I just finished John Kaag’s Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are. I was curious about Nietzsche back in college after reading one of Henry Rollins’ books. Kind of on a lark, I took a political philosophy course in my junior year at Ursinus, and Nietzsche was featured as one of the three thinkers we read. (I ended up taking two more of this professor’s classes; he was a great lecturer and I enjoyed the reading, writing, and discussion immensely.

While Kaag is indeed a professor of philosophy, the book itself isn’t written for a academics; it is unabashedly confessional, and at turns triumphant, as Kaag punctuates compulsive, starving hikes with passages from the German thinker, equivocating the writings with his own life and experience.
It’s a curious approach; not pop philosophy, by any stretch, but not dense, either. I hesitate to call it a good introduction to Nietzsche or anything so pat, but that’s not exactly wrong.
I liked Hiking with Nietzsche enough to move on to Kaag’s debut, American Philosophy: A Love Letter. This is far less familiar territory for me, although it features Willam James, who I remember someone describing as a psychologist who wrote like a philosopher, while his brother was a novelist who wrote like a psychologist. Something to that effect, anyway. I’m only a few pages in so far but so far, so good.
Here are some memorable quotes from Hiking:

“Nietzsche was drawn to Emerson’s Promethean individualism, his suggestion that loneliness was not something to be remedied at all costs but rather a moment of independence to be contemplated and even enjoyed”
“According to Nietzsche, there are two forms of health: the futile type that tries to keep death at bay as long as possible, and the affirming type that embraces life, even its deficiencies and excesses.”
“Human existence is cruel, harsh, and painfully short, but the tragic heroes of ancient Greece found a way to make the suffering and sudden endings of life beautiful, or aesthetically significant. This is what Nietzsche meant in The Birth of Tragedy when he claimed that the existence can be justified only as an aesthetic experience.”
“To feel deeply the wisdom-tinged sadness of growing older, to understand that one’s youth isn’t long gone, but rather somewhere forever hidden from view, to face self-destruction while longing for creation—this is to grapple with Ecce Homo”