rather, it would change in exactly the same way. Love and strife remained.

Hesse wrote in 1919, in a little-known essay titled “Zarathustra’s Return,” “If you … are in pain, if you are sick in body or soul, if you are afraid and have a foreboding of danger—why not, if only to amuse yourselves … try to put the question in a different way? Why not ask whether the source of your pain might be inside you yourselves?… Might it not be an amusing exercise for each one of you to examine what ails you and try to determine its source?” Perhaps the hardest part of the eternal return is to own up to the tortures that we create for ourselves and those we create for others.

Owning up: to recollect, to regret, to be responsible, ultimately to forgive and love. “What makes me Zarathustra,” Hesse contended, “is that I have come to know Zarathustra’s destiny. That I have lived his life. Few men know their destiny. Few men live their lives. Learn to live your lives.”

Some life lessons are hard-won. After killing Hermine, Haller is accosted by the characters of the Magic Theatre; he fully expects them to execute him for his crime. In fact, in a rare moment of single-mindedness, he relishes the idea of this seemingly ultimate punishment. But his judges have other ideas: Haller is condemned no...

Laughter: that was the key to the amor fati. The tortures of life’s game—even in a game that seems largely painless—would endure. Resisting or denying these tensions and strivings would only intensify their force. The point of life was not to “get a grip” but to loosen one’s hold just enough to get a fleeting sense of release. “Some of us think that holding on makes us strong,” Hesse remarked, “but sometimes it is letting go.” Genuine laughter would be long in coming, but it would remain the goal.

Jocose—that is the word for them, playful to the point of lawlessness. Their wool had been tagged with spray paint, and several of them shared the same color, but each one was singular and surprisingly independent.

His body was sinewy and weathered—not unlike Hesse’s—and his small barrel chest attached directly to slim thighs that terminated in a pair of sculpted calves. These were Wordsworth’s calves, the muscles of a great walker. His lungs, I am sure, were even more impressive. Lungs on legs: this is all he was.

Here the three hares meant many things: recovery, fertility, tranquility in motion, endless return. But the Buddhist hieroglyph also had a single meaning, simple and perplexing—a way of expressing the verb to be. Existence itself.

Hesse, however, explains that “words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed. A little distorted. A little foolish.” Words reify something experienced in motion, attempting to capture the forever unruly.

Hesse was a Nietzschean but also a mystic, an orientation that granted him an insight that evades most of us. Indeed, I suspect it escaped Nietzsche for much of his life. “Perhaps you seek too much,” Hesse suggests, “that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.”

Good words, but still words: “One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.” Carol reached over with her fork, stabbed a last piece of strudel, and placed it gently in my mouth. “I miss Becca,” I said. Carol nodded and kissed me lightly.

DAYS BEFORE HIS COLLAPSE, Nietzsche wrote, “I have often asked myself whether I am not more heavily obligated to the hardest years of my life than to any others.” By the end, he seems to suggest, it is precisely these years that gave him the chance to explore what he took to be life’s driving imperative. It’s deceptively simple: “Become who you are.”

What does it mean to search for ourselves? For most of my life I’d thought that my authentic self was something “out there,” something beyond the quotidian, something on a mountain high in the Alps. I preferred to think of myself as existing somewhere else, in an unperturbed realm of transcendence. I was always secretly looking for this, resenting any person who might get in my way.

As it turns out, to “become who you are” is not about finding a “who” you have always been looking for. It is not about separating “you” off from everything else. And it is not about existing as you truly “are” for all time. The self does not lie passively in wait for us to discover it. Selfhood is made in the active, ongoing process, in the German verb werden, “to become.”

The enduring nature of being human is to turn into something else, which should not be confused with going somewhere else. This may come as a great disappointment to one who goes in search of the self. What one is, essentially, is this active transformation, nothing more, nothing less. This is not a grand wisdom quest or hero’s journey, and it doesn’t require one to escape to the mountains. No mountain is high enough. Just a bit of cheese and any fast-moving river will suffice.

This frustration might be warranted, but I think Nietzsche and Hesse were encouraging us to venture beyond the straight and narrow: after all, the root of werden means “to bend, to wind, to turn into.” It gives us versus, verdict, and vortex. In becoming what one is, a person turns back, into, gathers something of the past, and carries it forward. It is genealogy compressed under high pressure.

Nietzsche gestures toward the slipperiness of self-overcoming in Schopenhauer as Educator: “you are not really all that which you do, think, and desire now.” And again, more dramatically, in Ecce Homo: “To become what one is, one must not have the faintest idea of what one is.”

Nietzsche’s point may be that the process of self-discovery requires an undoing of the self-knowledge that you assume you already have. Becoming is the ongoing process of losing and finding yourself.

I opened the porch door. She wasn’t hiding. There she sat, spellbound, on the polished concrete floor, looking westward as the sun set over Lake Sils, over the Maloja Pass, into Italy. This was the point to which everything led, the point from which everything flowed. “Papa, can we go there?” Becca asked, pointing at the road that ran along the lake and bent into the fading light. “Maybe next time, my love.” That was the way to Turin.

All this could have been experienced passively enough—and I am sure some of it was—but our last day in the Val Fex had cast shadow and light over life for many weeks. On good days, it still does. I try to remember the shepherd-ferryman, to eat cheese between meals, and to do my best to become rather than to obsessively seek and control.