#480： Hiking With Nietzsche
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Summary
In this episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, Professor of Philosophy and author of "Hiking with Nietzsche on Becoming Who You Are," Prof. John Kegs talks about the life and philosophy of philosopher and philosopher-in-chief, Friedrich Nietzsche.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast frederick nietzsche
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is one of the most polarizing and misunderstood of modern philosophers dismissed by some and
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misinterpreted by others the real philosophy of nietzsche in fact holds some incredibly
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life-affirming truths for everyone regardless of belief or age i guess they have spent much of
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both his personal and professional life tracking down those insights at the age of 19 and then
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again at the age of 37 he traveled to the swiss town where nietzsche wrote his famous work thus
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spoke zarathustra and learned something different on each trip from the mustachioed philosopher about
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living a life of meaning and significance his name is john kig and he's professor of philosophy and
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the author of hiking with nietzsche on becoming who you are in this compelling conversation john
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discusses what he learned about life hiking the same mountain nietzsche hike including the role
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that walking itself played in nietzsche's approach to thinking we begin with the biggest
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misconception about the philosopher including what he really meant when he said god is dead
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john then walks us through nietzsche's idea of the will to power how this impulse should be balanced
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with the more fati the love of fate in order to achieve nietzsche's ideal of becoming who you are
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and the different things his philosophy can mean to a young man and to one approaching middle age
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after the show's over check out our show notes at aom.is slash kig that's k-a-a-g
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all right john kegg welcome to the show thanks so much for having me so you are a philosopher what
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kind of philosophy do you specialize in so my background is in american philosophy and 19th
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century european philosophy two types of philosophy that actually american pragmatism especially says that
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philosophy should be judged on the basis of its practical consequences in other words how philosophy
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can matter to individuals and their communities how basically philosophy can make a difference in life
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okay so that's like uh william james was a pragmatist that's right yeah so it's and basically there was
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this sense in the second half of the 19th century that philosophy risked jeopardizing its own relevance
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basically by retreating to the ivory tower and that it needed to basically touch down again in the
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world well okay so you wrote a book about the pragmatist american philosophy which is great but
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you got a new book out called hiking with nietzsche now nietzsche is an interesting character because he was
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kind of doing something similar to the transcendentalist the pragmatist trying to make philosophy
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alive right but before we get to your relationship with nietzsche let's talk about this guy because i think a lot
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he's a very controversial figure he's misunderstood what do you think are the biggest misconceptions
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about frederick nietzsche yeah no that's a great question i'm glad that you asked so i mean nietzsche
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is probably the gateway for many many mostly 19 year old men into philosophy and that was the case for me
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he's also the most misunderstood philosopher of the 19th and 20th century maybe of all all of
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philosophy so i mean when we think about nietzsche we we think about the bumper sticker slogans god is
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dead and also what what doesn't kill you makes you stronger and i think that one of the misapprehensions
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or the misunderstandings of nietzsche is that when he says god is dead he's rejoicing over this fact
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he's not in fact he sees the fact that we can no longer believe in traditional forms of meaning so
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religious political familial he thinks that during the 19th century those forms of meaning have kind
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of gone down the toilet and that's what he means when he says god is dead he's not rejoicing what
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what he's saying is in the absence of these forms of traditional meaning making what are we going to do
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with our lives and he actually sees it as a crisis so he might be an atheist in a certain way but he's
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not he's certainly not a rejoicing atheist the second sort of misunderstanding is that nietzsche was
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an anti-semite or is the darling of the alt-right nietzsche was not an anti-semite his sister elizabeth was
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and that's how he became acquainted so intimately with the nazi party in the 1930s and 1940s and then
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in our collective memory today but that wasn't the case in nietzsche's day in fact he talks about
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nationalism and anti-semitism as a type of bovine nationalism type of cowish nationalism which he was
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not a fan of so i think those are the two main sort of misunderstandings but unfortunately that's the
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way that many of us understand nietzsche today yeah i think you know he was a friend with wagner
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the guy who wrote music and he was an anti-semite nietzsche that's kind of one of the reasons why he ended
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his friendship with him right right so i mean one of the the primary reason that nietzsche ended his
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friendship with wagner is that nietzsche had a very close relationship with a man by the name of paul ray
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and paul ray was a jew and wagner spread a very nasty rumor about nietzsche he said that nietzsche's
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difficulty with his eyes could be attributed to masturbation and his masturbation could be attributed
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to his fear of women and that his fear of women could be traced to a homosexuality that he was
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sharing with paul ray and that was a rumor that basically nietzsche never forgave and that that
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ended their relationship yeah i probably wouldn't forgive people spreading false rumors about you
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either so i mean what kind of philosophy was nietzsche doing because it's different from say plato
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or aristotle or more analytic philosophers you read a stuff and it's like sometimes very bizarre these
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aphorisms it's very bold speaking about you know zarasutra and things like that so what was
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how would you describe nietzsche's philosophy sure i mean it's very that's it's a hard question so i think
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nietzsche is trying to create a philosophy that can give us a sense of meaning in the absence of
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the traditions that i mentioned earlier so what he would like us to do is to understand that the death
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of god actually allows us to live and living is not just an issue of reason it's an issue of passion
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it's an issue of art and so that that belief then comes through in his philosophy and his philosophy
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ralph waldo emerson says one day philosophy will be done by poets nietzsche envisions that or is trying
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to embody that so when we think about the form of nietzsche's philosophy we see poetry we see aphorism
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we see songs drama and what nietzsche is hoping is that we actually see it as a philosophy of life
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he says that the the point of life is to make our lives like pieces of art and he tried to embody
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that in his writing so it doesn't come across as a straight argument or as a rational discourse
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because he says that and nietzsche suspects that human beings don't just live by rational discourse
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alone they live by gut instinct and they live by aesthetic or artistic experience and so by forming
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a philosophy that is as you say unconventional he's going he's trying to tap into those you know those
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ways of understanding yeah that irrational part he uses the god dionyses right as sort of that that
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represents that irrational part of humanity that's right i mean and so nietzsche envisions
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a culture that balances the dionysian and the apollonian the apollonian being this call to order
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and the dionysian being this sort of darker instinctual impulse and he says that the best
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cultures are those that can have a balance between the two and if we think and and have a balance between
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the two in the same experience that's what he thinks so is so unique about greek tragedy for example
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so you mentioned ralph waldo emerson there as i've read nietzsche i've found similarities between like
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what he was doing what the transcendentalists were doing what do you think were the similarities there
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yeah so i mean nietzsche is reading emerson through the 1860s and he says that emerson is his good
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friend because of his deep what nietzsche calls skeptics the word that gives us skeptical in other words
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emerson's doubt about conventional forms of morality is doubt about conventional or traditional ways of
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being and i think that that's a similarity i also think there's a similarity with emerson's sort of
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drive toward individualism and self-reliance which we see in nietzsche so if you think about nietzsche's
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understanding of the will to power the idea that we are most alive when we exercise our wills
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in sort of creative or meaningful ways this was in emerson as well and so that's another aspect
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i also think that nietzsche nietzsche's notion he describes it as the amor fati the love of fate
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and i think that we see this in emerson as well and we can talk about the love of fate a little later
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too i'm sure we will sure you just mentioned will the power i mean that's one of the books that i feel
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like people associate the reason why people associate nietzsche with nazism because that was
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like the book that you know all the the soldiers uh nazi american carried around but like people
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when they hear will the power they often think well he's talking about political power it sounds
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like they're you just talked about nietzsche wasn't really talking about political power or just
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dominance he was talking more some like a personal type of power um yeah i mean nietzsche is
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asking us to uh he says this to us and i'm going to be just very as frank as i can about it sure he says
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the young soul should look back on his life or her life and ask ask themselves what have you really
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loved up to this point and the will to power is one way of answering that question like what we find
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about our lives that are you know are the best parts of our lives are times when we're exercising
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the will to power this creative force and you're right it is individual and not necessarily nationalistic
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or imperialistic there is another way of answering that question what have you loved up till now but i
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think that the will to power is one is the traditional way that we understand nietzsche as answering that
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question so what we love is moments in which we feel like our volition is exercised in you know
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active ways or in ways that we have authorship over and nietzsche was very much attuned to the fact
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that human beings do feel good when they feel powerful right i think he's yeah he said something
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like joy is the feeling of power increasing something along that line yeah and and he's also coming out of
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this darwinian legacy darwin publishes the origin of species in 18 or 1859 and nietzsche is reading
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this and trying to figure out what a naturalized morality would look like in other words what would
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morality look like if we just think about humans as just another form of animal and that doesn't mean
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that he's reducing us to animals rather he's he's saying what are our natures actually like and where do we
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find joy where do we find it well one place we find it is power so you mentioned the beginning that
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oftentimes nietzsche is the the gateway to philosophy for 19 year old young men and you're one of those
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young men you started reading and writing about him when you're 19 years old as a college student
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what drew you to nietzsche as a young man sure i mean my my background is fairly conservative i grew up in
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the middle of pennsylvania central pennsylvania and if you've ever been there you probably know that like
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central pennsylvania is not a place where people think you know it's not not not a bastion of
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philosophy my mother a fairly conservative woman never envisioned her son becoming a philosophy
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professor i grew up in a sort of strict calvinist religious setting and which is not unlike
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frederick nietzsche he grew up a strict lutheran and when i read nietzsche's antichrist a book that was
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published at the end of his life it says one must have the courage to ask forbidden questions
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and i was hooked because those forbidden questions were questions like is there a god do i have faith
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what does it mean to be a man those are questions that nietzsche invites us to ask and he doesn't give
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us answers but rather he just says go ahead you know take the risk and so i was hooked thankfully i
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bumped into a very good professor two of them dan conway and doug anderson who um encouraged me to
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write a thesis on emerson and nietzsche on the concepts of genius insanity and what's known as
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the ascetic ideal not the aesthetic but the ascetic ideal asceticism being the idea of self-deprivation
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or self-control and anyway they they were the ones who uh said to me after my junior year they handed me
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uh an envelope and in that envelope was three thousand dollars and they said you know what
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you've never been out of outside of central pennsylvania you should go to switzerland you
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should go quote hike with nietzsche that's how the journey sort of began so you went on this hike you
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went to switzerland to dig deeper into nietzsche let's talk about switzerland what role did switzerland
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play in nietzsche's life particularly this town like it's basil or basil well basel was the town where
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nietzsche became the youngest tenured professor in philology the study of languages basel actually
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was a place that he escaped into the mountains and then in 1880 and then from 1881 to 1886
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he spent his summers in a very small town called sills maria on the italian border
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and he stayed at a boarding house which is now a museum and my professors doug and dan had
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contacted the museum and had arranged for me to stay there on this first 19 year old journey
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and i stayed there for nine weeks and hiked the trails that nietzsche had hiked it was also the
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place where nietzsche he basically escaped the sort of conventions of academic philosophy from basel
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and began to write books that at the time seemed unconventional to the point of craziness but
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really transformed contemporary philosophy so books like thus folks are athustra beyond good and evil
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these books uh were penned not not in an office but in in the hills outside of sills maria so you
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mentioned that nietzsche went there to hike he was a walker like he even wrote about walking what did
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what did nietzsche say about walking yeah he said he said many things one of which was the only
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thoughts worth having are the ones that you have on your feet i judge a thought on its ability to
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walk in other words to carry its own weight and nietzsche when when he first got there and many on many
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occasions through his early stay in sills maria would hike seriously he had a favorite mountain
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mount corvatch or piz corvatch but through his later life this walking became more of a way of
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you know it was more strolling rather than hiking because his health was so bad and he would take
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companions many of whom were women and many of whom or a couple of whom were jewish another sort of
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misconception about nietzsche is that he's a misogynist straight misogynist that he that he hates women
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and that he's an anti-semite well in the in the hills around sills maria he spent a lot of time
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with a feminist and with a jewish woman i mean he comes out of this long line of philosophers that
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you know thought on their feet so aristotle aristotle had a school of thought known as the
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peripatetics and the walkers russo said that his study was in fact his walking trail and then there's
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i mean he was like this epic walker there's kant too and your wife i think is an expert in kant
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that guy like people would like supposedly would people would set their clocks to his walking
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schedule yeah that's right and i mean i've often poo-pooed so emmanuel kant lived in konigsberg a part
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of prussia and people would joke around in konigsberg that you could see the sort of philosopher stroll
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the same time every day and i always thought that this was you know and nietzsche thought that this
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was a reflection of a constipated mind that you would never like you would just do the same thing
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over and over again but the more i get into adult adulthood i think maybe this is the best that some
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of us can do like i went like we're not going to the alps a lot of us are not going to the alps
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right maybe we should just go for a little walk like kant and kant i think has i mean carol has helped
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me see this that kant has the idea of what he calls a purposeless purpose on his walks he thinks
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that we should embody a purposeless purpose when we're trying to experience art or beauty or the
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sublime because usually our life is filled with these purposes that you know we raise children or we
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you know have a house or we buy stuff those are real purposes what's what's rare about
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const walks is they give him just a little space to have a purposeless purpose and i think that that's
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something useful in our sort of rat race of a life we're gonna take a quick break for your word from
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our sponsors and now back to the show i mean i'm curious have you what do you think it is about
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walking in your own experience right we're gonna get phenomenological here sure yeah uh your own
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experience with walking why do you think it it lends itself well to philosophy or thinking through
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ideas that's great i mean one thing is that walking is the most primary way of orienting
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ourselves in the world so i mean when you walk through a woods or when you walk through a city
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your feet are doing something for you in other words they're they're allowing you to explore the
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world and we usually don't even think about it but when you go on a real walk you realize you're
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exploring the world which is in fact what i think philosophy is meant to do as well so that's one
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aspect the other aspect is when you walk you get to get away in other words we have so many habitual
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or mundane moments aren't in our life philosophy or rather walking allows us to escape if for only a
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little while like we make fun of you know pedestrian is a word that we usually use to describe the most
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boring aspects of life but maybe we should be pedestrians like in other words maybe we should
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just walk a little bit more get out of our get out of our you know in the house ruts so i think that's
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another aspect no i like that yeah there's that latin phrase solvitar abulando like it is solved by
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walking you know sometimes like you got a problem you just go for a walk and you might not get the answer
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there but usually i do because you just your brain is sort of resting and then insights come
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right that's right and i i mean it doesn't have to be something i for a long time i thought that
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walking and hiking had to be this sort of heroic exercise of masculine power and as i've gotten gone
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gray slowly gone gray i realized that this is a sort of futile pursuit like you are it you can push
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yourself and i guess there is some sort of benefit to that but i think the real difficulty is to come
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to terms with the ways that you can't always exert yourself right so also on that first trip to
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switzerland when you're hiking word nietzsche height you're also doing some like extreme forms of fasting
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what was going on what were you hoping to do with that yeah this is a moment in the book where i'm like
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am i gonna write this am i really gonna write this and i did so when i was 19 i was writing about
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the ascetic ideal the ascetic ideal is the idea that we have the power to deprive ourselves
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of things and in fact that this is a form of self-control fasting is like a perfect example of
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ascetic practice nietzsche has a criticism of the ascetic ideal when it's placed in the context of
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christianity if you think about the priest or the one who fasts um in christianity they're they're
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typically thinking that they're going to fast in order to well go to heaven or in order to be you
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know sainted or something nietzsche doesn't believe that and he thinks that that story is actually pretty
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destructive but what i noticed about nietzsche's life is that he was not he did not have an unvaxxed
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relationship with food it was difficult for him to eat he had stomach problems so when i went to
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switzerland i wanted to play around well at first i was playing around with it but it turns out that
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fasting is pretty addictive and we we talk about men typically as fasting and women as having anorexia
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but i think that's a pretty stupid distinction i i mean straight up i just hadn't had a pretty
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serious eating disorder which i think many wrestlers and many swimmers which i was one
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end up with and i came back and came back from switzerland and have been struggling with an eating
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disorder the rest of my life wow so you mentioned uh you know he nietzsche wasn't a fan of the aesthetic
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ideal within the context of christianity but he he did see value like what did what value did he see
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in it then if he didn't think it will you don't do it to sanctify yourself yeah i mean this idea of
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what doesn't kill you makes you stronger i think that nietzsche was suggesting that we come to
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understand our limits through forms of very extreme practice and this is the exercising of the will to
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power oftentimes if you think about endurance athletes or if you think about extreme sports or if you
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think about forms of fasting they're all efforts to get a hold of yourself to sort of see your limits
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and to author something of your life to sort of um to own up to part of your life if you i mean i'm
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also a sort of long distance runner and when you're running long distances anything for me anything over
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10 miles i want to stop like there's a part of me that wants to stop and just continuing to go
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is an exercising of the you know is an exercise of the will and nietzsche thought that we come to
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know ourselves through those sort of moments so that sort of is a quick answer to your question
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yeah and also while you're there it sounds like you were having some mental health issue i mean there
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was a moment you're on the cliff and you stare down over a cliff and you're thinking what if i could
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jump i think everyone's done that at some point where you're driving oncoming traffic like if i just
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swerved but do you think something else was going on where do you think you were kind of descending
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into the abyss yeah with while you were hiking with nietzsche i mean when nietzsche says to you
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you must have the strength to ask forbidden questions he's also saying like the most forbidden question is
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the question of why why bother doing anything why bother getting up in the morning why and when he
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strips i mean when he strips traditional answers away from you that why can be very scary so for example
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if my minister or if my rabbi or if my mother or father are no longer the guiding forces of my life
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then what is i mean camus who sort of inherits the existential mantle from nietzsche camus writing in the
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the the 1940s says there is but one serious philosophical question and that is suicide
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he doesn't mean to bum you out he's just saying to you what's the point of life is life worth living
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and i think coming up with really good answers to that question is difficult or at least it was for me
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sometimes it still is no yeah i think everyone has that has had those moments that where they're
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like laying in bed at night and you're like what what am i doing yeah what what am i doing like
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it's just like what what the heck am i doing and i think that nietzsche allows you to voice those
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concerns which is good but it can also be very disturbing now you might ask yourself why is it good
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i think thoreau is better on this he says i don't want to get to the end of my life and discover that i
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haven't lived and i think that that the scariest part of death is getting to the end and discovering that
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you haven't lived and one of the hardest parts is to get to the end and then look back and think oh
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my god what was i doing with all of my time i didn't have that much of it man did i squander it
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and i think nietzsche wakes us up when he asks us to ask forbidden questions he's trying to wake us up
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to help us avoid that uh you know that end of life right well another thing he came up with sort of a
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thought experiment to get you thinking about that is eternal return yeah yeah that's right and so
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he says to you he says imagine that in your loneliest of lonelies
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a demon comes to you and says that this moment this very moment and all things you will have to
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live over not once not twice but an infinite number of times and then he asks the demon asks
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would this idea crush you or would it elevate your soul and most of the time i think it crushes us
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the idea that i'd have to redo this moment again exactly the same way an infinite number of times
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is terrifying think about all the time you're stuck in traffic or all the time that you're
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you know in a bad relationship you'd have to live that over infinitely so nietzsche is asking us to own up
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to life with a type of radical responsibility in other words can you live your life as william
00:26:41.160
butler yates says and do it all again live and play it again like play it again sam and i think
00:26:46.780
that that's a challenge that many of us would do well to sort of face up to and then you also talk
00:26:51.760
about you mentioned earlier more fati like there's a love of fate that kind of walks hand in hand with
00:26:56.620
that idea as well yeah so i mean for for a long period of time i thought the only way to answer
00:27:03.120
the eternal return to answer this demon is to exercise your power to exercise the will to power
00:27:09.040
but i realized especially on the second trip to switzerland and at the age of 37 i realized that life
00:27:16.980
adult life really doesn't consist in exercising your will to power or at least not primarily it it um
00:27:25.420
consists quite a bit in the times when your will to power fails you or you exercise the will to power
00:27:33.180
in disastrous or really embarrassing or heinous ways and the question then is how are you going to
00:27:40.720
embrace the eternal return and admit to yourself that you are deeply fallible that your life is deeply
00:27:47.960
fallible and i think nietzsche is coming to the end of his life and discovering something he says
00:27:53.380
we must embrace the amor fati the love of fate the love of fate says that we are to love not just bear
00:28:01.300
but love the things that we find most despicable embarrassing or heinous about ourselves like maybe
00:28:09.640
the whole maybe the hardest part about the eternal return is is the things that we do to ourselves and
00:28:16.060
do to others that we're not proud of and coming to terms and owning up to those things is i think
00:28:22.400
part and parcel of the amor fati and i think it's a really pretty mature way of thinking about adult
00:28:27.300
life right yeah i mean it's not like you're not being fatalistic or nihilistic it's like well no i
00:28:32.060
can't do anything like you have will to power you can exercise it but there's some parts there's nothing
00:28:36.680
you can do about it so don't don't beat yourself up too hard about it i mean there's this moment at
00:28:42.540
the end of nietzsche's life where he where he says i must look back on my sickest years with the with
00:28:48.840
deep gratitude they have allowed me to become who i am namely a philosopher but the idea that we would
00:28:55.800
be able to look back on the sort of the hardest years of our life and to say this too like i would
00:29:02.060
have that you know repeat infinitely that's the time i mean that strength is not straightforwardly
00:29:09.460
the will to power it's something a little different but if you've been born into a family
00:29:13.960
that that sometimes you'd think to yourself like man this was not of my choosing or into circumstances
00:29:20.860
that were not of your choosing maybe we have to exercise the amor fati not the not the will to
00:29:26.800
power well maybe this those two concepts combined in that idea that nietzsche uh you know he quoted
00:29:32.980
pindar you know you got to become who you are isn't that sort of like a combination synthesis of
00:29:38.240
you know will the power and amor fati i think i think so so i mean if you think about
00:29:43.640
the idea of becoming who you are it sounds pretty paradoxical because you already are who you are
00:29:51.300
in one way or if you become somebody else then what has happened to the person that you once were
00:29:59.100
it's it's kind of this cone-like riddle but i think what nietzsche is suggesting is that we have to
00:30:06.500
think about ourselves as the process of becoming in other words being somebody is not becoming the
00:30:13.500
person that you always wanted to become always wanted to be like the you does not exist out there
00:30:21.080
somewhere for all time and you discover it and then you become it for all time that's not how human
00:30:27.140
beings live or die we just change or we're transfigured and to figure out a way where we're both
00:30:34.620
the authors of our lives but also willing to own up to whatever happens those are the two aspects
00:30:41.540
the will to power and the amor fati i think that that's nietzsche's point with become who you are
00:30:47.600
yeah we like that it becoming like that's when nietzsche was talking about he says i am dynamite i am
00:30:52.320
dynamis i am change i'm always becoming right and so and this idea usually we just we think about
00:30:59.880
dynamite its roots being in the greek power it's not i don't think that that's quite right i think
00:31:07.240
he meant to to become who you are he says you must not have the slightest idea of who you are
00:31:14.120
which is strange in other words you you have to let yourself go is many times who we are in life
00:31:23.820
is we're clinging to the self we're clinging to the ideas about what we think we should become
00:31:30.600
or what we think we are and nietzsche says let it go see what else will happen see what change will
00:31:36.500
occur and i think that that's that's a pretty useful thought for those of us who are edging
00:31:41.260
you know 40 or 50 right well so you mentioned you went back to switzerland as a 37 year old man you
00:31:48.660
this time you brought along your wife and your young daughter what were you hoping to learn by
00:31:53.800
going hiking with nietzsche again as in midlife honestly no i mean honestly i i think i look back
00:32:01.280
on the decision to go again and my partner carol still says to me she goes you know like that was
00:32:08.200
the smartest and dumbest thing we have ever done and she's right and because i think what i wanted to
00:32:15.600
see when i initially went back was if i could sort of live as intensely as i did when i was 19 could i
00:32:21.820
still climb the same mountains could we still and the the answer is an unequivocal no like you can't do
00:32:29.180
that especially when you have a wife and child and so what what i tried to come to terms with is
00:32:36.300
growing up in other words i had to take the gondola to the top of the mountain with with becca and
00:32:43.220
carol instead of hiking up by myself and instead of being angry or resigned to this fact the challenge
00:32:52.160
is to own up to it to see if you can love it even the frustration of it so i didn't know what i was
00:33:01.360
going to find but what i found was honestly an appreciation for the amor fati which i didn't have
00:33:06.920
as a 19 year old right and you were becoming who you are which is now at this point you're middle-aged
00:33:11.760
guy with a wife and a kid yeah that's right and and honestly the the point of in in part of part of
00:33:19.300
this is to give an interpretation of nietzsche that allows one or allows a reader to see nietzsche's
00:33:26.060
brilliance in leading us into middle age usually he's regarded as the quintessential juvenile philosopher
00:33:32.660
19 year olds are drawn to him but you're supposed to get out of it when you turn 25 or 30 but i think
00:33:39.100
nietzsche provides resources for us to really think through our lives as we move toward death
00:33:44.940
and i think that that's what the book is about so no yeah i think i'm 36 i'm approaching middle age
00:33:54.080
and you notice yeah opportunities start closing down right there's some things you can no longer do
00:33:59.680
because of simply just time or you're you have responsibilities and for a lot of people that
00:34:06.220
can be they have that sort of moments like oh my gosh they have midlife crisis they do these crazy
00:34:10.060
things but nietzsche would say no you know chill out yes things are closing in your opportunities are
00:34:16.580
going down maybe a bit but you still have a bit you have you have the choice to to love it and to
00:34:21.200
embrace it but also there's still wiggle room within that those parameters yeah that's right i mean
00:34:25.980
that wiggle room is especially important so i mean nietzsche talks a big game about being a he's
00:34:32.700
calls himself a hyperborean or rather he says a hyperborean are like these mythical creatures that
00:34:39.020
live up at the top of mountain like frost covered you know ice covered mountains nietzsche was never this
00:34:45.080
person ever he was generally pretty sickly especially when he's writing these words and it's a hope that
00:34:54.200
you have a little bit of wiggle room to be the hyperborean in your mundane life in other words
00:35:00.060
see if you can wiggle yourself free even within the sort of habitualness of your life
00:35:07.620
and i think that that's a really interesting sort of you know value added to reading nietzsche as a 40
00:35:16.020
year old i'm i'm just on the brink of 40 is like we've talked about nietzsche's ubermensch this classic
00:35:21.640
overman this ideal of individual freedom and it's very appealing to a 19 year old or to a 21 year old
00:35:29.900
and what is interesting is that it just it it fits so well with their natural like with their
00:35:37.380
natural sense of vigor maybe the ubermensch is better is more is more useful to those of us who
00:35:43.960
have forgotten their free impulses in other words who have hit 40 or 50 maybe the ubermensch is a
00:35:51.360
lingering promise that we can be otherwise than we currently are and i think that that's what nietzsche
00:35:56.480
gives us that's an interesting point yeah when you're 21 like it's not really hard to strive but
00:36:01.700
when you're 50 it becomes harder but so it's there you're like oh i can still do that there's that
00:36:07.120
possibility right exactly and i think we forget about the mad possibilities of life as we get older
00:36:12.820
but we have to remember that the mad and that the mad possibilities of life don't necessarily involve
00:36:18.920
the same types of actions as they did when you were 19 the mad possibilities could be okay my daughter
00:36:25.180
my daughter has to you know my daughter has a snow day in this polar vortex right and i can be pissed
00:36:32.620
off about that and think oh geez i'm not going to get work done or i can go out and do something
00:36:38.360
beautiful with her it is up to me and those are little that's that's the wiggle room i'm talking about
00:36:45.680
it do you want to dig yourself an igloo with your daughter or do you want to be pissed off all day
00:36:51.040
that you have to you know that you're not getting the work done that you think you need to do
00:36:54.980
no i love it so yeah look for those wiggle rooms throughout life that's the thing i think a lot
00:36:58.440
of times people look at nietzsche and you got you think you have to do something grandiose and giant
00:37:01.820
and big because he talked like that he talked a big game but like if you look at his life
00:37:05.700
i mean he wrote some philosophy some books that like you know have changed the way we think but
00:37:10.800
he kind of i mean he was he read a lot he walked he slept i mean he didn't do too much but he still
00:37:16.760
had that idea that was there that he strived for no he's deeply human like he's deeply human at the
00:37:22.520
same time he's striving after something deep and transcendent and i think that that's what we need
00:37:27.560
to remember because uh oftentimes life is so mundane and like it's so boring and nietzsche says we are
00:37:38.060
wasting our lives if we just are satisfied with this but you don't necessarily need to go i learned
00:37:45.020
that you don't need to go to the alps in order to break out of that and i don't think that i'm
00:37:50.700
going to be going to the alps again right you can just build an igloo with your daughter yeah honestly
00:37:56.160
i mean it sounds stupid but it's it's it is true i think well john this has been a great conversation
00:38:01.820
where can people go to learn more about the book in your work well the publisher is friar strauss and
00:38:07.400
drew but honestly i think a lot of the pieces that i've written in the new york times and in the
00:38:12.580
los angeles review of books lately have resonated with these questions the book is out in the uk
00:38:18.520
next month and i think that i'm going to be posting a number of interviews through the bbc
00:38:24.060
and abc in the next couple months but i really do appreciate the chance to talk to you thanks so
00:38:29.580
much it's been a pleasure thanks again my guest there is john kegg he's the author of the book
00:38:33.660
hiking with nietzsche i'm becoming who you are it's available on amazon.com and bookstores
00:38:37.500
everywhere you can also find out more information about his work at his website john kegg.com that's
00:38:41.820
john kegg that's k-a-a-g.com also check out our show notes at aom.is slash kegg where you can find
00:38:48.180
links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic well that wraps up another edition of
00:38:59.760
the aom podcast check out our website artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast
00:39:03.880
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00:39:27.980
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