If right now you were told that you would relive this life exactly how it has gone and exactly how
it will go, with all its ups and downs, fortunes and tragedies, pleasures and pains, over and
over for eternity, what would you think? Would you be terrified? Would you want to change it?
Would you be happy with it? What could you do or think to make it ok, and perhaps even desirable?
19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche used a version of this contemplation
as a sort of thought experiment, referred to as the eternal recurrence,
in part, to consider and explore one of his important philosophical tenets known as amor fati.
The phrase amor fati is Latin for love of one’s fate. This concept is recognized to
have first been referenced and discussed in the philosophical work of Stoic philosophers
Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. However, Nietzsche would be the first to explicitly use
and focus on the phrase, molding and integrating it as a unique, important value of his philosophy.
He would most notably discuss the idea in his books The Gay Science,
Ecce Homo, as well as throughout other works, notes, and letters. By this point in his life,
Nietzsche had retreated to the Swiss Alps and was experiencing what one could easily infer as
a period of deep self-reflection over a life that was spiked with hardships and failures.
He had fled from his family and career in academia to find independence and pursue
freelance writing. However, he could not escape the reverberating negative effects of his family,
nor could he find success in his writing. He lost friendships, romances, and soon to be his mind.
His health waned worse and worse throughout his mid-life as a result of various ailments,
and he would frequently be bed-ridden and in pain. His work was essentially all he had,
and it was not enough—at least at the time. His books did not sell well,
and his philosophy went mostly unnoticed. His life was beset with failure after failure, misery after
misery until he died a relatively horrible death. Of course, we now know that following Nietzsche’s
death, he would go on to become a massive, global success, rising to prominence as arguably one of
the greatest philosophical minds to ever live. And so, how did such a brilliant, philosophical mind
deal with such a failure-ridden, dreadful existence? He attempted to philosophize it,
to derive wisdom and understanding from it; he concepted and integrated his view of amor fati.
For Nietzsche, when referring to amor fati, he is arguably talking more generally about the
loving of one’s life. The term love is also essential here as a key nuance to his usage.
It suggests more than a stoic acceptance, and rather, an almost enthusiastic and total
adoration. It is a sentiment, or rather, a declaration against the tendency to regret,
to assume one could have retained more control over the outcomes and conditions of their reality,
to have done differently, to have known any better, to have found that an existence void
of particular negatives would have ultimately netted more positive. And instead, to love and
embrace all of life exactly how it is, with all the good and the bad, the success and the failure,
the satisfaction and the pain. “My formula for human greatness is amor fati:” Nietzsche writes,
“that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity.
Not only to endure what is necessary, still less to conceal it—all idealism is falseness
in the face of necessity— but to love it.” Naturally and understandably, we tend to
find ourselves doing the opposite, deluded by the mirage of hindsight and wishful thinking.
It seems as though there were options to have done differently, for things to go differently,
to be better. We regret and yearn for otherness. In a theoretical sense, this may be true;
there were potential different options to choose from in the past and different potential ways for
things to go in the future, but in this reality, the one we must live, there was no option to have
done differently and there is no other way for things to go. Every decision you’ve made is the
best and only decision you could’ve made at the time with the information you had and the state
of mind you were in. And every condition of life that either these decisions led to
or that are fundamental to life in general, you have no control over and cannot change.
To regret or desire to go back and edit the past assumes that the things we wish to change,
presumably things we perceive and interpret as negative are, in the bigger picture, purely
negative—or somehow avoidable in an equivalent sense. It assumes that one could know what is
truly and ultimately best, how things would have gone if they went differently, and that somehow,
one would not still find themselves in a likely similar state of regret and loathing if they did.
It is not necessarily that life could have been different that is the problem,
but that we resist finding the beauty in how it inevitably has gone.
Resenting or fighting against what has happened to you or because of you only brings additional
misery onto the now, exasperating and adding more to resent and resist. Like pouring a gasoline of
regret onto a fire of unchangeable circumstances, we only unnecessarily intensify the flames.
The true challenge and task of life, for Nietzsche, is to fall in love with what you are
actually experiencing right now, as it is, in all the ways it is. “I want to learn more and more to
see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.
Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly.
I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse.
Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish
to be only a Yes-sayer,” Nietzsche wrote. This overcoming of regret and loathing and
resistance, the question posed in Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of whether or not you would
want to live your life over, whether or not you love or could love your life, is not at
all obvious or easy. In the previous quote, it should be noted that it concludes with the words,
“some day I wish to be…” Arguably Nietzsche alluded to it as a task of existence because
of how difficult and perhaps unlikely it is for most people to say yes to.
Perhaps the notion of amor fati is more of an ideal that Nietzsche establishes to strive
toward. Ultimately, to experience the moments of treachery and loneliness, failure and disaster,
loss and death, and all the rest that pervades existence and to still say yes, I love it,
is perhaps impossible in a specific case-by-case sense. But perhaps in certain moments of high
enough spirits, sufficiently distanced from misfortune, it is possible to practice a certain
love for the whole of it. And for Nietzsche, achieving this is the greatest affirmation
of life, which can then be used to construct the lens through which we see the beauty in everything
and more frequently arrive at that resounding yes. Ultimately, the question may not be how much you
love your life right now, but how much you could and how. And perhaps sometimes the
only way to experience the beauty of things is to think about things in a beautiful way.
Throughout his career, Nietzsche wrote extensively about the value of self-overcoming,
achievement, vitality, and power— the constant defining and accomplishment
of new goals set forth in the image of what one views as their ideal self—and
yet, interestingly, and at first pass, almost contradictorily, the focus of amor fati offers
a much gentler and more passive sentiment. However, amor fati need not deny the notion
of trying to overcome and accomplish, of trying to thrash and swim against the current of existence
and achieve things within it or control where it takes us; rather, one’s fate includes this.
It includes trying to overcome life’s conditions and failing in some ultimate sense.
And arguably, this idea of amor fati was, in its own right, an overcoming of Nietzsche’s,
as well as potentially for those who adopt it—an overcoming of this ultimate conclusion
of self-overcoming, the unattainable ideal self and ideal life. Amor fati is a sentiment
of willingness to accept at last the way things have gone and will go, to love a life that tries
in almost every moment to make you hate it, and to still stare back at it and say, yes,
I love it. What’s scarier than an opponent who smiles while being beaten? And perhaps because
of that, Nietzsche remains arguably one of the most notable and dynamic philosophers of all time.