One of the strangest yet most intriguing aspects of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas is his repeated
enthusiasm for a concept that he called amor fati (translated from Latin as ‘a love of
one’s fate’, or as we might put it, a resolute, enthusiastic acceptance of everything
that has happened in one’s life). The person of amor fati doesn’t seek to erase anything
of their past, but rather accepts what has occurred, the good and the bad, the mistaken
and the wise, with strength and an all-embracing gratitude that borders on a kind of enthusiastic
affection. This refusal to regret and retouch the past is heralded as a virtue at many points
in Nietzsche’s work. In his book, The Gay Science, written during a period of great
personal hardship for the philosopher, Nietzsche writes: I want to learn more and more to see
as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes 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. And, a few years later, in Ecce Homo Nietzsche writes: My formula
for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not
forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less
conceal it… but love it. In most areas of life, most of the time, we do the very opposite.
We spend a huge amount of time taking stock
of our errors, regretting and lamenting the unfortunate twists of fate – and wishing
that things could have gone differently. We are typically mighty opponents of anything
that smacks of resignation or fatalism. We want to alter and improve things – ourselves,
politics, the economy, the course of history – and part of this means refusing to be
passive about the errors, injustices and ugliness of our own and the collective past. Nietzsche
himself, in some moods, knows this defiance full well. There is much emphasis in his work
on action, initiative and self-assertion. His concept of the Wille zur Macht, or Will
to Power embodies just this attitude of vitality and conquest over obstacles.
However, he is aware that, in order to
lead a good life, we need to keep in mind plenty of opposing ideas and marshall them
as and when they become relevant. We don’t – in Nietzsche’s eyes – need to be consistent,
we need to have the ideas to hand that can salve our wounds. Nietzsche isn’t therefore
asking us to choose between glorious fatalism on the one hand or a vigorous willing on the
other. He is allowing us to have recourse to either intellectual move depending on the
occasion. He wishes our mental toolkit to have more than one set of ideas: to have,
as it were, both a hammer and a saw. Certain occasions particularly need the wisdom of
a Will driven philosophy; others demand that we know how to accept, embrace and stop fighting
the inevitable. In Nietzsche’s own life, there was much that he had tried to change
and overcome. He had fled his restrictive family in Germany and escaped to the Swiss
Alps; he had tried to get away from the narrowness of academia and become a freelance writer;
he had tried to find a wife who could be both a lover and an intellectual soulmate. But
a lot in this project of self-creation and self-overcoming had gone terribly wrong. He
couldn’t get his parents, especially his mother and sister out of his head.
Nietzche's books sold dismally and he was
forced more or less to beg from friends and family in order to keep going. Meanwhile his
halting, gauche attempts to seduce women were met by ridicule and rejection. There must
have been so many lamentations and regrets running through his mind in his walks across
the Upper Engadine and his nights in his modest wooden chalet in Sils Maria: if only I had
stuck with an academic career; if only I’d been more confident around certain women;
if only I’d written in a more popular style; if only I’d been born in France… It was
because such thoughts – and every one of us has our own distinct variety of them – can
ultimately be so destructive and soul-sapping that the idea of ‘amor fati’ grew compelling
to Nietzsche. Amor fati was the idea that he needed in order to regain sanity after
hours of self-recrimination and criticism. It’s the idea we ourselves may need at 4
a.m. finally to quieten a mind that has started gnawing into itself shortly after midnight.
It’s an idea with which a troubled spirit can greet the first signs of dawn. At the
height of the mood of amor fati, we recognise that things really could not have been otherwise,
because everything we are and have done is bound closely together in a web of consequences
that began with our birth – and which we are powerless to alter at will. We see that
what went right and what went horribly wrong are as one, and we commit ourselves to accepting
both, to no longer destructively hoping that things could have been otherwise. We were
headed to a degree of catastrophe from the start.
We end up saying, with tears in which there mingle grief and a sort of ecstasy, a large yes to
the whole of life, in its absolute horror and occasional moments of awesome beauty.
In a letter to a friend written in the summer of 1882, Nietzsche tried to sum up the new
spirit of acceptance that he had learnt to lean on to protect him from his agony: ‘I
am in a mood of fatalistic ‘surrender to God’ ⎯ I call it amor fati, so much so,
that I would be willing to rush into a lion’s jaws’. And that is where, after too much
regret, we should learn sometimes to join him.
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