Nietzsche Made Me Do It

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/22/opinion/sunday/nietzsche-made-me-do-it.html

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For a very long time, I considered myself a Hyperborean.

In Greek mythology, the Hyperboreans are giants who live “beyond the north wind,” high in unforgiving mountains, perfectly happy in seemingly unbearable conditions. The Greek poet Pindar said that “neither disease nor bitter old age is mixed in their sacred blood.”

I thought of this as I found myself perched on a granite escarpment at 8,000 feet, overlooking the Val Fex on the border between Switzerland and Italy. A Hyperborean wouldn’t be scared senseless up here, or worried about getting down. But I was. At the mouth of the valley lay Sils Maria, the one-time summer home of Friedrich Nietzsche. I had spent days trailing the spirit of the philosopher through these mountains. Clearly, he was responsible for this imminent disaster.

I looked down at my beat-up New Balance 990s. “Don’t you want to wear something a little more ‘technical’ on your hike?” my wife had suggested before I’d left. No, of course not. Running shoes would be fine. I would be fine. I was a Hyperborean.

This conviction was surely what led me off the trail four hours earlier, when I went scrambling up the monochromatic green slab that the Swiss call a foothill. Eventually the greenery gave way to granite and led me to the overlook, which was undoubtedly going to be the most beautiful place I’d ever see. I dug around in my daypack and found the précis to Nietzsche’s mature philosophy, “The Antichrist,” published in 1898, years after he supposedly went insane.

My family was down there somewhere — maybe five miles away. It felt much farther. This is an advantage of hiking, of walking away more generally: It can create what Nietzsche called the “pathos of distance.” This sense of being higher, of looking down, gives rise to the “craving for ever new widening of distances within the soul itself … the development of ever higher, rarer, more remote, further stretching, more comprehensive states.” This impulse to strive was at the core of Nietzsche’s perfectionism. “We are Hyperboreans,” he wrote, “we know well enough how remote our place is.”

I pitched a small stone over the edge. One. Two. Three. Almost four seconds before it exploded on the rocks below. About 300 feet. I often tell my 6-year-old daughter that having courage doesn’t mean that you aren’t scared. It means that you do it anyway. What I don’t tell her is that courage can eventually get you stuck.

I’ve hiked the backcountry many times in my 38 years, but I’m still not any good at it. I’m frightened every time I set out. When I was 19, on my first trip to the Val Fex, I tried to walk from Splügen to St. Moritz, over the Piz Platta at 13,000 feet, in running shoes not unlike these. I thought that if I went in a straight line, skipping all those seemingly unnecessary switchbacks, it would be only 25 miles. I could do this. I left the trail in the early morning. Fifteen hours later, I stopped; I had traveled roughly eight miles, quite far enough to be terrified. The next morning, after a frost-nipped night on an unmarked ledge, I turned back. I got lost and it took me two more days to return to Splügen.

The backcountry is an ideal place for Nietzsche’s hard questions: What am I trying to escape by making this dangerous trek? What is the point of this risk? Am I really, precisely, this alone? I’ve found that the disruptions of going “off-road” brings them into sharper focus. Am I going to die? It’s only a matter of time. The valley below me lit up with late-afternoon light. It began to rain.

I know there are far more treacherous and heroic climbs: Everest, Mont Blanc, Kilimanjaro. I also know there are writers who spend not hours but months or years on the trail of self-realization: Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild” and Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard” spring from such journeys. When I first read these books, I thought the point of arduous walking was to find yourself. And in a certain sense, it is. As Nietzsche says in “The Gay Science”: “What does your conscience say? You should become who you are!”

What I discovered in the mountains, however, is that becoming who you are usually involves getting over who you think you are. In fact the “who”— the idea of oneself — is probably an impediment to growth and honesty. Matthiessen never finds his snow leopard. Nietzsche wants us to be wanderers, “though not as a traveler to a final destination: for this destination does not exist.” This is not to say that we can’t set goals — quite the opposite. “Set for yourself goals, high and noble goals,” a young Nietzsche instructs, “and perish in pursuit of them.” If you arrive at a final destination, it’s a sign that you’ve set your sights too low, that your goal isn’t high or noble enough. Hyperborea is not a place to come to rest.

I slipped “The Antichrist” back in my bag. I was now entertaining the most forbidden question. One that modern life intentionally obstructs: “Am I dying right now?” Probably. Before I got up, I felt the tread on the bottom of my sneakers. The heels were worn down to the cushion. If I tried to walk down the way I’d come, I’d slip and fall hard. Going on all fours would be safer — I’d crabwalk until I reached softer ground. This was not the way to negotiate the craggy heights of Hyperborea, but I had long since stopped caring.

I’d slither home if I had to, but I wanted to get home. I guess that was it. Maybe that was the whole point of this idiotic trip: I finally knew what I wanted, what I loved. Even the most objectionable parts of life seemed preferable, even lovely, compared with this. Nietzsche’s most famous character, Zarathustra, shuttles up and down a mountain, between solitude at the top and companionship at the bottom. Maybe this is what he discovers on the way. Or maybe, in the mountains, he simply confronts what he essentially is — an animal that can be reduced to crawling on all fours, that is in the rapid process of dying.

My daughter often worries about death. I usually give her a version of the story told by the Stoic Epictetus: “I have to die. If it is now, well, then, I die now; if later, then now I will take my lunch, since the hour for lunch has arrived — and dying I will tend to later.” So let’s eat our lunch and not worry. She thinks that this “Epic Tedious” character is basically right. But after my day on a slippery mountain, I’m not so sure. Maybe the time to die is right now. Maybe that is what I am doing in the process of living. And maybe lunch will taste so much better if I realize that, if I eat it like my last supper.

I got back in one piece. Slightly scraped, but no worse for wear. The next morning, I didn’t hurry through breakfast. And I did not make a mad dash for the mountains.

John Kaag is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and the author of “Hiking With Nietzsche.”

Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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