Hiking with Nietzsche
On Becoming Who You Are
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3.9 • 18 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"A stimulating book about combating despair and complacency with searching reflection." --Heller McAlpin, NPR.org
Named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR. One of Lit Hub's 15 Books You Should Read in September and one of Outside's Best Books of Fall
A revelatory Alpine journey in the spirit of the great Romantic thinker Friedrich Nietzsche
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."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kaag (American Philosophy: A Love Story) mixes personal reflection and interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's thought in this meditative work, framed by two trips to the philosopher's home in Sils-Maria, Switzerland: once, when Kaag was a 19-year-old college student, and then, years later, when he returns as a philosophy professor with wife and child. The work reflects on adulthood and on squaring the notion of the bermensch with the realities of adult life. Kaag's reading of Nietzsche is tempered with humanity and compassion. Acknowledging that the writer's ideas are controversial, he writes that "even those who disprove them cannot disprove the person behind the scenes," emphasizing the deeply personal source of Nietzschean philosophy. Also thought provoking is this final explication of Nietzsche's maxim, "Become who you are": "Selfhood is made in the active, ongoing process.... The enduring nature of being human is to turn into something else, which should not be confused with going somewhere else." Kaag has crafted a stirring account of a personal encounter with a great mind.
