How Can Nietzsche Save Your Life - John Kaag

At the end of a philosophy class, the professor gave the author $3,000 and told him to go hiking with Nietzsche. He spent nine weeks in the Alps, struggling with the mountains and experiencing depression. As he got older, he realized that life can become boring and mundane, and he turned back to Nietzsche's philosophy to find meaning. Nietzsche believed in the will to power, the idea that individuals should trust themselves, exercise their individuality, and make their own meaning in life. The author took a second trip to Sils Maria, where Nietzsche lived, and learned that there are limits to the will to power. He also discovered the concept of amor fati, the love of fate, which means embracing all aspects of life, even the difficult ones. Nietzsche's philosophy encourages individuals to seek tension and friction in life, rather than pursuing comfort and convenience. The author reflects on his experiences and how Nietzsche's teachings continue to shape his life. At the end of that class, my professor handed me an envelope with a check in it for $3,000 and he said, you should go hiking with Nietzsche. So when I was 20, I hiked in the Alps for nine weeks and stayed at the Nietzsche House, which is now a museum. That was really my initiation into very hardcore philosophy. What happened up in those mountains is basically I discovered that the mountains will eventually beat you if you try to exercise your will to power too much. I got lost up in the mountains, I got frost nip or frostbite on my ears, and I struggled with depression, solitary, being by myself. Many of your readers, I imagine, are not that unlike me, where they have moments where they look at their average everyday life and they think, really, I have to do this? You get into your 30s and you think, and life becomes mind-numbingly boring, and you think, maybe I should return to Nietzsche. Maybe his message about the will to power is a reminder not to be complacent in the face of our adult lives. When Nietzsche said God is dead in the 19th century, he was giving a diagnosis of a culture that many of the places of authority that had guided individuals in the past, in the 17th and 18th century, were no longer functional. They no longer operated to give people a sense of meaning. In the absence of those traditions and conventions, Nietzsche fashions the will to power as a way of saying, individuals need to, like Emerson says, trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron string. So be an individual, exercise your individuality, try to make it on your own, try to figure out what you believe. Those are moves that are consonant with the will to power. Hello everyone, welcome to Artidot Podcast, I'm your host Vasir Karmenikas. The guest of this episode is Professor John Gogg, he's the author of a brilliant book called Hiking with Nietzsche, Becoming Who You Are. This book is a tale of two philosophical journeys that John Gogg made to Switzerland, to a town called Sils Maria, where one of the greatest philosophers of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote his landmark work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In this episode, John Gogg tells us how we can apply philosophy of Nietzsche to create meaning in our lives. This book is a very bold, intimate and rich with insight, it teaches us how we can defeat complacency in life and how we can balance sanity and madness and come to grips with the unobtainable. I hope you will enjoy my conversation with Professor John Gogg. Hello, Professor Gogg, it's such a pleasure to have you on my podcast, I really enjoyed reading your book, which we are going to talk about. For those who are not yet familiar with you and with your work, could you give a brief kind of introduction of yourself, of how you came to philosophy? Sure, absolutely. So first of all, thanks for having me. So I came into philosophy in a sort of untraditional way, or I, but I, well, let me go at this another way. It's, um, I was raised in central Pennsylvania in a fairly unphilosophical community, which I guess can have the reaction where then you become philosophical because you don't, you know, you don't see any resources around you that are doing philosophy. So my mom was an English teacher and she got me reading and writing and over the course of my high school, my high school days, I started reading what's called the Nebraska Plan. The Nebraska Plan is the first year seminar, philosophy heavy for the University of Nebraska. It's a sort of primer, a book that includes a number of selections from Einstein to Pascal to Descartes to Svart, Beauvoir, a lot of philosophy. And so I read that in my high school English class and it really got me thinking. And my mom walked me, helped me through that course. And then when I went to college, I started in taking philosophy classes. And one of them introduced me to a guy by the name of Frederick Nietzsche, where at the end of that class, my professor handed me an envelope with a check in it for $3,000. And he said, you should go hiking with Nietzsche, which was the first, which was the first voyage of the book that had turned into hiking with Nietzsche. So when I was 20, I hiked in the Alps for nine weeks and stayed at the Nietzsche House, which is now a museum in Sils Maria. That was really my initiation into very hardcore philosophy. Sounds like a very adventurous way of discovering philosophy. I discovered Nietzsche quite late in my life. I'm one of those weird people who can read Nietzsche between his lunch breaks. I started reading it. And when my colleagues saw me with a volume of Nietzsche, they were asking me, like, is it difficult to read works of Nietzsche on where to start? Although I'm no professional, no philosophy major, I was always struggling with that answer. After discovering your book, I felt like that your book combines all the elements that are perfect for someone who is not familiar with works of Nietzsche, with his life, but also connects his ideas with our present time, you know, how it can be applicable. The reason for that, as you mentioned, you talk about two trips that you have done to Sils Maria, where Nietzsche resided, and the first trip wasn't as successful, let's say. If you could expand on the first trip, what was it like for you? What were you looking for when you were going to? Sure. I mean, what you said about taking the intellectual side of Nietzsche and applying it to the present is what I try to do in all of my books is to wed philosophy with memoir and to show how philosophy can inform a human life. When it comes to hiking with Nietzsche, the first trip, when I went as a 20-year-old, I was in the process of writing an honors thesis or on my way to writing an honors and master's thesis on Nietzsche's concept of the will to power, and Nietzsche is oftentimes regarded as a philosopher that is appropriate for the teenage years, the sort of strength and individualism, the sort of masculine muscularity of the philosopher of the hammer. I think that as a teenager, I thought, oh, well, this is the will to power. I mean, this is what makes life most meaningful, is to exercise your will in creative and spontaneous, unique ways. It's pretty inspiring, especially for a kid from fairly conservative central Pennsylvania. When I went to Sils Maria, I tried to exercise my will to power on the mountains, which means I wanted to hike higher, I wanted to go harder, I wanted to see how much I could take. I was also exploring Nietzsche's idea that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, the Greek idea of agon, the struggle, as being fundamental to living a meaningful human life. What happened up in those mountains is basically I discovered that the mountains will eventually beat you if you try to exercise your will to power too much. I got lost up in the mountains, I got frost nip or frostbite on my ears, and I struggled with depression, solitary, being by myself, anxiety, and some pretty serious mental and physical hardship when I was 20. I came back, and thankfully I found a little bit of respite or a little bit of solace in some other philosophers, American philosophers, American transcendentalists, Thoreau, Emerson, pragmatists like William James, who began to help me sort my life out a little bit more than just this Nietzschean drive to the heights. Eventually, when I got into my 30s, I began to gravitate back toward Nietzsche and discovered other lessons there, lessons that I'm still learning today. I think that that's maybe where we'd like to, perhaps where you'd want to go next, just talking about the second trip, perhaps. Yes, perhaps one of the things that I noticed that when I was preparing for this interview in reviews of your book, one phrase that is mentioned all the time is that it is an incredibly honest book about your own experiences, about what you were undergoing, and I guess that's one of the things I also received from my readers when they encountered your book. They were saying not only about Nietzsche's philosophy or anything, but also that you are writing in an incredibly honest way. One thing that I personally noticed is that I had no clue that Emerson had such an impact on Nietzsche. I love Emerson's essays, and I saw kind of parallels of how that influence could have been in Nietzsche's philosophy. You had the really, as he described, not such good experiences after your first trip. What made you return to the same place after all those years? Yes, I mean, on the point that you just brought up about Emerson, it's really interesting to think about how Emerson did play a role. I mean, Nietzsche says that he is friends with Emerson because of his skepticism, the sort of skeptical perspective that Emerson has about conventions, and I think that's one thing that Nietzsche gets. Two other things that I think are really important is that you do find a version of the will to power in Emerson. In other words, in Self-Reliance, and he says, trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string, Emerson is saying something that Nietzsche is picking up on 30 years later and trying to see how it would play out into the late 19th century. Similarly, there's this idea of the amor fati, which is going to tie into the second journey. That's Nietzsche's term for the love of fate, and in Emerson, you have this idea of compensation, which is to say that we might exercise our will to power in meaningful ways, but at the end of the day, we always do so within a vast, vast network or system of give and take. So any time that I exercise my will to power, there's always a counteracting force back. That's compensation. So to get to your question about why the second journey... Sorry for interrupting. If I can ask you, could you expand on what Nietzsche meant by the will for power, as you said, maybe for some of our listeners who might not be fully familiar, what is the will for power? The will to power for Nietzsche is this idea that human meaning-making happens when individuals exercise their will in creative or original, spontaneous ways. And this is in contrast to the idea that human meaning-making can be developed or can happen in conventional, traditional forms, traditional institutions. I mean, when Nietzsche said God is dead in the 19th century, he was giving a diagnosis of a culture that many of the places of authority that had guided individuals in the past, in the 17th and 18th century, were no longer functional. They no longer operated to give people a sense of meaning. And in the absence of those traditions and conventions, Nietzsche fashions the will to power as a way of saying individuals need to, like Emerson says, trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron string. So be an individual, exercise your individuality, try to make it on your own, try to figure out what you believe. Those are moves that are consonant with the will to power. I hope that helped a little bit. Yes, of course. Yes, thank you. It's perhaps one of the most misunderstood quotes, that God is dead and we have killed him. Getting back to the question of what made you to take the second trip after the first one. Yeah. So, I mean, when you reach your 30s and you get into a situation where you have kids, and you have a wife, and you have a house, and you have all of these responsibilities, and life becomes mind-numbingly boring, and you get into your 30s and you think, maybe I should return to Nietzsche, like maybe his message about the will to power is a reminder not to be complacent in the face of our adult lives. That's the move that took me back to the mountains. And I took my wife at the time and my daughter with me. And the story of the second journey is really figuring out how Nietzschean can one be while still maintaining some sort of adult responsibility in life. And the answer is, is that there are limits to the will to power. And you need to learn the Amor Fati, which is the idea that you love your life, even if it's the most despicable aspects of that life, or the most humbling aspects of that life. That's Nietzsche's idea. And I think that in hindsight, I mean, it's been many years now since I took that second trip. I have learned in my 40s the idea of the Amor Fati even more pointedly, and it didn't require me going off to Sils Maria. You learn that life is extremely difficult. Life involves a lot of sickness, mental sickness, physical sickness, sickness of relationships, dissolving of relationships. And the question for Nietzsche is, how do you endure? How do you still affirm life, given all of its difficulty? And I think it's a really, for me, it's an incredibly powerful question. Perhaps one of the other difficult things is, which you mentioned, I believe, in the third chapter of your book that you call The Last Man. The fact that, as you said, when you reach 30, and life becomes really boring, and more and more forces you to the idea that perhaps the easier, simpler, more comfortable life is the way to go, is what Nietzsche was rebelling against, that this bourgeois idea that life should be easy. What do you think Nietzsche would say if he saw, in our time, that we pretty much live in the life of excess, you know, instead of limits? How he would see The Last Man, who is living right now, you know, in comfort, not taking any risks? So, I mean, in part, I think Nietzsche was living at the beginning of our time, which is to say, a real time of decadence, and a time in which people think that the highest virtue is convenience, and ease of living. And Nietzsche's thinking, why are so many people anxious and depressed, while at the same time living these really comfy lives? Maybe there's a relationship between our comfortable lives and the depression that we're experiencing. Maybe we don't have enough struggle, or friction, or tension in our lives. And Nietzsche's encouraging us to seek that tension out. When he says, make war, not peace, he's not saying that literally. He's saying, where's the friction? Where's the tension? Where you experience yourself in contrast to others, or in contrast to your surroundings? So I think, in part, Nietzsche is saying, hey, wake up. And part of waking up is to break the sleepwalking nature of our everyday lives. I mean, think about how much of your life is lived on a sort of default setting. And yeah, so, and even, and part of the story of Hiking with Nietzsche, in the second journey, is to say that there's no happy ending to Hiking with Nietzsche. Like, there's no, like, oh, everything ends up great, he discovers his will to power, and he becomes the overman. No, it's like, I go back to my humdrum life, and like, I have to find a way to make meaning in the process. Now, I mean, I will say this to your listeners, is that that book is, no longer represents my life. I mean, I've moved, every memoir is this thing where you're always writing in hindsight. I mean, and that book describes a moment in my life that I've now moved through. And I've not written another memoir since then. I wrote Six Wholes Healthy Minds, How William James Can Save Your Life. But I mean, not the same sort of depth of memoir. My life has gone on, right? But some of the Nietzschean lessons about coming to love yourself, coming to embrace the amor fati, those are lessons that I'm actually living through now, and have much more clarity on them since the book. Before we will continue with the rest of the episode, I wanted to tell you that you can find all the references, quotes, and other books by John Gogg on my website, which I will link in the description of this episode. You can also subscribe to my newsletter to receive all the future new episodes of Article Podcast straight to your inbox once a month, if you are enjoying listening to this episode. When you arrived for the second time, what was it like to experience the same places? How did you feel, you know, upon your second arrival? What kind of mindset you arrived with? So in part, the mindset was sort of self-loathing. I mean, it was the feeling of, oh, I should be able to climb these mountains by myself. And I resent the fact that I have to, you know, be a father and be a husband and I mean, I just didn't want to. And then the struggle about self, I mean, many of your readers, I imagine, are not that unlike me, where they have moments where they look at their average everyday life and they think, really, I have to do this? Like you've got to be kidding me. And that really was sort of underscored when I went back to the same place. And we stayed at the Vault House Sills, which is this grand hotel. We didn't stay at the Nietzsche House, right, which is this little house of a place. We stayed at a hotel with all the decadent trappings. And just the feeling of thinking, oh, what have I become? I turned myself over to the last man, right? I mean, that's how I experienced the second trip. And I think, in part, the story of the second trip is just the story of coming to look at your adult life and thinking, oh, what have I become, right? And how do I make good on this life I'm still living out, even despite the fact that I'm, you know, I've created a life that I hardly recognize. It's a very dark idea of eternal return, of that you can experience all your difficult moments in life over and over again. And could you expand on that, the idea of Nietzsche's demon, of like the what if we'll experience our life on repeat over and over? And how was it like on your second trip? I mean, just to give a little more context to the eternal return, I mean, it's a thought experiment that Nietzsche gives his readers. He says, imagine that a demon comes to you in your loneliest of lonelies and says the following words, says that you must relive this moment, this very moment, not once or twice or a hundred times, but an infinite number of times. And would that idea crush you or would it elevate your soul? And when I say this to my students, they oftentimes say, well, there are moments that I'd want to live over and over and over again. Like the moments when I'm exercising my will to power, like when I score that goal in soccer or when I get a perfect on an exam or something like that, like, fine, live those over. But the thing is, is that in adult life, when you turn 30 and 40, you realize that life does not consist in the main of these triumphant moments, but quite the opposite, moments in which you're incredibly sick or incredibly ashamed or betrayed. And you have to be able to affirm life even in reference to those moments. That's the amor fati. That's where the amor fati comes in. Nietzsche, in his later life, he said something like, I must be grateful to my sickest years, the years where I have convalesced and been in pain the most, because those moments have been the moment that have made me who I am. And think about, I mean, that's a deep thought. Would you be able to affirm those moments of sickness as repeatedly as those moments of triumph? Like, what would it mean for you to be able to not only bear them, but to embrace them? And that's a deep, I mean, that's a deep thought, I think. You said that, you know, when you came to Salisbury and when you were 19 and tried to exercise your will to power and in some sense, nature pushed you and showed you your limits when you were trying to exercise your will to power on the same roots when you already learned about your limits and that nature can push back that will to power. What was it like to take the journey once again? Well, I mean, in part, it was again, coming to understand those limits, but to realize that they're no longer just physical limits. They're the limits that your family places on you, the obligations of your life place on you, that you can try to exercise your will, but you come up against these walls. Some of them are self-imposed, right? But then also, I mean, as you grow older, you also then experience your physical limitations more pointedly. I mean, when I was 36, I could no longer hike the way I could when I was 20. I mean, it's just the fact of the matter, right? And yeah, and there's a, one of the most pointed things that I have not put into writing is that the relationship that you see in hiking with Nietzsche just went, I mean, it just completely exploded about two years later. I mean, I'm no longer married to Carol. Becca is growing up between us. I'm remarried to a woman named Kathleen, and we have a son named Henry. These are things that readers don't see, but the one thing that was probably missing from the story of hiking with Nietzsche was really an even more honest account of this relationship that was on the verge of fracture and realizing that, you know, becoming who you are is not this solitary thing where you, you know, go to the mountains by yourself or even with your, that adult life is really you accompanying people as they become who they are at the same time that you do it yourself, right? And then experiencing the tragedies that happen along the way, right? I mean, I've now been divorced twice. I've been married three times. I've now had multiple heart attacks and bypass surgery, and the idea that I should be most grateful to my sickest years was completely, I mean, relatively speaking, was completely lost on me at 36 even. I've now lived more life, right? I've just not written about it. So, but I think that that should be a message, that this isn't a once-and-done sort of thing. It's not like, oh, you know, hiking with Nietzsche, Keg's now a Buddhist, you know, Keg's a Buddhist priest. He's figured out the meaning of life, and no, life is a complete mess, and it remains a complete mess, and yeah, so. One of the things that touched me a lot is about becoming a parent. When you become a parent, you surrender part of your identity and your individuality, and it is different for different people, but like everyone has to kind of reinvent their individuality of being able to maintain a part of yourself that is not dedicated to another human being that came to the world. I really liked how you approached it from the perspective of Nietzsche, and I believe that many of my listeners would be curious, how did you tackle this, you know, keeping your individuality while becoming a parent? Because I don't think it is spoken, talked about, discussed a lot. Yes, of course. So, I mean, one of my close friends, Clancy Martin, and I wrote a piece called Dreadful Dads, which is about philosophy and parenthood, and the message of that is similar to the message that we get in Hiking with Nietzsche, which is that Nietzsche gives us some direction as to how to approach our children, that he says that they are individuals, and that our task as parents is to allow them to grow into the people that they eventually want to become, and that it's a relationship of, at first, care, you know, like very direct care, and also very direct guidance, but the whole point of being a parent is to eventually move away, and let the child move forward, like as an adult, like that's the, so there's this process of differentiation that has to occur between child and parent that occurs over time, and I think Nietzsche gives us a good idea about how we should do this, and what we should think not only about ourselves, but also about our kids, namely, that we make this evolution or metamorphosis from being burdened as a camel to being a lion who fights back, you know, I have a daughter, we have a daughter right now, who's nine, Becca, and she's beginning, I mean, the subject of Hiking with Nietzsche, and she's beginning now to be a teenager, and she's pushing back, like lion style, and then you move up even further and you think, like, what's the point of becoming an adult? Well, it's to exercise your freedom in meaningful ways. And that's what you have to want for your kids. I think that Nietzsche is also, Nietzsche is also pretty good on the idea that the point of parenthood is to also come to grips with who you are. In other words, know thyself as a parent, and to come to terms with your own crappy childhood, and your own, or your own less than ideal origins, and realize how those less than ideal origins are always already affecting your children, are always already affecting your, you know, partner or your relationships. And Nietzsche is pretty good on saying, get a hold of yourself, like in both in two ways. First, understand where you've come from, get a hold on that. And then get a hold on yourself, like try to try to be self-reflective about your actions. Don't just let your past determine who you are and how you interact. Both Nietzsche and Thoreau talk about having this life of hermit, of being separate from the society, but at the same time, not completely separating yourself from the outside world to having an impact. What was it like for you? How do you see that balance between being yourself, being separate from the society, and at the same time, having influence on people? Right. I mean, I think Thoreau is particularly good on this. I mean, we think about Thoreau and Nietzsche, and the solitary being, you know, up in, you know, up in the Alps, in Nietzsche's case, or at Walden Pond in Thoreau's case, but really both of them withdraw from the world, only at the point, I mean, I just read this really nice essay by Pico Ayer, and he says that Thoreau removed himself from the world, only so that he then could give back more to the world. And this idea that the remove and solitary nature of certain aspects of life give you the resources then to contribute in ways that are more genuine, authentic, and wholesome. I think that's a pretty good takeaway. I also think that there's a cynical story of Zarathustra, of him coming down at the end. And if you notice with Zarathustra, I think I point this out in the book, I can't remember, but Zarathustra is constantly shuttling back and forth between the valley, where all the people are, and the mountains, where only he is, or, you know, he's shuttling back and forth between communal living and solitary living. And that this shuttling is the movement that I think Nietzsche and Thoreau and Emerson are recommending for humans living through the 19th, 20th, and 21st century. Like, we need a little bit of remove so that we can come back and interact. I think there's also an issue where you discover that who you are is not simply exhausted by the social and conventional norms of your situation. So when you pull away, perhaps into nature, or by oneself, you have the sense that, oh, I'm not just my job. I'm not just the obligations that I have. I'm not just the roles that I play in my community. I'm something other than that. I'm something more than that. And I think that then allows you to go back into society in a way that you discover, oh, well, I could do X. I could do something else. I don't have to just follow the crowd. I can, you know, march to my own drummer, right? How do you apply it in your life? Do you have any examples from when you withdraw, let's say, because you have lots of projects. I've seen your website about the philosophy course, you write books, you give speeches. And I was wondering, what is it like for you in your own life? I mean, I have to say that the relationship that I'm in now with Kathleen, we take time away, right? We take time away either together or separately with our jobs, and then we move back into family life. And so there is this sort of shuttling that occurs. I also think there's a way in which there are relationships that you have with people who free you up. And rather than tying you into particular roles, they free you up to think about other things and to, you know, realize that you don't constantly have to be pushing in the rat race of life. And those I think are types of removals. So I think that really the rat race is the issue. It's the feeling that you always have to get ahead and that you are never ahead, or that you're always looking to be more beautiful and you always feel ugly, or you're always looking to be richer and you always feel poor. Like these moves that we make in our society are so deeply ingrained that if you can find a situation where you don't follow those sort of rat race moves, that's the type of remove you need. And I'll give you one example. I had a cardiac arrest when I was 40. And they took me to Tufts Medical Center and I had a massive bypass surgery. And I remember, and you referenced that I'm always so busy, right? Like I'm constantly writing books or I'm constantly working, probably because I don't feel I could be lovable if I stopped, right? And I remember laying there in Tufts Medical Center. I couldn't move. I couldn't read. I couldn't do anything. And Kathleen, she just laid down next to me around all these wires. And I thought to myself, this is the first time ever where I felt like I didn't have to do anything in order to be cared for or loved. And that is a deep, like that's the type of remove that is really, I mean, when you're swimming in Walden and you just like look up on a spring evening and you think, I'm okay, I don't have to do anything else, right? I'm okay. And that is the type of remove that then allows you to go back into your everyday life, I think, with a new perspective. That was a long answer. No, no, it was a wonderful answer. And it shows a lot of our, currently the culture of, let's say, productivity about the importance of, if you're not productive, if you're not pushing yourself to the limit, if you're not, you know, joining, as you said, the rat race of becoming a better part of yourself, of making whatever, being, looking better, earning more. And this sometimes, like it's, it has become part of life. So, and Nietzsche, and I think one of the reasons why I asked about this balance between being a hermit and detached of the world is to be able to see the world from, let's say, a bird's eye, your life from the bird's eye view and say, like, okay, I'm running too fast, to the wrong direction. And the answers that you gave me, was it, is it different from the, from your, from the answers that you had on your second trip? I think it's, it's, um, I think I was just getting the vaguest sense of it on my second trip. So, I mean, I remember being up in the mountains and like watching Becca play in the flowers, and thinking, oh, this is enough. Like, I don't have to, I don't have to go anywhere. I don't have to tell her what to do. I don't have to push the river anymore. I can just be right. And then it's just that sense just vanishes, right? Like you sense it, and then it's gone. But I think, I mean, what I just described, in a more dramatic sense is what I was beginning to get a sense of on the second trip, which is part of getting older is coming to terms with yourself, and coming to terms with the fact that you are okay, just the way you are. And, which does not lead one to complacency. Sometimes the hardest thing for individuals to do in our society is to simply stop, and to just accept, and just to love. And that's super hard, right? And that's, that's what I was beginning to get a sense of on the second trip, mostly with Becca, right? Seeing her grow into a little person, a lovely, lovely little person, but I've definitely had more of a chance to do it in, you know, much more recent years. Is this idea of stopping very much connected to when you described the importance of walking, and that many thinkers, both philosophers and spiritual leaders, came up with their ideas when they were walking, when, not when they were covered in books in their libraries, but when they were walking. And I thought it was a really great idea. And some of my favorite, let's say, thinkers or historical figures, I noticed that they were walking, and walking was an important part of their life. Do you think it is connected with what you were saying about detaching yourself from the world, that we need those kind of activities, that when we kind of switch off from this world? Yeah, I mean, I think that walking is one of those activities where there's, there's a type of purpose, purposeless purpose, behind walking and going for a walk. And that is say, yeah, you're going somewhere. But when you just take a walk, it's not like you're trying to go from point A to point B in the fastest, that's not a woman like in the smallest amount of time, that's not going for a walk. Walking is just letting your feet and your mind wander. And, and it's pretty rare. These days, I think going for a walk is always a good idea. Or going for a gentle jog is also a good idea. Like you don't have to, it's the same type of thing. And I say gentle jog, because I know that running can deviate from that sort of purposeless purpose, it can become an obsession. Well, you said that you had the surgery that you had multiple heart attacks. And as from your book, I can see that your physical exercise was an important part of your life. Did you what do you do? Right now, after, after, after that, after you take gentle jogs, and you swim a lot. And, and you just be okay with the fact that you're not going to be running as fast or as long anymore. And that's what it is to grow old. And coming to terms with that is a good thing. Or, you know, I'm trying to come to terms with it. Yes. One of the perhaps last questions that I wanted to ask you and kind of to wrap up, what I noticed is that the people that Nietzsche influenced, are very similar between each other from Thomas Mann to Carl Jung to Hermann Hesse, like all those thinkers, when you when someone reads them separately, without knowing anything about Nietzsche, feels kind of the same ideas, the same perspective of life. What is it do you think in that influence that the atmosphere of Hesse and Thomas Mann novel, yes, they are, perhaps it's not the best example, because they are from the same country. But like, there is this influence on those thinkers that unite them in their outlook in life. What do you think is unite people who influence Nietzsche so much? I mean, I think the commonality is the commonality between people who Nietzsche has influences, they all seem interested in what the philosopher William James would call the ever not quite of life. In other words, the sense that life is not realized at its best in terms of completion, but in terms of striving, or in terms of not even striving, transgressing the boundaries, living at the edges of experience. And not even, again, that seems to encourage a sort of radical perspective on life. What I'm actually suggesting is, we oftentimes live life only half awake. And Nietzsche suggests that we always have the power to live more deeply, to see more, to understand more, to experience more. And to feel every little sensorial nuance, like, just little feelings, and to make something of them. And I think that that's what I take away from Nietzsche. And I think what also many people have taken away. And also, there's the sense that the people that you mentioned, Jung, Man, they're interested in the self, and what is the self? Who are we? And coming to take a really close and honest look at who we are, and what has led to us becoming the way we are currently, and how we might change over time. I think that's a commonality between the thinkers that you've mentioned. Can I ask you, if you could meet Nietzsche, what would be the question that you might have asked him? If you stood in front, like, the reason why I'm asking, because you spent so many years of reading Nietzsche, writing about Nietzsche, and I'm curious, is there a question that you have in mind, and you would ask him? Nietzsche has this comment that the thought of suicide has gotten him through many a dark night. And I would ask him what he meant by that. And when were the times when that has been the case? And how has that thought kept him here? So Clancy, my friend, Clancy Martin's writing a book called I'm Still Here. And I'd ask Nietzsche the question of why are you still here? I'd want to know that. Do you have any guesses? Yeah. Well, from the point of suicide? I mean, Nietzsche, there are a few, that's not sure. I was going to say that there are a few people who have suffered more than Nietzsche, but that's almost certainly not true. But what I will say is that Nietzsche suffered and experienced real pain, both interpersonal and physical and everything in between. And I think that somehow Nietzsche managed for much of his life to deal with that pain in such a way that he could still affirm life. And I think that has to do with seeing the transformative power of pain and painful experiences. They change us. I mean, pain can be a sign of growth. And they, in many cases, help us grow. They also humble us. They also create commonality between us. And I think Nietzsche was on to a lot of those different vectors or aspects. I think when he finally broke down... And that's the incident with the horse that you described towards the end? Yeah, it's a question of what happened there. I mean, was it syphilis? Almost certainly not. Was it a brain tumor? Almost certainly not in certain ways. There are other physical diagnoses that we could say. But I think in part, it had to have at least in part been something like just a world weariness, like, oh my god, I've tried so long, and I'm breaking down now. And I think that that happens. I mean, I think a little bit about David Foster Wallace. And Wallace's very Nietzschean affirmation of life saying you can break out of your default setting. You can see things differently. See things differently when you're bored or depressed. See things differently. And then Wallace ends up killing himself. And that doesn't mean that he was wrong about his ideas. It means that sometimes you're not strong enough to get through or see a way forward. And I think the way that I interpret the end of Nietzsche's life is he crafted a philosophy that was meant to save a life like his. And it did a job for a long period of time. And then at a certain point, it was no longer enough. And whether that was because of physical ailment or just lack of will, I don't know. Maybe that's the question I would ask him. Like, what was going on? Yeah. That's what he told Salome, the woman that Nietzsche liked a lot. She described that, didn't she, about that perhaps Nietzsche collapsed behind the weight of his own ideas. Yeah. That's what you mentioned. Can I add one thought so that I don't completely bum your reader or listeners out? So I'm speaking, I'm trying to speak very honestly. And sometimes when you speak honestly, you talk about things that are not particularly pleasant. But there's another way where my life is so much richer because I've read Nietzsche and done philosophy and done all of the, I mean, gone through all of the crap. And I think that that sense that your life is so much richer because of some of the hardship that you've gone through is really the takeaway message of Nietzsche and of hiking with Nietzsche. So I didn't want to end on a note, you know, on a dark note. Yeah, no, I grew up in Russia and I studied, I grew up with reading Russian literature, which is not particularly positive at times. I currently live in London and recently my manager called me up and said, like, come to my office. As a Russian person, we more expect something to go wrong than to go right. So when I entered the office and I was like, oh my God, what's going on? She was like, why are you worried? Stop your Russian fatalism. You know, he expects something good to happen and I go to race. So like that Russian fatalism works the other way around. When you expect things to go wrong, but if they turn out right, it is sometimes more affirmative for life. You know, that's what my wife says, says Russian fatalism. My Russian fatalism saves me a lot. I would like the last question is, would you tell about your future projects, books, anything that you would like to share with the readers and listeners? They really loved your book and I'm currently reading your most recent one on William James. So I believe that the next one on my recommendation list will be that one. If you would like to share anything with the listeners, I would be very grateful. Sure. I mean, quite frankly, I wrote a book, the third book to the trilogy, American Philosophy Love Story, Hiking with Nietzsche. And this last book was called Love's Conditions. And it was about the fracturing of the relationship that took center stage in Hiking with Nietzsche. And it was about sexual orientation and betrayal and adultery. I mean, it's about a whole host of things. And I decided not to publish that. So primarily because of our children and also the sense that it was just not correct. So Love's Conditions was slotted with FSG, but I put it on a shelf and my editor was kind enough to let me do that. What I am working on is a book called Be Not Afraid of Life, which is William James's expression. And it's an anthology that is to be paired with Six Wholes Healthy Minds, How William James Can Save Your Life. And it will come out next fall with Princeton University Press. So I just finished that. And then I'm working on another book called American Blood, which is also with FSG. And it's the story of America told through a single family, the American Bloods, the Blood family. And it's a mixture of intellectual history, but also straight history. So I'm looking forward to that. I should say one last thing is that I've been doing work with an offshoot of Masterclass called Outlier. And I found it really meaningful. They're offering really low cost college credits at really high quality. And I have been working with them on developing a philosophy class and a college writing class. Is that what's on your website? Because when you open your website, that's what the clips from the class that come on. Is that the one that you're talking about? That's it. I hope you've enjoyed listening to this episode of Artidote Podcast. You can find all the links to John Cox's work and notes from his book on my website, which will be linked in the description of this episode. Please consider subscribing to my newsletter, which I send every month with my favorite books, notes, and other podcast episodes. Thank you once again for listening to Artidote Podcast, and I'll see you in the next one.