Nietzsche thinks that everyone who is developing as a human being will go through 3 stages of life:
- Camel: Willful and obedient beasts of burden — stagnant in life. Everything someone else has told you to do in life is essentially a burden tied to the camel. These weights are lies told to you, which need to be shed if you truly want to be free. The camel is not even aware of these weights, and has been inundated to simply obey and repeat.
- A good example of this is deciding not to take a gap year before college out of fear of social norms; these “weights” that we carry around can be severely restrictive. Why blindly trust what other people think?
- Lion: The lion is aware of the arbitrary traditions (“weights”) dictated by other people, and is working on escaping these weights. The goal of the lion is to fight the dragon named “though shalt”, thus understanding traditions to be what they are and respecting them if desired; if you choose to follow a given tradition, it is because you choose to, not because you were told to by society.
- However, the problem with the lion is that the lion struggles to find its purpose; in slaying the dragon, it has cast away true world theories and thus lost meaning to life. Thus, a huge mistake is believing that becoming the lion is the destination; it shouldn’t be believed that just because you have discarded the previous meaning of your life, that there is in fact no meaning to your life.
- Child: The child is a new beginning. When you’re the lion, you’re saying “no” to things that other people are telling you to do; as the child, you are saying yes to some things. The child is unconstrained and excitedly finding new things to do, new games to play.
Why is it so hard to stop being a camel and become the master of the desert? There is a seed inside of you that you can grow into. Most people are aware of this, but are fearful; it’s scary to look your potential right in the face. Thus, it’s important to set goals that are both calculated and ambitious. This is basically referring to Nietzsche’s Will to Power.
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They fear their higher self, for when it speaks, it speaks demandingly.
- But how are these goals defined? Nietzsche’s advice is to ask yourself “what has been important up to this point in your life?” Basically, the answer should be inside of you.
Finally, Nietzsche also says that you can’t be satisfied just reaching the stage of the child either. Nietzsche doesn’t like final destinations. The goal is to constantly think about what the next stage of humanity, the Ubermensch, should look like, and strive to become it. It is an ideal to strive for, not something one necessarily needs to become.
Thus, at least in my view, Nietzsche is essentially disavowing nihilism; while he wants people to reject traditional teachings of true world theories, he doesn’t think that the final destination is that there is no meaning to life. He wants each person to find their own meaning and work toward that goal.