ABSTRACT
Amor fati is love of fate. This attitude, Nietzsche tells us in Ecce Homo (‘The Wagner Case’, §4), characterises his ‘innermost nature’. The phrase initially occurs in The Gay Science (§276), where it is expressed in terms of Nietzsche’s desire to be a ‘Yes-sayer’, i.e. to be one that does not negate existence but affirms it, even in criticism: ‘Looking away shall be my only negation’. In this regard, love of fate is an essential constituent of the mature Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetic, for the deep desire to embrace existence and endow one’s life with a sense of justification requires that everything in life be affirmed – the key feature of the notion of eternal recurrence. Amor fati is Nietzsche’s formula for all that is great in humanity. It means not wishing anything at all to be different about one’s life: neither forwards nor backwards, nor in all eternity. To love fate means to love what happens because this is how it must happen: one cannot avoid this necessity without denying oneself and by implication condemning existence. One must therefore love what is even terrible about one’s life. Love of fate means, in effect, love of the inherent plurality of life, of the fact that every moment of joy brings with it the potential for loss and suffering. Nietzsche’s view is well illustrated by the following passage:
no one gives a human being his qualities: not God, not society, not his parents or ancestors, not he himself […]. No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives […]. One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole…But nothing exists apart from the whole!
