erraticwisdom

The darkly dressed student made yet another existentially pessimistic remark and the professor unleashed one of the harsher insults I’ve heard:

“Every student goes: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard…” Ok, so maybe it’s not as bad as it sounded, but the accusation was that we (particularly as malleable young students) go through predictable stages of intellectual and spiritual development.

Whether you want to or not you may go through “states” corresponding to each of these philosophers’ accounts.

Nietzsche’s provocative philosophy challenged traditional Christian morality (“God is dead”), and his concept of the Übermensch is appealing as a template for the dominant, worthy human.

Schopenhauer (to whom the professor was associating the troubled student) proposed a more pessimistic philosophical system, finding the universe irrational and often cruel and painful. There were avenues to freedom, mainly through ascetically amplified levels of awareness, but they are long, difficult and rarely successful.

Finally, Kierkegaard’s philosophy was partly a theological account and described the uselessness of rationality in spirituality and the importance of faith. His concept of the “knight of faith” is of an individual who has absolute faith in God, who is nothing other than their faith.

Do we really all go through such similar and clearly demarcated “phases”? It’s worrisome to me because my own understanding (or ignorance) of life and existence differs significantly from the professor’s and most in their post-Kierkegaardean states, and with each phase shift, one’s ability to step back into their earlier state of understanding becomes more difficult. Despite the torture of not knowing much, I like the questions I’m thinking about and the grounding that what little I do know is indubitable. I fear that an inevitable phase shift (especially that last Kierkegaard one) will subdue my curiosity with leaps of faith, maybe as some kind of defense mechanism. Accompanying this suppression seems to be the dreaded “normal” life, the mindless nine-to-five existence that I – in my current state – vow to never succumb to (however unrealistic that may be).

Feedburner says there are over 1800 of you out there. Where are you, in terms of your age, daily activities/obligations, and intellectual state (it needn’t be of the three described accounts)? I don’t think I’m the Schopenhauer type, but I would say I’m a pretty even mix of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard (if that’s even possible with such polar characters).