Actually, I’ve always been more of a Nietzsche man in the spin cycle of early existentialism. But recently I’ve been thinking more about Kierkegaard’s conception of the ethical stage. He believes that as we develop we come to an aesthetic appreciation of life, which falters as we become bored. I’m bored. Are you bored? (A common critique of existentialism is that only leisure classes have the luxury of boredom – everybody else is just trying to get by.) Kierkegaard thinks that we then have an either/or choice. Either we can choose to remain bored or we can evolve from an aesthetic orientation toward life to an ethical one. The ethical phase precedes a religious phase and is akin to Martin Buber’s “I & Thou” philosophy that gives primacy to relation with the other rather than soaking in the solipsism of the self.

Nietzsche goes the other way towards his superman who is beyond herd ideas of morality (ethics/religiosity) and shapes the world according to his will. More and more that approach just seems hollow and sad, especially since Nietzsche got and died from syphilis as the result of his post morality swim in the cynicism of the self. I dislike the conservative trimmings of my youthful indoctrination in Christianity and have no love of any morality that presupposes judgment, but I have to confess that the chewy ethical center and relation to the other as the higher good has stuck fast in me like the filling in a Danish (Soren was Danish so that is a joke about the nature of the philosophical pastry because, as Chevy Chase observed in Caddy shack, “A flute with no holes is not a flute and a donut with no hole is a Danish.”)

In that after the last six months of thinking about how to live my life I have come to two principles, that I need constant change in my life and that I need my actions to help other people, I seem to have slipped off the Nietzsche wagon and am hitching toward the mead hall of my Dane.