Hiking with Nietzsche

 John Kaag

Returning to the ancient Greeks, he argued that their remarkable strength was born of agon—the friction of contest—which was far from comfortable. Being sick could be a condition to which one eventually succumbs, but it could also be a trial that is heroically endured. The Greeks, according to Nietzsche, didn’t deny the existence of human suffering and limitation, but rather sought to transform them in art. In tragedy, characters lay hold of suffering and make it their own—claim it in such a way that failure and limitation become meaningful, indeed, gloriously so. Human existence is cruel, harsh, and painfully short, but the tragic heroes of ancient Greece found a way to make the suffering and sudden endings of life beautiful, or aesthetically significant. This is what Nietzsche meant in The Birth of Tragedy when he claimed that the existence can be justified only as an aesthetic experience. 

Aesthetic experience—the experience of the beautiful and sublime—has often been regarded as beyond the purview of modern philosophers. As the scientific revolution gathered speed and tipped into the Age of Enlightenment, thinkers prioritized rational and moral ideals above all others. One’s decisions and actions were to be guided by universal principles of prudence, logic, and reason rather than by any vague pursuit of the beautiful life. By contrast, Nietzsche believed that a quest for aesthetic experience was the only way to mitigate the horror of existence. The Greeks understood beauty in its most robust sense—as a way of transforming agony and drudgery into something creative and enrapturing. There was no such thing as “art for art’s sake” for the Greeks; the point was to come to see the tensions and contradictions of life—even the despised and the hideous—as one would take in a work of art. 

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Chur hadn't changed. Indeed, in many respects it never has. It’s been continuously occupied since the Bronze Age, five thousand years ago, and the signs of this enduring inhabitancy are everywhere. “We need history,” Nietzsche tells his reader, “inasmuch as the past wells up in us in hundreds of ways. Indeed we ourselves are nothing other than what we sense at each instant of that onward flow.” In 1464 Chur burned to the ground, but when German artisans rebuilt it in subsequent years, new buildings were laid on the foundations of the old. The city, unlike so many modern ones, does not assault the landscape but settles gently in the valley between vaulting mountains. This too was a matter of being situated in, or on, the past—a deep foundation of glacial stone. 

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Beyond Good and Evil has two primary targets: Kant and women. Kant, one of the great moral theorists of the Western canon, has a theory of duty that drove Nietzsche wild, and not in a good way. The diminutive fellow from Konigsberg had a notion of ethical obligation that threatened to abnegate Nietzsche’s vision of the free spirit. But there was something more essentially wrong with Kant; even before his ethical theory got off the ground, there was something foundationally amis, in his philosophical system. Before turning to ethics, Kant wag an epistemologist: he wanted to know what sorts of truths are available to the human mind. Working in the 1780s, Kant confronted the skepticism of David Hume and the other British empiricists and was intent on overcoming it. Modern skepticism had come very close to reducing the idea of true belief to mere custom, opinion, or habit—that is to say, to not much at all—and Kant wanted to resurrect the primacy of truth and certainty. He did it in a weird and, Nietzsche suggests, philosophically suspicious way. 

Kant argued that one apprehends indubitable truths about the world because humans possess a certain mental faculty that can apprehend indubitable truths about the world. His theory is more complex than this, but not much, and Nietzsche argues that Kant spills no small amount of ink on a circular argument. Kant then uses this circular argument to explain where values—moral and aesthetic judgments—come from. Humans’ ability to ascertain truth by way of reason makes them special—so special, in fact, that they have “incomparable worth.” This means that they cannot be bought or sold or exploited or, in his words, used as a “mere means.” It is a good story, but one that begins with a circular (fallacious) argument. None of this would matter, not one bit, if the history of European philosophy hadn’t spent more than a century championing Kant’s supreme triumph. Writing a century later, Nietzsche had had enough. 

Where do moral values come from? According to Nietzsche, it isn’t from a shadowy mental faculty that allows a human mind to grasp the truth. Instead, it comes from a basic need...from a fear so pervasive and elemental that modern society has been erected in enduring protest, in the cover-up: the fear of existential uncertainty. I'd never squabbled with Carol about this point, but I had asked, “What attracts you to Kant? You know he’s a raging sexist, right?” Yes, she knew. She just didn’t care. He provided what she called “manifest certainty,’ and this made everything else somehow forgivable. Manifest—like clear, apparent, obvious, palpable, definite, self-evident. That kind of certainty. She didn’t even care about the argument that much, just the conclusion: every human being had incomparable worth owing to his or her rational faculties, and this meant that no one was any better than her neighbor when it came to the calculus of moral judgments. 

Kant’s circular argument promised a sort of brute equality that Carol could, and would continue to, live with. I knew her well enough not to argue about this. She’d grown up in a small town in Saskatchewan, far removed from the ivory tower. Her first job at fourteen was waitressing at the truck stop she could see from her bedroom window. The idea that everyone was equal by virtue of their powers of reason was an axiom that didn’t have to be proved in an academic way. It had an unquestionable, practical power, a belief that led her out of the truck stop and came to buttress the Canadian egalitarianism that had enabled much of her life. To deny its validity was to deny what she’d become: a college graduate, a doctoral student who became a female tenured professor in the discipline of philosophy. Carol defended Kant’s manifest certainty as if her life depended on it, because, on a certain level, it did. 

Nietzsche explains that for all of philosophy’s highmindedness, it often boils down to satisfying certain brute needs—a desire for protection, an adaptive proclivity for nourishment, a means of effectively negotiating a dangerous world, This is the origin of what he calls “the will to truth,” a force that drove Kant to develop a system that came to domi. nate Western philosophy, Nietzsche suggests that the “greater part of conscious thinking must be counted among the instine. tive functions, and it is so even in the case of philosophical thinking...” One's attraction to manifest certainty is not the outcome of reasonable argumentation but rather the out. growth of primal fear, 

After his tirade against Kant, Nietzsche turns to the possibility of walking as a “free spirit.” What will these liberated thinkers look like? One thing is sure, Nietzsche contended: “they will not be dogmatists. It must be contrary to their pride,” he explained, “and also contrary to their taste, that their truth should still be truth for every one... ‘My opinion is MY opinion: another person has not easily a right to it’—such a philosopher of the future will say, perhaps.” 

Nietzsche heralds a coming age of new philosophers, what he calls the “philosophers of the future.” Perhaps they will also be moved by the will to truth, but these new thinkers will neither pursue it rabidly as their guiding ideal or, even more dangerous, confuse truth with grand illusion. Kant’s “manifest certainty” is worthy of contempt, according to Nietzsche, because it postures as objectivity, a weak argument done up to the nines and presented as absolute truth. At the end of the section on the free spirits Nietzsche shifts the discourse away from truth entirely. His philosophers will write on behalf of the will to life or more famously the will to power. Power is different from faint truth. Very different.

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Within the Frankfurt School, Adorno joined Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse in espousing what has come to be known as “critical theory.” It was, at least at first, a neo-Marxist movement, one that held that culture itself could be, and was being, used as a force of oppression. This might seem like a stretch. Culture—entertainment, consumerism, the arts—doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that can imprison a people. This intuition, however, Adorno argues, is precisely the thought that lowers one’s defenses. Popular culture shapes a people’s preferences, delimiting the scope of human activity and desire. Our consumer culture might give us choices, might give us the semblance of being free to choose, but this liberty amounts to pitifully little if everyone is given the same circumscribed options. Critical theory, according to Horkheimer, who coauthored the Dialectic of Enlightenment with Adorno, was meant to free people from the subtle forces that enslaved them. How it was supposed to do that had, during my years as a graduate student, completely eluded me. But the Waldhaus gave me some idea. 

The critical theorists—following Nietzsche—attacked popular culture in all its forms. They objected to the commodification of beauty and the sublime and the leveling out of difference and individual taste. Like Nietzsche, Adorno both abhorred and was riveted by herd mentality. Unlike many psychologists, Adorno asserted that this mentality wasn't a natural social impulse but a grand performance orchestrated by a priestly master (he came of age in Nazi Germany and wrote against fascism in all its forms). The sheep that comprised the herd could, at any time, opt out of the performance, but the theatrics of culture combined with the necessities of capitalism had given it an almost irresistible draw. Still, Adorno wrote in 1951, “If they would stop to reason for a second, the whole performance would go to pieces, and they would be left to panic.” 

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on Friedrich Holderlin. 

Holderlin had confronted the decline of Western civilization nearly a century before Nietzsche. Writing in the aftermath of the French Revolution, in a style that attempted to wed German and ancient Greek thought, he tried to understand the relationship between destruction and creation, and he held, much like Nietzsche, that destruction created the space and opportunity for new birth. In a fragmentary essay titled “Becoming in Dissolution,” Hdélderlin writes, “in the state between being and non-being, however, the possible becomes real everywhere and. . . in art this is a frightful yet divine dream.” 

Following the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, Holderlin was a “weeping philosopher,” one who suffered deeply from what was, at the time, termed “hypochondria” but would today be called depression or anxiety disorder. His psychological fragility made working for a living very difficult, and he was supported largely by his mother. His last years of freedom were spent playing the piano “morning until night.” Eventually those free years came to an end, and in 1800 he was institutionalized at the Autenrieth asylum, where he was straitjacketed and forced to wear the Autenrieth mask. Made of leather and wood, the mask was a muzzle that kept a patient from talking or screaming. Hélderlin was force-fed—a hell I've often imagined. And he descended ever more quickly into what most people call madness. 

Nietzsche adored Holderlin’s writings and must have felt no small amount of sympathy for a man who imploded in the frenzy of creation. His deep respect for Hélderlin, however, can be traced to a mutual admiration that both thinkers held for an ancient philosopher who came closest to their worldview. It wasn’t Heraclitus, but rather Empedocles. Empedocles believed that the world operated under exactly two principles of order: love and strife. His cosmology envisions a dynamic cycle that, in turn, pulls things apart in strife and draws them together in affection, eternally. This is the heart and soul of all creation, according to Empedocles. Both Hdlderlin and Nietzsche could wholly accept this description of reality. 

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 Ecce Homo, translated “Behold the Man,” is Nietzsche’s autobiography. It is the account he gives at the brink of mental collapse. Perhaps it is the story that allows him to go over the edge. It is, indeed, the most personal and authentically inauthentic story I've ever read. It is full of bombast and self-aggrandizement, switchbacks and dead ends, what some readers regard as the sign of a deranged mind. “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” “Why I Write Such Good Books”: these are the principal chapter headings of Ecce Homo. | agree: Nietzsche would be completely insane were he not aware of his exaggeration. But this is a false bombast that knows itself. 

Irony allows one to say two things at once, indeed to express two mutually exclusive realities in a single utterance. It allows one to give voice to love and strife, to indebtedness and ingratitude, to salvation and guilt, triumph and utter defeat all in one breath. “I am the world’s best philosopher,” “I am the perfect parent,” “I have absolute self-knowledge”: these impossible instances of hyperbole actually indicate, very honestly, how far they are from the truth. Irony is the language of the two-faced. It allows one to be a decadent and its opposite. Nietzsche admits, “A dual series of experiences, this access to apparently separate worlds, is repeated in my nature in every respect: 1 am a Doppelgdnger, I have a second face in addition to the first. And perhaps also a third.” 

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Dionysus’s adopted father, Silenus, played one of these flutes. Forever lighthearted, the satyr frolicked drunkenly through the forest of Greek mythology. He was enigmatic, uncatchable. When Midas tried to pin him down, to wrest from him the meaning of life, the little imp rebelled: the key to life is never to have been born, or if you are born, to die as quickly as possible. Live and die as quickly as possible. I've spent most of my adult life fixated on Silenus’s nihilistic suggestion, ignoring what was most obvious about the creature, namely that he represented fertility and rebirth. Die as soon as you can—so that you can come to life again and again, like a morning flash, or spring after a brutal winter. There is another way to interpret the Ubermensch that has little to do with perfectionism and self-stylizing: Nietzsche would like us to die, to get out of the way, to get out of our own way, so something else can take our place. So that we can become what we are. 

The entire festival is in honor of death—to either appease it or become it—but ultimately for the sake of creation—or, better, re-creation. This is the wisdom of Silenus and why the satyr was chosen as Dionysus’s guardian. Dionysus was twiceborn, or, more dramatically, reborn. He died as quickly as possible, only to rise again. By some accounts he was the offspring of an illicit affair between Zeus and the goddess of the underworld, Persephone. Hera, Zeus’s wife, discovered the adultery. Flying into a rage, she convinced the Titans, a family of primordial giants, to hunt the child down, dismember him, and cannibalize him. The only thing left when they were finished was the boy’s heart. But Dionysus would live on. When the Titans devoured him, Dionysus’s body was ground up, ingested, and digested by ancient giants. After Zeus found out about this act of revenge, he brought his son back to life and obliterated the Titans in a storm of lightning bolts. Nothing remained of the giants, just a wet soot: titanic and earthly, but with a hint, a mere fragrance, of something divine. It is a haunting admixture: the shame of ingratitude, tempered with the faint possibility of creativity and redemption. According to Orphic myth, Zeus combined this soot with clay to fashion small imperfect figures—humans. “Our body is Dionysian,” the neo-Platonic philosopher Olympiodorus explains, “we are part of him, since we sprang from the soot of the Titans who ate of his flesh.” 

Eventually time lapses and the night recedes. The parade passes away and the sun rises. All great festivals are based on a cycle of death and rebirth. It doesn’t matter where they’re celebrated—Easter, Halloween, Ramadan, Diwali, Saturnalia, Morganstreich—they all have a similar flavor. Things must suffer, go dark, perish before they live again. This is not an escape or respite from life but rather its realization: in the end, to burn up and out, as Zarathustra does, “like a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains.”