Hiking With Nietzsche~On Becoming Who You Are by John Kaag

Author:John Kaag [Kaag, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy
ISBN: 0374170010
Amazon: 0374170010
Goodreads: 37941732
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2018-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

DECADENCE AND DISGUST

To choose instinctively what is harmful to oneself … is virtually the formula for decadence.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1888

For a man with Nietzsche’s general constitution, psychological uplift was a suspicious sign—good weather before the flood. After battling with poor health and the ascetic ideal in 1887, concluding that the grip of both was tight and enduring, he seemed to suddenly wrest and regain himself. The spring of 1887 had been miserable. He had traveled to Nice, which was a monstrous mistake. The bright lights and clatter of the seaside town had driven the philosopher to distraction, so in the following year he decided to spend his months away from Sils-Maria in Turin. In the city itself, at last, he found requited love.

Turin was hospitable to Nietzsche’s particular physiological needs. Here, the sun seems to cast long, warm shadows from dawn to dusk. In the early morning a walker can traverse the city by way of narrow cobbled streets without encountering a passerby. The streets go on forever, until they don’t, when they open into vast squares that appear to draw sunlight and people in exactly the correct proportion. Nothing is rushed or hasty. Things happen “in good time” rather than “on time.” With the Alps in clear view, the inhabitants of Turin live and work by nature, rather than apart from it. In April 1888 Nietzsche wrote, “Turin, my dear friend, is a capital discovery … I am in a good mood here and work non-stop. I am eating like a demigod, [and] I can sleep … It’s the air that does it, energizing, dry, jolly.” He was accustomed to surviving in, perhaps by virtue of, the nowhere of Sils-Maria, but here in Turin he found what he called “the first place where I am possible!” Possibility is usually regarded as something discrete: a particular opportunity that can be realized. But as Nietzsche found out in Turin, possibility can mean so much more.

In May, Nietzsche’s mood swelled: “A charming, light, frivolous wind in which the heaviest thoughts take wing blows on good days.” In Turin the aging man could feel the grand extravagance of possibility. Gravity no longer gripped him in the same way, and he could relish, perhaps for the first time, the music of his day. It wasn’t Wagner’s—this was the music of Nietzsche’s past. It was Beethoven’s Ninth and, above all, Carmen, to which the philosopher was drawn. I’d never understood the attraction. On the edge of my twenties, I thought that the opera’s appeal had more to do with the composer than with the plot (Bizet, like Nietzsche, died well before his popularity was secure). But now, closing in on my forties, I began to understand Nietzsche’s appreciation for the libretto and score.

Carmen is a light treatment of something absolutely dark, the terrible destiny of star-crossed love. Carmen first seduces, then spurns, and finally destroys Don José, who, in turn, loves her and stabs her to death. This is not the Passion

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