Hiking With Nietzsche — Becoming Who You Are — John Kaag // Review & Quotes
It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, but overall, I really enjoyed John Kaag’s ‘Hiking With Nietzsche’. It is a refreshing ‘memoir-ish’ exploration of Friedrich Nietzsche, by professor of philosophy, John Kaag.
This is not an in-depth study of Nietzsche; it casually explores some familiar concepts from his writings, I don’t believe it is intended to be philosophically rigorous. This was actually ideal for me as it was the first book I read on Nietzsche and presented his work in a relatable way.
I’ve read that some people consider Kaag’s introspection “shamefully indulgent” on his journey of self-discovery, however I found it honest and candid. Kaag first visited the Alps in search of Nietzsche when he was 19-years old in the midst of his existential crisis. He returns to trace his tracks as a middle-aged man with wife and daughter in tow.
Result: We are following a man who’s following a man. We get Nietzsche’s life (and, to an extent, philosophy) explained, leavened liberally with Kaag’s life and thoughts, which provides philosophic relief and clarity.
I also found the constant juxtaposition of his views with his wife’s — a Kantian philosopher — surprisingly humorous, and it provided a great contrast and grounding for both Kaag and you as the reader. I think you could easily misinterpret their relationship or the tone in which he is writing. I almost felt like he was mocking himself and his own foolish, selfish and naive choices. The fact he has dedicated the book to his wife and daughter further suggests his self-awareness.
I think Kaag’s story is relatable and I’m unsure why, but I found it darkly humorous, maybe due to a combination of Nietzsche’s overly dramatic tone contrasted with Kaag’s ‘mundane’ but very relatable everyday applications of his philosophies.
My favourite part is the timeline he has provided at the back of the book which really helped me wrap my head around Nietzsche’s place in history (nerdy I know). Kaag also provides an excellent bibliography and suggested reading list at the end which has been really useful for me.
I will definitely be picking up his other books, especially ‘American Philosophy: A Love Story’ which I have heard fantastic reviews about.
Quotes
“Set for yourself goals, high and Noble goals, and perish in the pursuit of them! I know of no better life purpose than to perish in pursuing the great and the impossible: Animae Magnae Prodigus.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Notebook,1873
Page 3
“let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft?” — Nietzsche
Page 6
“he who has attained only some degree of freedom of mind cannot feel other than a wander on the Earth- they’re not as a Traveler to a final destination: for this destination does not exist.” — Friedrich Nietzsche Human, All Too Human, 1878
Page 11
In the beginning, according to Nietzsche, “man was surrounded by fearful void-he did not know how to justify, to account for, to offend him self: he suffered from the problem of his meaning.”
Page 31
“a man’s maturity-consists in having found again the seriousness of one had as a child, at play.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886
Page 37
“I used to be happy,” one of my students in for me halfway through the term, “then I started reading Nietzsche.”
Page 39
This Nihilist with his Christian dogmatic entrails considered pleasure an objection. What could destroy us more quickly than working, thinking, and feeling without any in a necessity, without any deeply personal choice, without pleasure-as an automated call of “duty”? This is the very recipe for decadence, even for idiocy. Kant became an idiot.
Page 45
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 the ideals and beliefs.
Page 46
The question in each and every thing, “do you want this again and innumerable times again?” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science,1882
Page 63
Are we, in the words of William Butler Yeats, “content to live it all again?” Being content in this sense is not being distracted from, or lulled to sleep by, or resigning on self to a fate that cannot be avoided. It is to live to your hearts content with the knowledge that you will do this, and everything, again, for ever.
Page 74
“I and me are always too deeply in conversation” — Nietzsche
Page 84
Over the years I’ve slowly learned how to use, or at least appreciate, insomnia. For a parent, it provides a blessed calm in an otherwise scattered existence.
Page 85
Humanity, according to Zarathustra, is but a bridge or a rope that connects beasts to this superhuman ideal.
Page 86
To love in spite of appearances can be one of the signs of true affection.
Page 88
God has been dying for a long time. Our faith in the divine has been eroded by a steady onslaught of focus: the advances in science, the age of reason, the birth of modern capital, the distraction of consumerism, the defication of the state.
Page 100
God didn’t stand a chance. His death is no cause for celebration; at best it has created a vacuum that needs to be filled.
Page 100
First one must become camel, loaded down with the baggage of the past, of tradition, of cultural constraints.
Page 100
In the loneliest desert, a second metamorphosis occurs, “here the spirit becomes a lion who would conquer his freedom and become the master os his own desert.”
Page 101
The lion is the only beast who can fight, and kill, what Zarathustra calls the dragoon of “thou shalt”.
Page 101
“We are, all of us, growing volcanoes that approach the hour of their eruption; but how near or distant that is, nobody knows — not even God” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science,1882
Page 105
“Greater part of conscious thinking must be counted among the instinctive functions, and it is so even in the case of philosophical thinking…”
Page 110
One’s attraction to manifest certainty is not the outcome of reasonable argumentation but rather the outgrowth of primal fear
Page 110
That, my love, is the stupidest book,” Carol said, pointing to my copy of BeyondGood and Evil.
Page 113
Was he a misogynist in Beyond Good and Evil and else-where? Probably. Sometimes. Nietzsche reflected the chauvinism of his age, and he objected to the idea of fighting for the rights of women as a concept, but usually his comments about women reveal confusion, even fear, rather than genuine hatred.
Page 116
Nietzsche’s Genealogy is meant to give an explanation of this transformation // how the roman empire became the holy roman empire.
Page 124
He wanted to explore the moral and psychological shift that he would come to call the rise of “slave morality”.
Page 124
Nietzsche said he was interested in the relationship between food and thought, and he believed that thinking was inextricably tied to eating.
Page 130
Carl Jung explained that “to fill himself with physical matter would make him heavy… He could not fly, he would be fettered to the Earth.”
Page 130
“To choose instinctively what is harmful to oneself… is virtually the formula for decadence.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols,1888
Page 140
“We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge — and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves — how could it happen that we should never find ourselves?” — Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals,1887
Page 156
“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 1888
Page 175
“This painting — that which we humans call life and experience — has gradually become, is indeed still fully in the process of becoming, and should thus not be regarded as a fixed object…” -Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human,1878
Page 194
“They both listened silently to the water, which to them was not just water, but the voice of life, the voice of Being, the voice of perpetual Becoming.” — Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, 1922
Page 210
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.
Page 214
This is what Nietzsche calls the “amor fate”, the love of fate.
Page 214
“Becoming what you are”: it has been described as “the most haunting of Nietzsche’s haunting aphorisms.” It expresses an abiding paradox at the core of human selfhood: either you are who you are already, or you become someone other than who you are.
Page 220
Becoming oneself seems to wash away any last vestige of identity.
Page 220
“To become what one is, one must not have the faintest idea of what one is.” — Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Page 221
“Repetition. It is an excellent thing to express a thing consecutively in two ways, and that’s provide it with the right and the 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
Page 223
