Book review: Hiking with Nietzsche, by John Kaag

When he was 19 and studying philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, the academic John Kaag was offered a sort of unofficial travel bursary. “My advisor pulled some administrative strings,” he recalls, “and found a way for me to escape. At the end of my junior year he handed me an unmarked envelope – in it was a cheque for three thousand dollars.” At the time, Kaag was studying Nietzsche and his US contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson, so his advisor suggested he should use the money to travel to Basel, where Nietzsche wrote his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. However, when the young Kaag arrived in this most mind-numbingly well-ordered and efficient of Swiss cities, he realised – much more quickly than Nietzsche did – that the place wasn’t for him: “I woke the next morning before daybreak, went for a long run in order to confirm my suspicion that Basel was utterly soulless... and made for the train station.”