Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are

by John Kaag

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.

Philosophy at its best was to be learned by rote—not in the sense of mindless memorization, but in the sense of learning something by heart and enacting it in experience.

Hiking, unlike most vocations, is work with its own immediate reward, and its unpleasant aspects are often the most advantageous.

When he wrote, at the very end of his career, “Have I been understood? Dionysus versus the Crucified,” he meant to show that suffering does not refute life as we experience it but must be welcomed, embraced, in exactly the same way we welcome and embrace happiness.

“Happiness? Why should I strive for happiness? I strive for my work.”

To work so hard, to burn so bright, and then to be snuffed out without warning or explanation—this was the idea that haunted Nietzsche as he set off into the Alps.

This was no simple task, as it meant preserving individualism in the midst of society, interacting with others without being absorbed by the group.

“I am no man. I am dynamite!”

He lived in the face of a persistent temptation to die. “It is not in our hands,” Nietzsche writes in The Twilight of the Idols, “to prevent our birth but we can correct this mistake … the man who does away with himself performs the most estimable of deeds.”

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

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. Kant embodied the Enlightenment ideals of order, harmony, rationality, and, above all, duty—philosophical concepts Nietzsche spent his entire life trying to dismantle. Kant was interested in self-control, but it was a precise, passionless kind of control that Nietzsche claimed was perfectly fitted to Christian notions of piety and self-sacrifice.

What could destroy us more quickly than working, thinking, and feeling without any inner necessity, without any deeply personal choice, without pleasure—as an automaton of “duty”?

Clearly, sometime in the last century, America had followed Europe’s lead in exchanging beauty and risk for comfort and convenience. Nietzsche, however, believed that this obsession with maintaining some semblance of health was far from actually being healthy.

As the scientific revolution gathered speed and tipped into the Age of Enlightenment, thinkers prioritized rational and moral ideals above all others. One’s decisions and actions were to be guided by universal principles of prudence, logic, and reason rather than by any vague pursuit of the beautiful life. By contrast, Nietzsche believed that a quest for aesthetic experience was the only way to mitigate the horror of existence.

My childhood had been a relatively happy one under my mother’s watchful eye, but her vigilance, heightened by my father’s absence, grated on me and my brother as we became young men.

She didn’t even care about the argument that much, just the conclusion: every human being had incomparable worth owing to his or her rational faculties, and this meant that no one was any better than her neighbor when it came to the calculus of moral judgments.

Boo, Kant.

What will these liberated thinkers look like? One thing is sure, Nietzsche contended: “they will not be dogmatists. It must be contrary to their pride,” he explained, “and also contrary to their taste, that their truth should still be truth for every one … ‘My opinion is MY opinion: another person has not easily a right to it’—such a philosopher of the future will say, perhaps.”

Nietzsche argues that despite all pleasant appearances, the history of the Western world is a silent story of suffering, that underneath the orderliness of modern life is a chronicle of pain that has been assiduously repressed.

It is in the midst of this torture that slave morality was born. It began with a basic insight about pain—that not all suffering is created equal. There was the truly unbearable variety—that is to say, the type that had no cause or explanation. And then there was the kind of pain that could be endured, even happily: this was suffering for a cause. All one needed was a very good story about why one was being tortured.

slaves transform the pain of their inferiority into a searing contempt for the powerful.

When one’s life is completely controlled by powerful masters, the discipline of self-denial gives a slave something to do on his own terms. Indeed, it becomes the one thing a slave accomplishes on his own behalf.

The twentieth-century analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein often visited his collaborator and friend Bertrand Russell in the early evenings, and Wittgenstein would pace the floor of Russell’s apartment for hours, cogitating and ambulating.

My pacing, explained?

Nietzsche himself was a decadent, a product of his age and its haute bourgeois culture. He was coddled by his mother as a child, by his sister in young adulthood, and by his protectresses in later life. He never worked—at least not in the sense of dirtying his hands—and for many years of his adulthood he lived on an academic pension and the charity of wealthy friends.

Unfortunately relatable.

Our consumer culture might give us choices, might give us the semblance of being free to choose, but this liberty amounts to pitifully little if everyone is given the same circumscribed options.

One way of retreating from pop culture is to embrace unabashed elitism. This was culture—exclusive, but not oppressive.

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.

Nietzsche’s mother had, from the start, tried to compensate for the absence of his father, which produced what I’d always regarded as an unintended but foreseeable consequence: an absolute devotion bordering on absolute codependence.

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.

The young Nietzsche acknowledged that there was something tragic about a refusal to give Dionysus his due. There are, however, some people—Nietzsche himself was often one of them—who from either “lack of experience or thick-headedness” turn away from the exhausting chaos of revelry for the sake of some semblance of mental health, “but of course these poor people have no idea how corpse-like and ghostly their so-called ‘health’ looks when the glowing life of the Dionysian swarm buzzes past them.”