Harold and Maude, towards an Aesthetic Hedonism

Abstract

Friedrich Nietzsche’s vision for humanity after he declares the death of God is both atheistic and aesthetic, the freedom to live life as it comes (amor fati). Therefore, we can call his existential vision aesthetic atheism. Maude, in the movie Harold and Maude, has a different take on living without God. Rather than take down Christianity, she tries to reform it. She lives freely but is not the intellectual free spirit that Nietzsche hoped would emerge after his proclamation. Rather, her way of existence we can call aesthetic hedonism. She understands that life is contingent, but she loves life for what it is and tries to free others, including animals, saints, and Harold, to experience the same. She does not urge the atheistic turn. I turn to Quentin Meillassoux’s notion of cosmological necessary contingency that, while he agrees with Nietzsche that God is at present inexistent, a necessary contingent cosmology cannot rule out the emergence of a divinity. He wonders just what kind of divinity might emerge. I argue that the divinity that might emerge, using Meillassoux’s term ‘divinology’, would depend upon the prevailing attitude, and consider this through both aesthetic atheism and aesthetic hedonism attitudes towards the world.