Hiking with Nietzsche by John Kaag

Hiking with Nietzsche: Becoming Who You Are is a tale of two philosophical journeys—one made by John Kaag as an introspective young man of nineteen, the other seventeen years later, in radically different circumstances: he is now a husband and father, and his wife and small child are in tow. Kaag sets off for the Swiss peaks above Sils Maria where Nietzsche wrote his landmark work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both of Kaag's journeys are made in search of the wisdom at the core of Nietzsche's philosophy, yet they deliver him to radically different interpretations and, more crucially, revelations about the human condition.

Just as Kaag's acclaimed debut,
American Philosophy: A Love Story, seamlessly wove together his philosophical discoveries with his search for meaning, Hiking with Nietzsche is a fascinating exploration not only of Nietzsche's ideals but of how his experience of living relates to us as individuals in the twenty-first century. Bold, intimate, and rich with insight, Hiking with Nietzsche is about defeating complacency, balancing sanity and madness, and coming to grips with the unobtainable. As Kaag hikes, alone or with his family, but always with Nietzsche, he recognizes that even slipping can be instructive. It is in the process of climbing, and through the inevitable missteps, that one has the chance, in Nietzsche's words, to "become who you are."

Why I Picked It Up

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This summer, I read some Nietzsche. This month, I also went hiking alone in the Swiss Alps, and read this book on the plane on my way over. I generally enjoy this sort of personalized deep dive—not quite memoir, but not quite cut-and-dried analysis either.

Writer-wise, I respect when references and reflection seem to cost the writer something. John Kaag isn't afraid to get personal, even when doing so casts him in a wildly unflattering light. You can read into a lot of ego, but also admire the humility it takes to admit to suicidal thoughts, selfishness, etc. So a lot of what grates me about him also takes guts that I admire. Of course, there's a fine line between cerebral living and solipsism.

As Kaag talks about (precisely) within this book itself, there's a line between rumination and asceticism. At what point does self-discipline or measurement turn into a mode of existence that's just as indulgent as straight-up hedonism?

Especially in narratives like this—veering into Peter Matthiessen in some ways, Bonnie Tsui in others, with a concerning dash of David Foster Wallace—it can deeply benefit people to know when they need some external force to get out of their own heads. (On that note, I highly recommend anyone who follows a similar rabbit hole to read Franny and Zooey. Too much philosophizing is sometimes not a good thing.) And similarly, I always put the disclaimer in the side bar on any book I think could throw someone into a dark headspace for a period.

About the Book

As mentioned, Hiking with Nietzsche can be a tough read. I'm partway through Kaag's first book, American Philosophy: A Love Story, as a follow up and notice he starts right off the gate with a calibration like "On the Harvard lawn, I deeply wanted to kill myself" then goes into some intense descriptions. So apparently, that's just his style: disarming.

A lot of the book deals with the mismatch between ideal and reality, and how that can totally fuck someone up by trapping them in the contradictions. So if Nietzsche's assertion that "certain types of lives were best lived as quickly as possible"—a sentiment analyzed by Kaag—feels like it will make you spiral into a similar thought process, you should probably not pick up this one.

Kaag first describes a trip he took as a young student to follow in Nietzsche's footsteps. He writes about his curiosities, what about the philosopher struck him, his experience and loneliness while abroad, and some startling moments that took him to the edge—sometimes literally—and catalyzed his later academic career.

Then he describes returning in adulthood. First, he was married and divorced; now, he's back with this second wife, Carol, and their young toddler, Becca. The experience is fundamentally different in some ways with company, time, and life events that shift the way he views and studies Nietzsche. He lives and breathes academia, so he's eager to see how he considers the insights he had way-back-when—and is slightly concerned that being in the same place will provoke the same sort of spirals.

Voice & Tone

Kaag filters all his observations through his own experience, which frankly can feel bleak and self-absorbed at times. There's a certain level of disconnection from others (which he admits to in American Philosophy) that gets to a level of Norwegian Wood-style self-absorption, protected by his references and metaphors.

Unlike the others though, he eventually balances this by acknowledging his wife and daughters, especially in the moments where his responsibilities of fatherhood remind him that he's not just existing for himself anymore. I sympathize with the darkness because it always hurts me to know the depth of how someone feels this way about themselves, but there's also a moment I frequently see in (usually male) philosophers where I feel it would ultimately benefit themselves to look beyond themselves. Which is interesting to me, because plenty of them also talk about autonomy, responsibility, etc. purely in the abstract and then completely drop the ball in their personal lives.

At the end of the day, it's just a whole lot easier to philosophize about people than to deal with them in reality, but there is a point at which that becomes a shield that's perpetuating your own misery. Darkness and shame can be indulgent too, but of course, that onus of responsibility can be so hard to navigate. When do you call it? What is you, permanently, versus self-fulfilling prophecy? And then of course we get into questions of depression as a disorder, what is your circumstance, how some people may just have a different baseline, etc. etc. All-in-all, it's perhaps harder for a man who is a philosopher for a living to stop following a spiral once he feels the itch to follow it.

The aesthetic of the book is very Dead Poets Society, so you can align with or relate to the book without necessarily having the same POV as Kaag. I could vividly picture Nietzsche, described by Kaag, with a few school friends.

“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 battements to sanctify the pact.”

Aggressive, but not harmful. And there is—as in all things—a line.

But then again—I respected how upfront he was about instincts, decisions, etc. that undoubtedly hurt people or made him seem selfish. I also had a world of respect for him discussing the line between a curiosity of asceticism vs. an eating disorder of his that blew up beyond his control; eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder, and they're especially trickier for men to talk about. And of course, the motivations vary wildly; in his case, he wasn't trying to look ripped at the gym, but rather to explore a certain mode of self-punishment that got out of his control by masquerading as a mode of control instead. So, props. I want to talk so much about asceticism, but that's perhaps a separate essay.

It's hard in a situation like this because Kaag seemed, on the surface, to be invested in his own sole intellectual curiosity, but during the tipping points he described, there was the sense that any sort of connection or intervention would have made an infinite difference.

And then, of course, there's him in adulthood. He's still self-deprecating and masochistic, passionate about the philosophy references, etc. The man despises marriage, and speaks about his own divorce with bitterness. (I looked it up and he ultimately divorced his second wife, mentioned here, too; he seems to be married again now, so I genuinely hope they are doing better together.) He starts to critique Nietzsche, and oscillates between blindness and severe self-awareness; surely there's a middle ground somewhere.

That teenage experience, and how it surges up in adulthood, is tempered by his tenderness towards his child too. There's nothing that softens me maybe more than seeing how a kid—in this case, maybe the reminder of innocence, or a sort of awe—can soften someone who thought himself largely unreachable. He's not flawless here, but it's sweet to read the way his voice changes when talking about Becca.

I Love a Reading Parallel!

He mentions other writers, like Hermann Hesse (also published by FSG), following in Nietzsche's footsteps to hike and write and study at this exact lodge he stayed at. The dream, honestly.

Considering I read Siddhartha on the StairMaster at my gym and took great comfort in the "look beyond your own self" advice while my heart rate climbed and I longed to be done with my cardio push, it felt fitting while he analyzed what a healthy amount of asceticism and discomfort could be.

I also accidentally made a self-fulfilling prophecy out of my experience reading (which I also did when I caught a stomach bug directly after finishing The Plague by Albert Camus.)

On the plane, I thought about how miserable it would be to hike fasted like he does, then accidentally did so on my first day when a refuge at the bottom of my first (major) ascent was supposed to have breakfast and didn't. I ended up hiked my hardest climb for hours before eventually finding lunch, and I hadn't eaten that morning or the previous evening—or packed snacks—because of travel logistics. Ouch!

the views helped, but I can occasionally get hangry—

But that midday ravioli at Rifugio Elisabetta hit like nothing else. Because backpacking is all about contrast, even when dizzy. I also had a Fanta for the first time since maybe age seven and a pear-and-chocolate tart that made me positively euphoric.

Quotes That Struck Me

“Love was always something contingent, something that had to be earned. And there was never enough.”

“Walking is among the most life-affirming of human activities. It is the way we organize space and orient ourselves to the world at large. It is the living proof that repetition—placing one foot in front of the other—can in fact allow a person to make meaningful progress.”

I especially appreciated this one when I checked my step counter and was at 36,000 for the day.

“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 slave has few options at his disposal: he can will nothing and be wholly controlled by his master, or he can set his will in motion in the ongoing process of self-negation. The slave has a choice between nonaction, which would eventually bring about his demise, and action, willful but self-abnegating, which would hasten this eventuality. Nietzsche thinks the decision is all too obvious: humans would rather destroy themselves than embody the passivity of willing nothing at all.”

Per Nietzsche, there's a lot of discussion as punishment as the only form of control someone has (which, of course, aligns with Kaag's unfortunate eating disorder experience.)

“When one spends time reading—and falls in love with—a particular philosopher, he gradually begins to confuse the world of objective fact with an imagined one of ideals and beliefs.”

“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 then enacting it in experience.”

“Hiking, unlike most vocations, is work with its own immediate reward, and its most unpleasant aspects are often the most advantageous...Life is often painful or bothersome, but the hiker, at the very least, gets to determine how he or she is meant to suffer.”

“I'd often thought that philosophy had a paradoxical effect on Nietzsche and Scopenhauer; it allowed them to come to terms with life, but it made living with others nearly impossible.”

“The tragic heroes of ancient Greece found a way to make the suffering and sudden endings of life beautiful, or aesthetically significant. This is what Nietzsche meant in The Birth of Tragedy when he claimed that the existence can be justified only as an aesthetic experience.”

“I came to remember—and indeed cherish—these strange moments that hovered somewhere between shame and pride.”

“I 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.”

“The self is not a hermetically sealed, unitary actor (Nietzsche knew this well), but its flourishing depends on two things: first, that it can choose its own way to the greatest extent possible, and then, when it fails, that it can embrace the fate that befalls it. Being in love can jeopardize both of these conditions, something that Nietzsche learned with Rée and Salomé.”

Overall Thoughts & Conversations

As mentioned, I have a hard time with Kaag as a person but respect him as a writer for these reasons: he is perhaps too open about how he acts badly to others (and the way he justifies it in the name of philosophy feels like it lacks accountability.)

That's no hate to Kaag himself; I just may be hitting my limit on male philosophers who use existentialism to treat others like catalysts rather than actual people. If we believe in autonomy, let's also treat others like beings with the same levels of complexity we have ourselves a.k.a. don't hide all the ways in which we may be shitty to them under an academic references. I've thought a lot this year about the idea of someone and how we harm others by turning them into concepts. Maybe you're Enlightened, but you might also just be a jerk.

Kaag's works sort of startlingly illuminate the difference between living out a philosophy vs. drowning in it.

But in the opposite vein, I respect his openness especially in regards to tough or even taboo topics. I don't think vulnerability and self-awareness are synonyms, but the frankness can be admirable all the same. I don't know what I believe about him, but I don't have to. I'm sad for him that he gets this dark; I like the proportions of his writing.

Another aspect I love about both Hiking with Nietzsche and its predecessor American Philosophy: A Love Story is that he is excellent at instructing readers in the differences between philosophy branches and evolutions. I've read quite a bit at this point, but his explanations have this clarity to them that makes divergences click within a paragraph or two. For that reason, each of his descriptions makes a great overview, more so than A Nietzsche Reader or Figuring or other similar broad strokes. Obviously, this one focuses mainly on Friedrich.

“For Emerson, self-overcoming was realized in summer moments of joy and sadness, the moments at high noon in which one realizes that the day is in decline, already half over.”

The book covers a lot of ground, both figuratively and in Kaag's daily explorations in Switzerland. Of course, I've been adoring explorer- or nature-adjacent picks this year, so that's on theme. He talks about suffering vs. contrast with an eye for aesthetic relief, which I love; moral relativism; Nietzsche's own contradictions and times when events in his personal life seemingly bled into his writing or beliefs.

He veers into his suicidal tendencies in what seems(?) like a realistic way; there were aspects soothed by his wife and child and the knowledge that he was not alone entirely, but there were other elements of being haunted by it that would follow him forever alone. It is obviously worst-case-scenario, and everyone should do whatever they can to keep him from going over; however, it didn't absolve him from occasions in which his grappling with darkness made him cruel or uncaring towards others.

That's such a hard balance to strike, and if you've been in that situation on either side, you know it's likely one of the most difficult conflicts to navigate. What's an appropriate amount of unreciprocated care and flexibility? When should someone receive consequences for whatever ways in which they lash out, neglect others, or are all-in-all selfish while getting through their singular darkness or crucible? Everyone deserves grace, but it's worth interrogating what's a journey with plausible peaks and valleys (sorry for the pun) versus what's a consistent pattern of evading responsibility for both your own feelings and their effects on others. It's hard, and I empathize, but I can also see some deflections here.

There's a big conversation embedded on this about when solitude turns poisonous, which is also a tough balance to strike as an independent thinker! I've been talking a lot this year about the concept of multiple selves, and Kaag does too, except he mentions it mostly within parenthood/without the context of his daughter, then again in partnership/alone. You can't be entirely visible to one person, but the trouble comes when you start to believe that the impossibility of 360-degree awareness of multiplicity means that who you are with others is somehow less authentic than who you are in complete isolation and darkness. When you go too abstract, you can lose touch with reality and other people in a way that can leave deep scars over time because you redefine authenticity.

“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.”

I'm also largely of the opinion that, as shame grows, it compounds all of this. The fear of shame (of admitting internal contradiction, or darkness, or possible inauthenticity) is what bars people from having the slow connections and conversations that make you realize you don't have to be alone in a spiral. But that's me getting sappy/sad about those who feel completely cut off from others. (Again, always here to listen to anyone who needs. Knowing darkness doesn't mean judging it!)

Overall, it's a solid read that explains a lot of Nietzsche and has a lot of the balance I like from anybody doing a deep dive on a topic or figure. That being said, because Kaag is kind of a polarizing figure himself at times, you might find aspects of his lifestyle or reasoning abrasive.

I'm liking my follow-up read of American Philosophy, and appreciated reading this one before my own trip. I may or may not read a third book, but if I find him to not really have learned his lesson in regards to acknowledging other people, I'd probably put it down. Hopefully that's not the case!

For fans of

American Philosophy: A Love Story by John Kaag; Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace; On Muscle by Bonnie Tsui; After the North Pole by Erling Kagge; The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen; Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse; Nietzsche, obviously, etc.