I. Nietzsche as a Forest Enthusiast

At the lowest point of his sane life in 1877-78 Nietzsche discovered a form of self-medication to deal with his several chronic maladies. It involved long periods of daily walking, preferably in forests, for up to ten hours, whenever he was able to get out of bed. In August 1877 he reports from the forested Swiss mountain retreat of Rosenlauibad to Erwin Rohde that he walks for two hours before sunrise and another few hours in the afternoon and evening.¹ In 1880 he tells Peter Gast that he’s walking ten hours a day near Marienbad.² We know that he preferred to walk in deep shade, wore blue-lensed glasses to protect his sensitive eyes, and often carried a parasol for additional protection from the sun (was this the Regenschirm that he forgot?³).

The Japanese now have a name for such experience of the woods: shinrin-yoku, usually translated as “forest bathing.” They understand it as a form of physical and psychological therapy. Current students and practitioners describe forest bathing as a practice of mindfully immersing oneself in the woods, all senses alert to sights, sounds, smells, touch, and (sometimes) taste. “Bathing” is an appropriate way of describing this practice of soaking oneself in the total forest atmosphere and environment. Breathing forest air, it’s been experimentally shown, reduces the amount of the stress-inducing hormone cortisol in the bloodstream; regular forest walking (about four hours a day) raises the amount of cancer killing proteins and immune cells in the system. Some studies show effects in lowered blood pressure (although a few others have so far failed to confirm this) and there’s general agreement that such walking in the woods significantly lessens depression. Since trees absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen (the reverse of human beings), forest walkers inhale more highly oxygenated air than they would in other surroundings, supporting blood oxygenation and stimulating brain function. In letters and in published texts Nietzsche frequently recalls that almost all his writing after 1877 was based on notes and compositions made on his walks, and he speaks contemptuously of thoughts conceived while sitting.⁴ Certainly the tone of his middle and later books is markedly more lively and sparkling than his early works of classical scholarship which were generated in the traditional Sitzfleisch manner, requiring a desk and a mountain of books.  

Nietzsche, already a stateless person, arguably became the first philosophical climate migrant when he resigned his Basel professorship in 1879 and left the city. He had spent much of 1877 and 1878 on leave, seeking relief from his many ailments in Sorrento and a series of Alpine spas and retreats. The self-designated “weather prophet”⁵ undertook a nomadic, singular quest to breathe freely in “good air,” settling periodically in Sils Maria, Nice, Genoa, Sorrento, along with many interrupted journeys and shorter stays in spas and retreats. Nietzsche’s meteoropathic itinerary is interwoven with all those texts where he diagnoses Europe’s health and future prospects. His search for salubrious conditions became fused with his project of articulating a healthier way forward for humans and superhumans. Nietzsche needed to escape the constraints of his Basel professorship, not only to give his growing philosophical work free reign, but because it was an environmental sinkhole. In 1869 he arrived in a city that had recently experienced a typhus epidemic, and still held the living memory of cholera in 1855. Shortly after leaving Basel, Nietzsche writes to his constant friend Franz Overbeck, declining an invitation to visit: “Yes, dear friend, you’re right, and I’d come immediately if I didn’t have Baselphobia, a genuine anxiety and aversion to the bad air, the bad water, the entire depressed essence [Wesen] of this unholy brutal site of my suffering!”⁶ While Lionel Gossman celebrates Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, a cultural capital where luminaries like the great historian flourished, along with Nietzsche, the church historian Overbeck, and the myth and symbol analyst Johann Jakob Bachofen,⁷ he acknowledges the city’s overcrowding, pollution, and obtrusive factories. As Gossman describes some of the facts on the ground – and in the air and water:

The drains were in poor condition. No one knew who was responsible for keeping them in repair, and there was no provision for regular cleaning. In addition, most of the houses that had a privy (by no means all) were not connected to the drains. The waste simply seeped through poorly maintained cesspools until finally it poisoned the city wells. The new dyeworks and chemical works were also held responsible for polluting the drinking water...⁸

In the Basel miasma Nietzsche’s sensitive constitution collided with Europe’s burgeoning, accelerating industrialization which was reaching a fever pitch in the 1870s. This experience resonates later in Zarathustra’s chapter, “On Passing By,” where “Zarathustra’s ape,” a parody of his cynical dimension, warns him away from “the great city”:

“Do you not already smell the slaughterhouses and soup-kitchens of the spirit? Does this city not steam with the fumes of slaughtered spirit?

Do you not see souls hanging there like limp and filthy rags? – And they even make newspapers from these rags!”⁹

Nietzsche experienced Basel’s air as if it were today’s Delhi and its water as comparable to Flint, Michigan’s during its ten-year water crisis. The antidote to such conditions was to be found in the elemental surroundings of “Wald, Berg, und See,” an earthly trinity often evoked in his writings¹⁰.

In June and July 1877 from Rosenlauibad, a spa in the forests of the Bernese highlands, he writes to his sister and Malwida von Meysenbug, that he is taking the water cure and notes that the quality of the air varies with the time of day and is best in the morning.¹¹ Nietzsche notes that the altitude (4,000 feet, twice as high as Basel and without its pollution) is good for his health, and wonders whether he should seek greater heights. We recall that in Ecce Homo he marks his 1881 revelation of the thought of eternal recurrence in Sils as “6,000 feet beyond man and time.”¹² This may have been the highest altitude Nietzsche ever attained; one wonders what he might have thought and written at greater heights. While he constantly aspires to the heights, a theme developed in various directions by such acute commentators as Gaston Bachelard, Luce Irigaray, and Peter Sloterdijk, he apparently never climbed above the tree line. This opens up the question: how much of Nietzsche’s health benefits from his walking had to do with the thinner air and how much from the atmospheric composition in heavily wooded areas?  

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II. The Science Behind Forest Bathing

In the last fifty years or so we’ve learned much about the biology and chemistry of the forest (Wald: it’s worth noting that English makes no distinction between forest and woods that would parallel German’s Wald/Forst, where Forst denotes a deliberate plantation or tree farm). Central to human therapeutic engagement with the forest is our breathing forest air. While we can also delight in many other aspects of a forest walk, which may evoke genetic memories of the species’s primordial environment, our respiration is especially crucial. Yet it was only around sixty years before Nietzsche’s climate crisis that the nature of breath began to be understood and about the same time after his death that research began to delineate the specific bodily effects of forest air. Early modern philosophy and science, grasping for an understanding of breath, tended toward mechanical models. Descartes, for example, had maintained that respiration was part of a process in which the heart acted as a heat pump, heating up inhaled air, which was then cooled in the lungs and liquified as blood.¹³ It took some time before Antoine Lavoisier discovered in the late 18^th century that human respiration consists in inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide. It took more time to learn that trees (especially during the day) do the reverse: absorbing carbon dioxide and emitting oxygen. This helps to explain Nietzsche’s rejoicing in the tonic air of the high forest. In today’s climate crisis we realize that forests must be protected because they operate as carbon sinks, removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Tree farms, however, cannot compete with old growth forests in this respect, because they lack the full, rich substance of the old forest floor. Trees enhance the air for humans by releasing phytoncides (literally, plant-based killers), chemicals that defend them against injurious insects, parasites, and the like. Phytoncides, like trees’ profuse roots, and amazingly extensive fungal and microrhyzial networks linking them below ground, are also means of communication, by which trees of the same species transmit relevant information concerning favorable and unfavorable conditions (the estimate is that 68 quadrillion miles of such underground networks link trees around the globe¹⁴). Forest bathing involves not only breathing cleaner, highly oxygenated air, but inhaling phytoncides with multiple and measurable salutary physical and psychological effects.

Not all trees are created equal. As Nietzsche might say, some aspire to the heights more vigorously than others. So it becomes a matter of interest to see just what we know now about the forest air that Nietzsche breathed in various settings, that atmosphere that he and his “son” Zarathustra rejoiced in as “good air.” Let’s begin with the Swiss Engadin, birthplace of his masterwork, and the site of his discovery of eternal recurrence “six thousand feet beyond man and time.” Given what we know of the local topography, and taking into account Nietzsche’s epistolary reports on his health and walking, it appears that most of his Engadin woodsy peripatetics occurred at altitudes of 4-6,000 feet. In the Sils region, at such heights, the strongly predominant species of trees are evergreen conifers including cypresses, pines, cedars, yew, and spruces. Physicians and arborists note that while all trees filter noxious particulate matter from the air, conifers do so especially well. Peter Wohlleben writes: “Forests differ a great deal from one another depending on the species of trees they contain. Coniferous forests noticeably reduce the number of germs in the air, which feels particularly good to people who suffer from allergies”¹⁵. Qing Li is a professor of medicine at the Nippon University in Tokyo, specializing in forest medicine and forest bathing. In his comprehensive and beautiful book Forest Bathing, he reports on a number of studies that have tracked the effects of phytoncides. Incubating phytoncides with human “natural killer” (NK) cells – types that destroy cancer cells – found that they markedly increased the protective cells’ activity. In another register, human subjects were systematically exposed to phytoncides in controlled experiments over time. Resulting findings included heightened NK activity, decrease in stress hormones, increased sleep hours, decreased measures of anxiety, hostility, and fatigue.¹⁶ Li also reports on the beneficial effects of microbes (Mycobacterium vaccae) that are inhaled in forest environments and even in home gardening. Experiments on both mice and humans show that exposure to the microbes boosts the immune system and has anti-depressive psychological effects.¹⁷ All these results suggest that there is a firm biological basis for much of the anecdotal observations and recommendations of nineteenth century European meteoropathy. Emerging evidence suggests that diffusing essential oils derived from certain conifers (notably Japanese hinoki oil) can approximate health benefits associated with actual forest bathing.¹⁸

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III. The Art of Breathing

Nietzsche read widely in various contemporary guidebooks concerning medicinal geography as he sought salubrious environments; he was in effect on a personal quest for the best of what ancient physician Galen had called “airs and places.” Adapting some of their recommendations to his individual situation, he devised a regimen of forest bathing for himself with his long walks in wooded areas.  

During his first year or so of travels, as he moved toward his final departure from Basel, a time later acknowledged as his emotional and intellectual nadir, Nietzsche composed The Wanderer and his Shadow, a prolonged conversation with his double, sprinkled with both literal and metaphorical references to the importance of free breathing and salutary atmosphere. His emphasis on the importance of breath was apparently reinforced then by his beginning to following the popular exercise regime of Moritz Schreber, which emphasized the importance of deep breathing.¹⁹ In September 1878 he reports that he’s eagerly following Schreber’s regime.²⁰ In Dawn Nietzsche prescribes a routine of such breathing for those who suffer from anxiety and distraction: fifteen minutes, lying prone, breathing slowly and deeply (aph. 462). This calls to mind many ancient and modern regimes of exercise and meditation that focus on breathwork.

Nietzsche’s pursuit of health and its conditions (“wellness”) reaches a kind of epiphany in aphorisms projecting the possibility of a pluralistic ecological utopia, a “great tree of humanity,”²¹ where individuals relocate to climates and milieus appropriate to their diverse metabolisms and constitutions. It’s necessary that all should find the geographical conditions that enhance both their spiritual and physical lives²²:  

To live at present within a single culture does not suffice as a general prescription; under these conditions too many highly useful types of human beings would die out, those who cannot breathe healthily [*] in it. We must use history to try to give them air, and to sustain them; even the human beings of backward cultures have their value, – Along with this cure for the spirit [*], humanity must strive to discover a medical geography for its physical relationships…²³

Perhaps Nietzsche believed that his discovery of a forest walking routine was uniquely tailored to his needs.²⁴ Yet if contemporary advocates of forest bathing are right, it is a regimen that would benefit almost everyone, and would be especially valuable for those confined in offices and crowded cities (thus the explosion of interest in it in urban Japan). While some may find it surprising to find Nietzsche speaking of spirit and spiritual matters, as he frequently does, there is nothing other-worldly here; Nietzsche’s Geist is close to the French esprit and to the thought conveyed in English when we refer to a spirited person or conversation. The more dualistic versions of spirit familiar from mainstream religious and philosophical traditions were themselves transformations of much earthier concepts relating to air and breath (Hebrew ruach, Greek pneuma).  

The Shadow figure, airy yet less substantial than the air, returns in Zarathustra to sing the praises of the cleanest, most inspiring (in-spiriting) air (“Among Daughters of the Desert”). His song is one of many ways in which Nietzsche prefigures the post-Freudian psychoanalytic discovery of what I’ll call the respiratory erotic. Although the song is set in the (presumably treeless) desert, the Shadow likens his delight in that imagined atmosphere to his current wonderful experience of breathing pure, thin air in Zarathustra’s forested mountain redoubt. Breath is the most fundamental constant of human life, marking its first and last moments. What Nietzsche found and reports on, especially in Zarathustra, is that there is a respiratory spectrum of pleasure and pain, ranging from disturbances like coughing, choking, and sneezing to the exalted pleasure of inhaling the cleanest mountain air. A few post-Freudian psychoanalysts have suggested that the priority and primacy of breath, which can be exhilarating or painful, indicates that in addition to the classic Freudian stages of the oral, anal, and genital erotic, there is a preceding and never outgrown stage of the respiratory erotic²⁵. Nietzsche (himself a great if unacknowledged source for Freud) seems to have come to such a realization through forest bathing. He understood that superior breathing was enabled by prolonged walking in certain forested environments and that unfavorable settings like polluted cities could cause considerable discomfort. Now our access to refined accounts of the relevant biology and chemistry helps to explain our experience on that affective spectrum. While breathing – like the oral, anal, and genital functions – may be unthought and unthematized in much of life, it accompanies human consciousness even more continuously than the three Freudian erotic modes. Thus Spoke Zarathustra records a phenomenological itinerary of the respiratory erotic, as Nietzsche’s hero journeys back and forth among forest, sea, and town.²⁶  

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a constant touchstone for Nietzsche, especially during 1877-79 when he was discovering forest bathing, a fresh voice from the New World speaking in new accents of nature and employing a philosophical vocabulary in which breath figures as a master trope for human thought and experience.²⁷ He writes:

It seems as if the law of the intellect resembled that law of nature by which we now inspire, now expire the breath; by which the heart now draws in, then hurls out the blood, – the law of undulation.²⁸  

Such themes in Emerson have led scholars to see echoes of the ancient idea of a breathing world-soul in his thought, a theme going back to Plato’s Timaeus and the Stoics, reinforced by readings of Schelling and mediated through English writer and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).  

The American thinker combined a great sensitivity to the liberating effect of forest immersion with a constant reference to the universal rhythms of breathing, themes that characterize Nietzsche’s work from this time on. In Emerson’s Essays, which the German thinker read constantly at this time, he writes:  

At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he takes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes ... The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently-reported spells of these places creep on us …These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. They are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us.²⁹

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IV. “I am a forest”

There seems to be a later echo of Emersonian woodland themes in Zarathustra’s chapter “The Dance-Song.” In his Essays the American writer reports that  

[a] lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward; a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet.³⁰

And indeed, in “The Dance-Song” Zarathustra and a few of his Jünger, traveling through the forest, encounter a bevy of dancing nymph-like girls. Enjoining them to continue their dance, Zarathustra launches into his own song as the maidens dance with Cupid, whom he has summoned from sleep. Nietzsche’s avatar now identifies himself with the forest: “Indeed I am a forest and a night of dark trees: but whoever does not fear my darkness will find rose-bowers too beneath my cypresses”³¹. We note that dark, evergreen cypresses are among the most salutary trees for forest bathing; roses and rose-apples occur at several points in Zarathustra, indicating refreshed and renewed breath by their odors. What does it mean to be a forest? It’s tempting to read this declaration in the light of recently emergent concepts of the forest as a pluralistic community of trees and associated plants, animals, and microbes, communicating both through an underground rhizomatic network of signals and carbon transfers (“darkness” or Dunkel) and the aerial dispersion of phytoncides.³² Such a decentered assemblage can be compared to current concepts of the human neural system that have replaced former notions that assigned various functions to limited specific areas of the brain. On this view, we could prosaically paraphrase Zarathustra’s declaration “I am a forest” as “I am a multiplicity whose complexities are linked by a vast network of communicating channels.” We might see this playing out in the intricate triangular dance of ideas that Zarathustra then conducts in the forest meadow with Life and Wisdom, paralleling the maidens’ dance with Cupid. He recognizes his deep affinities with each and their tangled relations with one another. The forest inspires this variation on this traditional topos of the ancient philosophical schools, which attempted in their various ways to explain the compatibility of Life and Wisdom or to subordinate one to the other. It will also be in the forested sanctuary of his mountain home that Zarathustra attains his resolution of this play in “The Convalescent,” where he awakes to a refreshing new woodland odor, fulfilling a promise made earlier to his Jünger³³. Despite his bodily challenges, Nietzsche sometimes achieved such a renewed convalescent breath through forest bathing, and Zarathustra’s path through various landscapes also records the healing, vivifying practice of immersion among those “dark trees” that enable the “good air” he seeks.

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The article image was painted by the Australian artist Mitchell Nolte (link), whom we commissioned to illustrate our entire forest series.

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Gary Shapiro was born in 1941 in St. Paul, Minnesota. He earned BA and PhD degrees at Columbia University where he participated in the political and cultural turbulence of the 1960s. He has taught at Columbia, Kansas University, and the University of Richmond where he is now Professor Emeritus of Philosophy. He lives in Richmond, Virginia with his partner, the artist Tanja Softic, and two cats with strong personalities. Shapiro has held fellowships or residencies at the School of Criticism and Theory, Wesleyan U. Humanities Center, Rockefeller Bellagio Center, and the National Humanities Center (US). He has published the following books: Nietzschean Narratives (1989), Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and Women (1991), Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art After Babel (1995), Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (2003), Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics (2016). To appear in 2027: Between the Nameless and the Named: Civil Wars and Ancient Quarrels in the Novel and Philosophy. In 2019 spoke at a HARP anniversary event on “Seeking Nietzsche’s Great Tree of Humanity: The Overhuman and Powers’s The Overstory,” later German publication in Narthex (read it online here).

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References

Derrida, Jacques: Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles / Éperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche. Translated by Barbara Harlow. Chicago 2017.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Complete Works. New York 1926.

Fenichel, Otto: “Respiratory Introjection,” in: The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel: First Series. New York 1953, p. 221–240.

Gossman, Lionel: Basel in the Age of Burckhardt. Chicago 2000.

Li, Qing: Forest Bathing. New York 2018.

Shapiro, Gary: “Breathing Nietzsche’s Atmospheres,” in: Lemm and Ulrich, eds.: Nietzsches Naturen. Berlin 2024.

Webster, Jamieson: On Breathing. New York 2025.

Wohlleben, Peter: The Hidden Life of Trees. Translated by Jane Billinghurst. Vancouver 2016.

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Footnotes

1: Letter from 08/28/1877, nr. 656.

2: Letter from 07/18/1880, nr. 40.

3: Editor’s note: In an enigmatic entry from 1881, Nietzsche writes in his notebook: “‘I have forgotten my umbrella’” (nr. 1881,12[62]; transl. Paul Stephan). In his important essay Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles from 1978, French philosopher Jacques Derrida uses this quote to demonstrate the impossibility of giving a single comprehensive interpretation to Nietzsche’s texts (and texts in general).

4: Editor’s note: For a detailed analysis of Nietzsche’s contempt of sitting and his philosophy of movement, cf. the essay On Dubious Paths ... An Outline of Nietzsche's Concept of Wandering by Michael Meyer-Albert on this blog.

5: Letter to Franz Overbeck from 11/14/1881, nr. 167; transl. Gary Shapiro.

6: Letter from 04/03/1879, nr. 832; transl. Gary Shapiro.

7: Editor’s note: Nietzsche was very interested in the works of the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) and attended his lectures. He particularly influenced the philosopher’s high regard for Italian Renaissance culture and its aristocratic individualism. The theologian Franz Overbeck (1837–1905) shared a house with Nietzsche in Basel from 1870 to 1875 where they developed a close friendship lasting until Nietzsche’s mental breakdown. The Swiss jurist and anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–1887) is famous for his speculations about a prehistorical matriarchal society. His main work Mother Right (1861) influenced not just Nietzsche’s view on antiquity (esp. the “Dionysian” and its association with unrestricted female sexuality) but also Friedrich Engels and Sigmund Freud.

8: P. 79.

9: Transl. Graham Parkes (Oxford 2005).

10: Cf. e.g. a letter to Erwin Rohde from 06/19/1869 (nr. 8).

11: Cf. letter from 06/06/1877 (nr. 612) and letter from 07/01/1877 (nr. 630).

12: Ecce Homo, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” § 1.

13: See his Treatise on Man, published in 1662.

14: Cf. New York Times June 20, 2026.

15: The Hidden Life of Trees, p. 222.

16: Cf. Li, Forest Bathing, p. 97–98.

17: Cf. ibid., p. 102–103.

18: Cf. ibid., p. 231–239.

19: Editor’s note: The Leipzig-based German medical doctor and university lecturer Moritz Schreber (1808–1861) published several popular self-help books on personal health and invented the Schrebergarten. Read more about Schreber’s influence on Nietzsche in Tobias Brücker’s essay Everyday Life Contributes to Thoughts. Nietzsche and Dietetic Popular Culture on this blog.

20: Cf. letter to Ernst Schmeitzner from 09/10/1878 (nr. 754).

21: Human, All Too Human II, The Wanderer and his Shadow, aph. 189; transl. Gary Handwerk (Stanford 2013).

22: Cf. Human, All Too Human II, The Wanderer and his Shadow, aph. 188 & 189.

23: Human, All Too Human II, The Wanderer and his Shadow, aph. 188; transl. Gary Handwerk (Stanford 2013). * = my emphasis.

24: Cf. also his critique on a single diet for everyone in Twilight of the Idols (“The Four Great Errors,” aph. 1).

25: Cf. Fenichel, “Respiratory Introjection” and Webster, On Breathing.

26: Cf. Shapiro, “Breathing Nietzsche’s Atmospheres,” p. 28–34.

27: Editor’s note: The American philosopher Emerson (1803–1882) was a great influence on Nietzsche. For more on this important piece of Nietzsche’s intellectual breeding ground see the interview with Willow Verkerk on Nietzsche and North America on this blog.

28: Emerson, “Intellect.” Complete works vol. 2, p. 332.

29: Emerson, “Nature.”. Complete works vol. 3, p. 169-70 & 171.

30: Emerson, “History.” Complete works vol. 2, p. 18.

31: Transl. Graham Parkes (Oxford 2005).

32: Editor’s note: For more on the rhizomatic nature of forests see also the third part of this series, The Postmodern Forest, written by Mandus Craiss.

33: See “On the Bestowing Virtue,” 2.