book report: Hiking with Nietzsche

Totentanz als Lebenszeichen: Charlotte, my blogging friend and for the next nine months occasional partner in Zurich crime (yay!!) wrote about 83-year-old graffiti artist Harald Nägeli and our trip to Ufenau Island here, here, and here. If you're interested in cool Swiss places you should subscribe to her blog because she gets out more than I do.

We interrupt the trip ramblings to bring you a few thoughts on Hiking With Nietzsche, the book John Kaag wrote before Sick Souls, Healthy Minds, which I enjoyed so much this summer. I don't want to start another book before I write about this one, so I need to get this little review off my to-do list. Also I'm supposed to definitely for sure this time start writing my theology papers this week, and I'm procrastinating. 

So, Nietzsche. I'm so thankful that there are teachers like Kaag who do the hard work of becoming educated, well-read humans and then sharing their acquired wisdom with those of us who are intellectually far lazier. And also thankful that we're moving away from the idea of wisdom as something that hovers above the concrete and inevitably messy lives of those who are pursuing it. In both Sick Souls and Hiking, Kaag weaves together biography, autobiography, and philosophy, making a subject I've often experienced as infuriatingly obscure and narcissistic feel authentic and relevant. The framing story of Hiking is that he is retracing a pilgrimage he took at age nineteen to Nietzsche's Swiss mountain retreat - this time with his wife and preschooler along for the journey. Unfortunately, wives and children play no part in Nietzsche's Swiss mountain retreat, but Haag soldiers on admirably for 200 pages before he admits defeat:

As we reached the trailhead to the valley, I arrived at a conclusion that I’d tried to avoid for weeks: this trip had been a failure. A search for the Übermensch had become a family affair—brimming with tender moments, routine tasks, and playdates. The attempt to be free, to retrace a path that I’d taken in my youth, had been cut short by my family obligations, and the journey had slowly morphed into a holiday taken in honor of Nietzsche’s memory rather than anything genuinely, authentically Nietzschean. I had proved unable or unwilling to stop its gradual decline into mundane life. 

I enjoyed the book immensely but it seems like the author missed a huge opportunity here - to realize that the trip was doomed from the start to be less than "genuinely, authentically Nietzschean" not because of any failure on his part, but because of a failure on Nietzsche's part - and frankly, on the part of the whole vast sweep of Western philosophy, at least as I've encountered it - to engage with those parts of human existence historically designated as female or "mundane." Here's one piece of that puzzle:

“Art thou a man entitled to desire a child?” Nietzsche asks in his childlessness. “Art thou the victorious one, the self-conqueror, the ruler of thy passions, the master of thy virtues?” No—not even close. Frustration, selfishness, insecurity—parents are supposed to keep these in check, but in my limited experience, they are precisely the psychic phenomena that are born in child-rearing. My friend Clancy, one of the few father-philosophers I know, and one of Nietzsche’s best translators—says that parenting is like breaking rocks, only more grinding. Historically, men have opted out of this drudgery, excusing themselves by pretending that “making a living” was somehow as difficult as raising kids. Of course, this is a grand farce, a convenient cultural myth that effectively keeps women in the home. As patriarchy declines in the coming century, more men will come to feel the painful truth of parenting—that it is frequently beyond difficult.

And here's another:

Nietzsche gestures toward the slipperiness of self-overcoming in Schopenhauer as Educator: “you are not really all that which you do, think, and desire now.” And again, more dramatically, in Ecce Homo: “To become what one is, one must not have the faintest idea of what one is.” I’ve never fully understood this point, but the moments where I’ve come closest are strange, uncanny, disruptive ones: hiking with Carol and the sheep in Val Fex, or watching our daughter dance on a hill of wildflowers, or getting lost for the first time when I was nineteen and again when I was thirty-six. Nietzsche’s point may be that the process of self-discovery requires an undoing of the self-knowledge that you assume you already have. Becoming is the ongoing process of losing and finding yourself.

But he doesn't put them together - to experience in the drudgery and frustrations of parenting the crucible of self-discovery. I suspect that as patriarchy declines (one can only hope), philosophers will find themselves exploring dangerous peaks much closer to home.

Addendum: You know the icebreaker, "if you could share a meal with one person, living or dead, who would it be and why?" That one always hits where it hurts. I have this vision of sitting for an hour in awkward silence across from...I don't even know, Einstein?...with crumbs and soup flecks down my front, only to realize after the meal, alone again with only the regret of missed opportunity for company, that there were a thousand questions I could have asked. SHAME SPIRAL. Pull yourself together, Susannah. Just make something up. This is an entirely hypothetical question!! I know. I KNOW. Anyway. My point here is that at long last I have an answer: I would like to have dinner with John Kaag. First, he seems the type to be able to carry the conversation even if his dinner partner happens to have selective mutism or pasta sauce in her lap, and second, I have so many questions for him that one might just slip out and break the ice and then things wouldn't be so bad? This feels like progress, somehow.