John Kaag, in Hiking with Nietzsche, his account of tracing Nietzsche’s legendary sojourns in the Swiss Alps, provides one of the best introductions to Nietzsche’s thought since the work of Walter Kaufmann.
Philosophers vary in the personal relationship that they have with their readers. You can’t understand Plato’s Socratic dialogues without grasping Socrates as a man. Socrates’ character and his thought, as presented by his friend Plato, mirror each other, and of course, mirror Plato. In contrast, I don’t think anyone ever said that you had to appreciate Kant as a person to understand The Critique of Pure Reason.
Nietzsche falls into the former category. He’s a philosopher of conduct, like Socrates or Kierkegaard, and for these existentialist writers, it helps to know something about the author.
In Nietzsche’s case, the first step is to perform an exorcism and remove the stereotypes that popular culture has attached to his name. Pop culture is good for many things, but the pursuit of knowledge is not one of them.
I started reading Nietzsche in high school, as one of those writers, who for some inexplicable reason, my teachers didn’t bother to mention. When you realize that there are more interesting writers than your teacher is willing to bring up in class, it’s a decisive rite of passage.
In my day, you went to Walter Kaufmann for a balanced view of Nietzsche. Kaufmann was fighting against the headwinds of the 1940’s and earlier misinterpretations. According to those misguided ideas, you might be excused for thinking that Nietzsche was a Nazi, along with his sometime friend, Richard Wagner, except that they weren’t alive during the 20th century. Nietzsche made it to 1900, the dawn of a century whose character he did so well in predicting.
Kaufmann probably went too far in “normalizing” Nietzsche, for the honorable reason that he wanted him to get a fair hearing. Kaag, in contrast, makes Nietzsche seem “impossible” both as a man and as a thinker, and that’s an accurate assessment. Where Kaufmann sees difficulties in Nietzsche’s thought, Kaag sees fissures and impassable crags.
Kaufmann cites the plausibility of syphilis as the cause of Nietzsche’s final breakdown. Kaag seems more inclined to credit Lou Salome’s earlier opinion that her ex-friend’s inner contradictions led to mental collapse.
Lou Salome said she had gotten out of her friendship with Nietzsche “just in time”. Nietzsche wanted contradictory things. He dreamed of friends who were “free spirits” but he also wanted them to be his loyal disciples. In his philosophy, he was an admitted decadent, a man in decline, who envisioned the mythic over-achiever, the overman.
Kaag maintains a deft balance between the striking alpine terrain of his pilgrimage and Nietzschean philosophy. Never has the marriage between terrain and thought in Nietzsche’s work been explained so well.
Hiking with Nietzsche is about John Kaag’s journeys as well as Nietzsche’s. As a young man, Kaag visits Nietzsche country, the Swiss hamlet of Sils Maria and the Alps that encircle it, solo. As an academic approaching middle age, he persuades his wife Carol, a Kantian with an opposing philosophy, along with their two-year old daughter Becca, to join him on a return visit.
On that return visit, Kaag gets into trouble for spending too much time wandering alone in the mountains, once with a copy of Hesse’s Steppenwolf in his backpack. I liked the near twenty-something Kaag, risking his life alone under an overhang of rock in an alpine all-nighter, better than the adult Kaag, who can’t be late for dinner without receiving a scolding.
Throughout the mountain trails, the awesome atmospheric displays, the challenges of climbing, hiking and “scrambling”, which consists of ascending/descending steep hilltops without safety gear, John Kaag places a daisy chain of Nietzsche’s key ideas, reciting as a litany selected titles of Nietzsche’s great and partly destabilized books.
Reading Nietzsche seriously is like attempting to x-ray your own brain. MAGIC THEATER NOT FOR EVERYBODY. (Consult Steppenwolf.) John Kaag can provide you with a ticket to Nietzsche if you should be crazy enough to want one.
As a bonus which I loved, a sort of terminal moraine of Nietzsche’s thought, we have brief introductions to Adorno, Hesse, Marcuse, Mann and others who were all following in Nietzsche’s footsteps with their own books before the melting snow obscured his tracks.
I’ll leave John Kaag in Hiking with Nietzsche where his heart mostly is, with his wife and daughter on the slopes, enjoying the sunlight.
And with the sheep. For Nietzsche, most people are sheep and subject to disdain. In John Kaag’s case, maybe the sheep are just sheep, and beautiful they are, hundreds of them, on the alpine hills in fading light.
