A revelatory Alpine journey in the spirit of the great Romantic thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche
Hiking with Nietzsche is a tale of two philosophical journeys—one made by John Kaag as an introspective young man of nineteen, the other seventeen years later and in quite different circumstances: as a husband and father. His wife and small child in tow, Kaag sets off for the Swiss peaks above Sils-Maria, where Nietzsche routinely summered, and where he wrote his mysterious landmark work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both journeys are made in search of the wisdom at the core of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but 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 and 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.”
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“John Kaag is the closest thing we have to William James: a breathtakingly good prose stylist; philosophically and psychologically courageous, inventive and inspiring; ruthlessly honest; unsparing about the difficulties of love, intimacy and experience; and above all, human, in the most valuable and moral sense of the word.”
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Clancy Martin, professor of philosophy, University of Missouri–Kansas City, and author of How to Sell: A Novel, praise for the author