Also crucial to making this mental switch is seeing the dilettante’s curiosity as equal in intensity to the expert’s, but different. Picture the dilettante as the love-child of two very different philosophical figures: Kierkegaard’s aesthete in Either/Or (1843) who finds and cultivates interests with an intensity that is abandoned before it hardens into obligation, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘free spirit’, the fiercely curious, light-footed nomad whose restless pursuit of intellectual and artistic treasures provides a profound, if rootless, freedom. From Kierkegaard, the dilettante acquires an innate aversion to boredom (‘the root of all evil’) which is achieved by what he calls ‘rotation of crops’: perpetually changing ‘the method of cultivation and the kinds of crops’. From Nietzsche, the dilettante inherits a rejection of convention coupled with perpetual motion, a sense of permanent ‘homelessness’ that propels an unfettered perusal of interests. Passionate enough to go deep, detached enough to eventually leave, such a figure shows the possibility of being intensely invested in various ways of knowing, doing and making, but never content to let a sense of self form too firmly around them.
https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-dilettante-is-the-anti-hero-of-our-over-optimised-age
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