Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are

by John Kaag

“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.”

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.”

“TO BE IGNORANT OF WHAT OCCURRED before you were born is to remain always a child.”

Children remind us, in delightful and painful ways, what it is to be a person.

Or perhaps Nietzsche is directing a reader’s attention to the bifurcated nature that underpins much of human reality, the splits and fractures one experiences in the course of adult life. To feel deeply the wisdom-tinged sadness of growing older, to understand that one’s youth isn’t long gone, but rather somewhere forever hidden from view, to face self-destruction while longing for creation—this is to grapple with Ecce Homo. Being a parent is to live out such a disjunction between duty and personal freedom—to love a child with one’s entire being, but to preserve something of one’s identity that parenting cannot touch. Nietzsche explains how this divided self is not only possible but inevitable.

“To become what one is, one must not have the faintest idea of what one is.”

If this is true, I’m well on my way to becoming what I 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.

Repetition. It is an excellent thing to express a thing consecutively in two ways, and thus provide it with a right and a left foot. Truth can stand indeed on one leg, but with two she will walk and complete her journey. —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, 1880

“You must find your dream,” Hesse instructs, “but no dream lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular dream.”

the key to life is never to have been born, or if you are born, to die as quickly as possible. Live and die as quickly as possible.

There is another way to interpret the Übermensch that has little to do with perfectionism and self-stylizing: Nietzsche would like us to die, to get out of the way, to get out of our own way, so something else can take our place. So that we can become what we are.

All great festivals are based on a cycle of death and rebirth.