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Nietzsche most sadly collapsed at 44 and never made it to the child phase. But he was so right. So, prescient.
The Three Phases
- The Camel: This is the spirit of duty and reverence. The camel takes on heavy burdens, humbles itself, and accepts traditional values and knowledge as a necessary foundation. It’s the stage of the scholar, the apprentice, and the person who dutifully follows established norms and traditions.
- The Lion: In the loneliest desert of the camel’s journey, the spirit becomes a lion. The lion’s role is to say “No” to the great dragon of “Thou Shalt.” The dragon represents all of the inherited values, dogmas, and societal expectations. The lion’s purpose is to fight for its freedom and destroy the old, externally imposed values.
- The Child: The lion, however, cannot create new values. Its strength is in negation and destruction. For new values to be born, the lion must become a child. The child is innocence, forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelling wheel, a “holy Yea.” It represents a state of creative freedom, where one can create their own values and will their own world without the burden of the past or the reactive struggle against it.
Kevin Cann
Public Domain
9/9/2025