{"id":823,"date":"2026-11-05T10:09:04","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T10:09:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/11\/05\/in-praise-of-the-dilettante\/"},"modified":"2026-11-05T10:09:04","modified_gmt":"2026-11-05T10:09:04","slug":"in-praise-of-the-dilettante","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2026\/11\/05\/in-praise-of-the-dilettante\/","title":{"rendered":"In Praise of the Dilettante"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Also crucial to making this mental switch is seeing the dilettante\u2019s curiosity as equal in intensity to the expert\u2019s, but different. Picture the dilettante as the love-child of two very different philosophical figures: Kierkegaard\u2019s aesthete in <em>Either\/Or <\/em>(1843) who finds and cultivates interests with an intensity that is abandoned before it hardens into obligation, and <a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/what-nietzsche-learnt-from-diogenes-the-cynic\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Friedrich Nietzsche<\/a>\u2019s \u2018free spirit\u2019, 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 (\u2018the root of all evil\u2019) which is achieved by what he calls \u2018rotation of crops\u2019: perpetually changing \u2018the method of cultivation and the kinds of crops\u2019. From Nietzsche, the dilettante inherits a rejection of convention coupled with perpetual motion, a sense of permanent \u2018homelessness\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/why-the-dilettante-is-the-anti-hero-of-our-over-optimised-age\">https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/why-the-dilettante-is-the-anti-hero-of-our-over-optimised-age<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Also crucial to making this mental switch is seeing the dilettante\u2019s curiosity as equal in intensity to the expert\u2019s, but different. Picture the dilettante as the love-child of two very different philosophical figures: Kierkegaard\u2019s aesthete in Either\/Or (1843) who finds and cultivates interests with an intensity that is abandoned before it hardens into obligation, and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[20,80,7,211],"class_list":["post-823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-attention","tag-capitalism","tag-consciousness","tag-dilettantism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}