I Have Become a Child Again Nietzsche

I wanted to know all nigh everything when I was a child. I was an inquisitive child. The will to knowledge took root well earlier I was in any existent position to pursue it. I remember, as a child, being conscious of a realm of adult understandings that I just didn't have admission to. There was a universe of truth and wisdom beyond my ken, and it fascinated me.

Things are different for kids today. Thanks to the internet, the truths of adult existence are only a mouse-click away. But I didn't have recourse to instant internet gratification. I was left to think virtually things. My search for noesis, as I travelled through babyhood and teenagerdom, led me to dwell on the weightier things in life. Intuitively, I knew that many of the adult things across my experience were sombre, perhaps even dreadful, matters. The more that I reflected on these matters, the more I became a sombre person myself. I was weighed down past what I knew. I stared too long into the completeness and I started to encounter the abyss in me.

This was before I read Nietzsche. I started university afterwards than almost, at the age of 24. Attention philosophy classes and reading Nietzsche was a revelation for me. I had a Damascus road experience – broke with much of my by life, and devoted myself to philosophy broadly.

Looking back, I can run into there was a spiritual transformation that came forth with this as well. I went from being a camel to a lion. I transitioned from the beginning to the 2d phase of Nietzsche'southward "three metamorphoses."

Nietzsche introduces the three metamorphoses in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The metamorphoses draw the process of spiritual transformation that characterizes his vision of the flourishing life. We don't ever think of Nietzsche as a "spiritual" philosopher. Only the story of the 3 metamorphoses is nothing if not a saga of spiritual transformation. The phases of spiritual metamorphosis are symbolically represented past the camel, the panthera leo, and the child.

I had become a camel, of sorts, by allowing my naive quest for cognition and wisdom to atomic number 82 me into the darkest and most disturbing corners of being. Perhaps we inevitably get camels when we have on the labor of philosophical thinking. Eager to prove ourselves capable of embracing the truth, we seek out the heaviest and nearly burdensome insights, and force ourselves to dwell on them as a rite of passage. "What is heavy? Thus asks the weight-bearing spirit; thus it kneels downwards like the camel and wants to be well laden." Nietzsche describes the camel spirit as a collector of burdens, conquests, and scars. The camel asks: "What is heaviest … that I may take it upon me and rejoice in my force" (Z, 54).

Camels can carry great weights and survive in the desert. But the weighted private is inevitably taxed by their burden. Over time, they run the risk of being poisoned by bitterness, despair, and the spirit of revenge. If the camel does not go a lion, the seeker will be ruined by their quest. It is e'er in the "loneliest desert [that] a 2nd metamorphosis occurs, the spirit here becomes a lion; it wants to capture freedom and be lord in its own desert" (Z, 54). This is a fair description of the metamorphosis that I underwent in my university years, which were a thrilling catamenia of self-discovery and actualization.

Reading Nietzsche changed my life. If I had never read Nietzsche, I would have remained a camel personality all my days.

What does it mean to be a lion? The metaphor speaks for itself. The lion is the "rex of the beasts." The lion spirit says "I will" – and that is the whole of the police. The camel becomes a lion when the subject field of spiritual transformation, having ventured into the desert of human expectation, discovers that "God is expressionless" and surmises that everything is permitted. In this moment, the individual realizes that there is nothing to foreclose them from creating their own values, imposing their own will upon the world. But, in the desert of the existent, the lion encounters a dragon, and "G Shalt" glitters on its scales. The dragon is Nietzsche's paradigm of societal norms. In the lion stage, the field of study of spiritual transformation must engage the dragon in mortal combat. Ane needs to be a lion in spirit to defeat the law of "Thou Shalt" and affirm the conditions of i'due south flourishing.

There is no happiness in fighting dragons all i'southward life, however. To complete the three metamorphoses, the lion must get a child. ‎Maturity, for Nietzsche, means rediscovering the seriousness 1 had as a kid at play.

A child-like spirit is vital to happiness, health, and well-being. "The child", Nietzsche says, "is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a Sacred Aye" (Z, 55). The lion becomes a kid when the private who says "I volition" ceases to assert their values contrary to the law of "Thou Shalt", and affirms them instead "for the sport of cosmos: the spirit at present wills its own will, … its ain globe" (Z, 55). Life is no longer a reactive struggle to defeat other forces. Life is a commemoration of ane'south powers – a sustained act of pure affirmation. The kid-like spirit knows the joy of life and the innocence of perpetual creation.

Philosophy helped me evolve from a camel to a lion. I'm still working on becoming a kid. It is a long way dorsum to the first of one'south life. Only this is where I am headed. Nietzsche was wrong nigh many things. But he was right to fence that a light, innocent, affirmative approach to life is vital to spiritual flourishing and creative existence as well.

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Source: https://philosophyforchange.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/nietzsches-three-metamorphoses/

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