John Kaag is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is the author, most recently, of Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, published with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This is the companion book to American Philosophy: A Love Story, which was named a NYT Editor Choice and an NPR Best Book of 2016.
What is your new book about?
Hiking with Nietzsche is the story of two trips in search of Nietzsche—one taken when I was a nineteen year old, beginning my Masters thesis (on Nietzsche and Emerson) and one when I was thirty-six, beginning to think through the difficulties of mid-life.
Both of the trips took place in Sils Maria, Switzerland, where Nietzsche routinely summered. It is not a formal biography of Nietzsche or a close reading of the texts—but rather a demonstration of what Nietzsche does with a reader. It is about how philosophy can change one’s life.
As a very young man, I had a radically individualistic and rather (self)-destructive reading of my philosophical hero. I hiked for nine weeks, fasted (in order to explore the ascetic ideal and the will to power), and slept in the room next to Nietzsche’s in the Nietzsche Haus. This philosophical experiment had a very concrete and particular results: I acquired an eating disorder that landed me in the hospital in the coming years and that I struggle with to this day, and came as close as one does to suicide. Philosophy may change your life, but never in ways you can fully anticipate. As a full-fledged adult, with a partner (Carol Hay) and six year-old daughter as travel companions, my interpretation of Nietzsche shifted. In the end, the book is about hiking with Nietzsche into middle age, discovering what this childless philosopher can (and cannot) teach us about parenting, love, and resisting the complacency of later life.
The book is written as a philosophical memoir—half personal meditation, half intellectual history. I hope the tone is approachable, if the subjects are sometimes difficult to approach.
So you took your six-year old daughter to the Nietzsche Haus?
No, not exactly. Much of the second journey is based out of the Waldhaus-Sils, a grand old hotel, set in the mountain above Nietzsche’s onetime abode. It’s where Hesse and Adorno used to stay when they came to make their Nietzschean pilgrimages. It is the perfect place to come to terms with the self-loathing of modern decadence.
Do you consider yourself a Nietzsche scholar?
No. I have already been informed that I am not “a Nietzsche guy.” This is right and, I hope, alright. I do not, for example, worry too much about whether Nietzsche proposed to Lou Salomé one, twice, or three times (which seems to be an open question in the literature). Many of the careful, and very valuable, distinctions that have been made by scholars—like Nehamas, Young, and Babbich—are not highlighted in a book like this. It is, in part, a memoir—a personal take on Nietzsche. And it is a book for a general audience. That being said some distinctions (like the one between “Becoming who you are” and Becoming what you are”) underpin the story in its entirety.
Both American Philosophy and Hiking with Nietzsche are intensely personal. You deal with the death of loved ones, divorce, alcoholism, anorexia, suicide, parenting. Do you think that all philosophy has to be this personal?
Well, professional philosophers do spend their lives doing philosophy. So it is necessarily profoundly personal in that respect. But does philosophy always have to be “public philosophy” or be bent on changing lives? No, I don’t think so.
I am happy we have a diversity of approaches in philosophy. I imagine that many forms of technical metaphysics and epistemology will never “touch down” as it were in the lives of most people—and that is fine. I am glad scholars can work on these topics just as I am glad that people can pursue theoretical physics or pure mathematics or ballet. What I object to, fervently, is the idea that philosophy is necessarily untethered from the affairs of the world. This is just wrong. I, for one, am most satisfied when I am doing philosophy from a personal and confessional perspective, when I write as teacher or companion rather than a professor, one who wants to profess. I do think that Pierre Hadot had it right when he reminded us that ancient philosophy was bound up with living a meaningful life. But does everyone have to agree with this? No, I don’t think so.
Where did you write Hiking with Nietzsche?
Large portions of it were written on the second trip in the summer of 2016, at the Waldhaus and in the hills surrounding Sils-Maria. I have a number of notebooks from my first trip when I was younger, so those helped. Honestly, most of the book was written in the wee hours of the morning (I have insomnia) and around parenting. Part of the book is about the tension between raising children on the one hand and individual goals and intellectual interests on the other.
What do you want a reader to take away from the book?
I’m not exactly sure, and I think that is a permissible answer. I would not be upset if readers dwelled on this paragraph, which I think is one of the keystones of the book:
As it turns out, ‘becoming who you are’ is not about finding a ‘who’ you have always been looking for. It is not about separating ‘you’ off from everything else. And it is not about existing as you truly ‘are’ for all time. The self does not lie passively in wait for us to discover it. Selfhood is made in the active, ongoing process, in the German verb werden, “to become.” The enduring nature of being human is to turn into something else, which should not be confused with going somewhere else. This may come as a great disappointment to one who goes in search of the self. What one is, essentially, is this active transformation, nothing more, nothing less. This is not a grand wisdom quest or hero’s journey, and it doesn’t require one to escape to the mountains. No mountain is high enough. Just a bit of cheese and any fast-moving river will suffice.
So you don’t have to be a mountain climber after all in order to understand Nietzsche.
Well, I think we are all hikers and trespassers. Nietzsche, I suspect, would just like us to be more honest about the meaning and value of our “destinations.” Having tried it twice, I’m convinced that one does not discover Nietzsche alone at the top of some remote mountain peak. Zarathustra shuttles between his lonely cave and the valley below for a reason. Maybe you get to walk with Nietzsche only if you are willing to be en route, to slip, and occasionally fall.
The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.
