Nietzsche’s Amor Fati
The Embracing of an Undecided Fate
By Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen
This is the complete version of an essay that was published previously in an altered form in Poesis: A Journal of the Arts & Communication.
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There is in Nietzsche an unequivocal affirmation of life, and it would be precisely wrong to say, “notwithstanding the equivocality that he injects into his every assertion,” for there is nothing in Nietzsche that withstands his equivocality. Yet, it speaks to the essence of Nietzsche’s posture to observe that there is nothing diffident or less than forthright in his work—he makes assertions, enormously complex assertions, and they are clearly intended to be taken as asserted. Nietzsche means what he says. It is his saying that bears the complexity in its method, which practices the undermining and enhancing of inherited terminology and philosophical principles, often in ploys of overt contradiction, to propose what is unequivocally meant. One must follow him in his every move, through each verbal gambit, to get at a meaning that always constitutes straight answers to straight questions, at a meaning that presumably requires the richness of literary strategy, of complicated saying, to be formulated at all. The idea dissolves without the verbal underpinning. It evaporates in the absence of his statement. It is so subtle, even as it is so clear and unequivocal once grasped. In short, nothing in Nietzsche goes without saying.
One could be clever and say merely that, with Nietzsche, his very equivocality is itself equivocal, and it would be right to say so. However, left at that, such a characterization initiates a spiral of thought that burrows itself into the soil. It is the business of philosophy to digest such material, to sift it for its intrinsic clarity—otherwise, philosophy would be nothing more than gamesmanship and scholarly fantasy. And so it is as much to the point to observe that Nietzsche is dealing with conceptions that defy simple expression, that he is laced in and trussed by conventional terminology that resists the statement he needs to make, terminology that has been filtered by and formulated according to the very conceptions he wishes to deny, conceptions that frequently establish themselves as opposites, as choices one is required to choose between, and that he is seeking to say that which has not yet found its unequivocal terminology, which stands beyond the perimeters of established options. His verbal play is a ploy. It is a means to an end, not the end itself, not the thought but the only available statement for getting at the thought, and it is our business to find our way to it.
And so there is an unequivocal affirmation of life in Nietzsche, but it is not such as one would think, nor perhaps one that many readers would be prepared to affirm. The very category of expression becomes transformed under Nietzsche’s hand, by his voice. An affirmation is, by definition, an act of counsel: it is an attitudinal posture, a judgment of value, an expression out of a principle of appropriateness, which is recommended to the reader, which is voiced for the purpose of exhorting the reader to do likewise. Implicitly, it is intended as guidance. But if one asks if this is Nietzsche’s intention, if he affirms life so as to suggest to readers that in a matter open to discretion they choose to affirm life, the answer is as complex as is his personal rhetoric: it is both yes and no. In essence, the category of recommendation does not fit, not even so far as to warrant denial. Something subtler is at work here.
One of Nietzsche’s most overt, and perhaps his best known, assertions of affirmation for life is his clear exhortation: “Amor fati”—the love of fate, the acceptance of necessity. From his first expression of the thought in The Gay Science, Nietzsche makes it clear that his reference to fate is a reference to necessity: “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! . . . And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.” (1) The issue of fate is not to be mis-read here. Nietzsche means the necessary, but it is not the necessary in an ordinary sense.
And so, to understand Nietzsche’s Amor fati, one must first comprehend what Nietzsche means by “fate,” what quality of the fateful is possible within Nietzsche’s ontology, within his vision of the world. The idea of fate is not to be understood as a fixed and unalterable orientation of events on a necessary outcome. It is not a promise and eventual achievement, extending from some source capable of guaranteeing outcome, of a final state, for oneself, humanity at large, or the world, and after the accomplishment of which, eventuality—the playing out of result—comes to an end. There is no teleology in Nietzsche’s universe—nothing comes to an end. The process that is the world, that is reality, is incessant. And so, Nietzsche’s fate must not be understood in the context of a determinism that takes the form of a finality that the world or the self are “fated,” or promised, to achieve. Nor is it fate in the sense of some categorical, transcendental moral imperative to which we owe absolute allegiance and under which we are laden with a sense of absolute responsibility. The incessant process, the continuous “Becoming” of the universe, leads to nothing in the end, for there is no end: “becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing.” (2)
Nietzsche’s “fate” is something more complex than the nominal concept of fate as pure necessity, for as with everything in Nietzsche’s conception of the universe, it is riddled with its own opposite—the intricacy of opposites is the principle of relation in Nietzsche’s understanding of reality. Nietzsche emphasizes the aspect of necessity in his first explicit reference to Amor fati, yet he again and again returns to linking necessity and freedom in his conception of fate. It is an ideal, an ideal of Amor fati, that he envisions in his characterization of Goethe and the poet’s “fatalism”: “Such a spirit [as Goethe] who has become free stands amidst all with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the single is loathsome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole—he does not negate any more.” (3)
The fatalism of Amor fati involves an insight into Being as that which is, as Jacques Derrida phrased the comparable idea, “a third irreducible to the dualisms of classical ontology” (4) whereby Becoming negates Being. For Nietzsche, fate and the love of it involve us in a knowledge, amounting to wisdom, of an “excess” (5) beyond Being with Becoming as its negation, beyond the value of truth with non-truth as its negation, in a state of awareness that is beyond normative conception and that leaves him who “knows” it “only as a Yes-sayer.”
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This saying as an intricacy of opposites—of those which are opposite from the logical point of view, which functions by means of an operative stipulation that everything is to be conceived according to what it is not, according to its negation—is a philosophical strategy, a tactics of proposition, that Nietzsche initiated at the beginning of his career, in The Birth of Tragedy, with his analysis of the tragic view of the world. There, the tragic, rather than constituting the “negating” side to an opposed “affirming,” embodies, through the conception of opposites as interpenetrating, what Nietzsche calls an irreducible “contradiction.” (6) “Contradiction,” for Nietzsche, does not mean the violation of binary logic, but an “intricate relation” (7) between opposites, such as bliss and pain, that simultaneously unites them and holds them apart.
The tragic worldview, then, is a chiasmic unity of opposites, one with neither negation nor affirmation, because as a medium that permits “Yes” and “No” to interpenetrate, it affirms them both equally, leaving affirmation affirmed precisely to the degree that negation is.
Thus, comparable to the tragic, as conceived in the tragic worldview, fate for Nietzsche is a seeming contradiction in terms—the terms of “freedom” and “necessity.” The solution is not a resolution, for no solution is required, for in a truer sense than that conveyed by phrasing the matter as “interpenetrating” opposites, there is no contradiction. Nietzsche does not attribute necessity to fate as determinism vs. freedom; he ascribes both qualities to fate in equal measure. The necessity of fate rests in Nietzsche’s insight that it is unalterably—eternally, necessarily—“free” in a playful elusiveness.
Nietzsche disabuses us of the interpretation of Amor fati as an embracing of fate without interpolation of freedom by linking it to the poetic. This linkage is particularly evident in one of Nietzsche’s Dionysus-Dithyrambs, “Only a Fool! Only a Poet!” (Nur Narr! Nur Dichter!), which alludes to the foolishness, or playfulness, of the poet as the epistemological frame within which to address the excess beyond truth and its opposite, the excess that is fate for Nietzsche.
It is the playfulness/foolishness of the poet and poetry—that is, of the ambiguity or indeterminacy of poetry’s metaphorical core—that would be able to capture the elusive “truth” of fate. But as before, Nietzsche ties together the “freedom” of fate—freedom in the sense of not being restricted by the oppositional logic of discursive language—and the dimension of “necessity” he acknowledges in fate. Thus he writes in “Praise and Eternity” of his love of fate as necessity:
This interpretation of fate—which braces each with its opposite, rendering a “conception” that is “above,” inclusive of, paired normative conceptions in their definition by opposition, and which Nietzsche renders late in his philosophical career—has been implicit in all of his thought, in various guises. It is present in his view of the world as not being determined by the “outside” of some final cause or meaning that serves as its goal, that is not judged as “guilty” by the “No” of the fixity of transcendental Being for being “playful” in its ceaseless, goalless Becoming. In other words, fate, as Nietzsche interprets it, is the emblem of his insight that there is nothing—nihil—outside the transitoriness of the world of eternal Becoming. Fate, then, is the name for a totally immanent, perpetually transitory world that is not subject to the finality of a goal outside of it, the achievement of which would redeem the “guiltiness” of Becoming. Amor fati is the embrace of the world that is as it is—eternally Becoming—not as it “should” be, for there is no “should,” no imperative that it be, or be transformed into, something other than it is. Put differently, Amor fati is the embrace of a world that is an implicate order of freedom and necessity: of freedom in that it is free from any “should” that would judge it to be deficient, and from any goal that “should” be attained, and of necessity because the lack of a goal to be achieved allows the world its “must,” its having to be what it is, not what it is made by an authority beyond the perimeters of the world.
In particular, it can be said that Nietzsche’s appeal to love of fate is the consequence of his thesis of the “death of God,” love of a supreme center of the value of Being that guaranteed meaning to a meaningless world of Becoming—the authority beyond the limits of the world. The fate of Amor fati “frees” us, then, to a world of radical immanence, a world beyond the dualism of immanence and transcendence. Nietzsche characterizes this world as whole in the sense of an interconnectedness or web-like structure Nietzsche describes as Verhängnis (literally a “hanging together”), a word that also means “fate.” Given that the world of interconnectedness (Verhängnis) is its own fate (Verhängnis), it is beyond any outside determinism because there is no outside to the whole. Given a radically holistic world, there is no outside to its Verhängnis, and thus we must be what we are: Verhängnis. As Nietzsche puts it succinctly: “One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness [Verhängnis], one belongs to the whole, one is the whole.” (10)
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It is clear that the freedom of Amor fati, of Nietzsche’s fate, of Nietzsche’s universe, is a “freedom from”: a freedom from a fate imposed upon the world from “outside” the world, the freedom from ultimate, absolute authority. The recipient of freedom in the interpenetration of necessity and freedom is the world, and thus is Becoming. With his appeal to Amor fati, Nietzsche affirms the lack of a center of Being, and thus recognizes a world without the horizon that Being would set to its Becoming. The world has been set free in this thought, and is free to become whatever it will. It is not “guilty” for departing from what it is or only approaching, eternally approaching, what it “should” be. It is innocent in that it is free to become anything—nothing is disallowed, there is no outside authority to disallow.
The realization of Amor fati thus brings us a “new ‘infinite’.” “Rather has the world become ‘infinite’ for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.” (11) A world open to potentially infinite interpretations is one without the institution of a given, unalterable meaning stemming from the metaphysical source of meaning. And with the death of God, with the realization that the necessity of the world is that it must be free from the imposition upon it of any determining authority, “At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again . . . the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’.—” (12)
Thus, Nietzsche is giving us Amor fati as the emblem of a world that demands to be interpreted beyond the “corner” of metaphysics, that is, beyond the reign of a dualistic perspective that insists on one interpretation of the world: the interpretation, the ultimate truth, of the supremacy of Being and its variants functioning as perfection, goal, meaning, and judge over the world of Becoming, the world that is, apart from its interdiction, eternally in process. The world is free in that no such interdiction is possible.
And the awareness of this freedom of the world, the freedom from a truth about which it, and we, would have no choice, is for Nietzsche a “new knowledge” and “the sun of a new gospel”—the gospel of necessity that sets us free and returns us to an innocence in place of the guilt that is inherent in being subject to an ultimate authority, an authority that sets a truth one can never become and a responsibility one can never meet, caught in a state of mutability, in a process of incessant change.
The necessity is the necessity of play, play that is aesthetic, as the world has been for Nietzsche from the start, from the assertion in The Birth of Tragedy, “existence and the world seem justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.” (14) That play, that integration of integral opposites, qualifies even the aspect of existence, subtending beneath it both existence and non-existence. The affirmation of life, the affirmation of fate that is life as necessity, as play, is, as Derrida put it in his reading of Nietzsche, an affirmation that determines the absence of a center of Being (“presence”) “otherwise than as loss of the center.” This interpretation is one in which “play must be conceived before the alternative of presence and absence,” that is, the alternative of Being and Becoming. It is an interpretation that is not “negative, nostalgic” about the lost center of Being but “the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming,” an affirmation that “tries to pass beyond man and humanism . . .” (15)
The sense of the affirmation of life, of fate, as a thought that moves “beyond man and humanism,” of a qualification of existence that intertwines it with nonexistence as a condition of its existence, points to the reason that underlies Nietzsche’s rhetorical strategies and that renders the terminology he employs impertinent to the truth he wishes to reveal—for there is a truth to “things.” Meaning is infinitely interpretable, but there is a reality to which we are subject, of which we are—the reality whose meaning is infinitely interpretable. There is a reason that fate for Nietzsche is authentically fatalistic and which compels all the standard terminology established for contending with questions of meaning and existence capable of nothing better than interpenetration and unending play.
The events of the world are not fatalistic in the sense that there is an ultimate eventuality, an outcome, and thus a meaning to which they always are trending and which puts an end to the process of eventuality. The process is unending, and it is for us fatalistic in that it is beyond our capability to influence. The freedom in necessity is for the world, but it is not for us. We cannot direct or curtail the course of events because we are not present within the course of events. We are, as is all else, merely momentary presences, our lives a sequence of disconnected, flashing events that demonstrate a sequence only for our perceptions. In themselves, they are as glimmering lights on an ocean of glimmering lights, in incessant motion but flowing nowhere. “Here I sat waiting . . . all time without aim” (16)—all time without goal, without finality.
We are without integrity, neither self-sustaining objects nor subjects in the world, for nothing is a self-sustaining object. There is freedom only for the world as there is necessity only for the world, for there is only the world. The rejection of individual integrity, of individual existence, can be found at the start of Nietzsche’s thought, as one can find the philosophical foundation of the aesthetic nature of existence and the world. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche dismisses the reality of the principium individuationis, (17) the principle of individuality, of the integrity of the object and its individual presence. There are, for Nietzsche, no “things,” no existences that stand apart in any way from all of existence. All exist only in the web-like structure of Verhängnis and exist in no other sense. Our conception of individual existences is a function of our error regarding the sense of unity. “We need ‘unities’ in order to be able to reckon: that does not mean we must suppose that such unities exist. We have borrowed the concept of unity from our ‘ego’ concept—our oldest article of faith. If we did not hold ourselves to be unities, we would never have formed the concept ‘thing.’ ” (18)
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