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Nietzsche’s Amor Fati
The Embracing of an Undecided Fate
By Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen
There is thus no free will, not for individual beings, “we realize the impossibility of any liberum arbitrium, or ‘intelligible freedom.’ ” (19) The Will to Power is the motivating impulse to apparent eventuality—more, it is the “substance” of constant eventuality rather than the power “behind” it—but the Will to Power is not ours. Our personal impulses to action are not freely chosen, we do what we do just as objects subject to interaction, subject to laws of physics, subject to the slip of gravity, do what they do—without motive, without intention. Our motivating impulses function something more like instincts than intentions. They function in a law-like fashion.
Comparable to gravity. Law-like, but our impulses are as if controlled by natural law within a universe free of outside imposition, free of imposed requirement. We follow what the universe does—we are of it, and are nothing else.
And it is the nature of Nietzsche’s universe that necessitates the absence of integral, individual existences—specifically, the nature of his temporality. In Nietzsche’s ontology, there is no time line, no movement from the past to the present and into the future, not as a continuous flow upon which all events and existences are buoyed, like leaves meandering down a stream. Time has no currents. There is no continuance. There are but isolated moments in time, points of time—“It is possible to speak only of points of time, no longer of time” (21)—and nothing endures, thus there is nothing to endure, for there is no time for anything to continue to exist.
The moment is an expansive idea, increasingly expansive over the course of his career to the point at which it becomes the central image of his ontological vision, comparable to, and explicative of, the Will to Power. It becomes the setting for the realization of the truth of the world. “On this perfect day [. . .] a glance of the sun fell upon my life: I looked backward, I looked outward, I never saw so much and so many good things at the same time. [. . .] How could I not be thankful to the whole of my life?” (22) It is important to realize that the perfection Nietzsche refers to here is not the perfection of Being beyond the world of Becoming but the contemplative experience of a moment, of a wink of an eye—Augenblick—during which time is a Becoming without the striving for a goal, and thus is not deficient, that it is “perfect,” complete unto itself, in the world of Becoming. The gratitude Nietzsche expresses for the time of his whole life, out of the experience of the perfection of the moment, is an affirmation of fate as the irreducible interplay of time and eternity, for the moment and eternity as an immeasurable moment become interlaced. “Can we remove the idea of a goal from the process and then affirm the process in spite of this?—This would be the case if something were attained at every moment within this process—and always the same.” (23) The moment is ever the moment, what is “attained” is “always the same,” but it is always something “attained,” always something newly achieved. The moment of attainment never departs, and Being and Becoming are inextricably intertwined under the aegis of the moment, of the point of time, as under the aegis of the Will to Power.
Yet, normally, we do not experience the moments, the time points, as always the same attainment—we experience them as constantly shifting, constantly transforming into something different and following each other in a sequence. The time points are isolated in the sense that each is a span of duration limited by its nature as a dynamic “atom” of time, but they are not isolated from each other in terms of influence—they are not walled off from each other. “The point of time affects another point of time, thus dynamic properties are to be presupposed.” (24) Thus, a world can exist—it does not flash into and out of existence, all time points compounded in some sense upon each other, with no time line along which to distribute them. And thus we are capable of interpreting—misinterpreting—a personal history, a continuing appearance of self, a memory. The appearance of distinct, individual, continuing identity becomes what was analyzed in The Birth of Tragedy as the Apollinian “beautiful illusion” (25) that obscures the Dionysian vision of continuous flux, the flux of incessant moments of time that somehow are always new and yet always the same—the “article of faith” of the idea of unity, which permits us to “reckon”: the reduction of the flux down to the appearance of a coherence of existence.
Thus there can be the appearance of personal outcome, of an inexorability to personally significant events, of eventuality on an individual level—of personal fate—but the viewpoint of integrity is our own Apollinian construction. It is error, but it is not our error, and it is not our Apollinian construction in the sense of personal commission. The construction is made, the error of interpretation committed, but they are not made and committed by us, for that could be so only if we created ourselves. Only then would we be present to construct the illusion of our own existence. We would then be causa sui, self-generating, and in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche committed himself to the unacceptability of causa sui, (26) to the absurdity of the claim of self-creation, on the basis of logical flaw.
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Which is to say that, in Nietzsche’s universe, we can exercise no influence over events because we do not exist. We are mere appearance, delusions suffering the delusion of ourselves, apparent presences by our natures strangely capable of being aware of ourselves as appearances and incapable of seeing past the deceptive appearance of our natures. “ ‘Mankind’ does not advance, it does not even exist.” (27) We are not the source of events, and thus not in a position to be the source of any influence over events—we are events, comparable to all other events, appearances thrown up by the dynamism of the Will to Power, the active and sole reality of the world. In more technical language, we are epiphenomenal—moved as are all apparent “things” and incapable of moving them, patterns among the patterns woven and rewoven into the tapestry, and thus the center of a philosophy that “tries to pass beyond man and humanism . . .”
“World wheel . . . blends us in too,” (28) which is to say that Nietzsche’s is a nihilistic vision, a vision in which all that we know and all that we are is rendered void of reality: we are “something” done by “something” else. “It is only late that one musters the courage for what one really knows. That I have hitherto been a thorough-going nihilist, I have admitted to myself only recently.” (29) But for Nietzsche, Nihilism is a complex matter: “Nihilism. It is ambiguous: A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism. B. Nihilism as decline and recession of power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.” (30)
Passive nihilism, also “Nihilism as a psychological state,” (31) is a widespread and historically significant condition of despair, following upon the collapse of values that have been revealed to be untenable, that can no longer be believed. This is the psychological repercussion of the death of God, the loss of the sense of an outside authority to constrain the Becoming of the world and give it a fixed meaning, an ultimate and final goal. For Nietzsche, after 2,000 years of Christianity and its moral interpretation of the world, its belief that the world is organized by principles of good and evil, that principles of good and evil are true—a self-aggrandizing faith that envisions the world on the model of ourselves, that sees the world as centered on us and our fate, “the hyperbolic naiveté of man: positing himself as the meaning and the measure of the value of all things” (32)—the forced loss of faith in these values, the recognition of their arbitrariness, their lack of truth, brings about the “decline and recession of power of the spirit”—a general dispiritedness. Under the principle that attitudes give way to their opposites—“Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones but by extreme positions of the opposite kind” (33)—the loss of faith results in a yearning for nothingness. “At bottom, man has lost his faith in his own value when no infinitely valuable whole works through him; i.e., he conceived such a whole in order to be able to believe in his own value.” (34) Once we realize “the world does not have the value we thought it had,” (35) we become as nothing to ourselves, and the world loses all worth.
But there is also the form of active Nihilism, which in individuals of strength—the virtue that Nietzsche admires most, “I teach the Yes to all that strengthens, that stores up strength, that justifies the feeling of strength,” (36) a quality one may think of as fortitude—can realize the “new knowledge,” “the sun of the new gospel,” can observe the freedom of the world that is absent the imposition of a fate imposed from without. In the same conditions that bring about the despair that yearns for nothingness, in the collapse of all old values, “we find the pathos that impels us to seek new values. In sum: the world might be far more valuable than we used to believe; we must see through the naiveté of our ideals, and while we thought we accorded it the highest interpretation, we may not even have given our human existence a moderately fair value. What has become deified? The value instincts in the community (that which made possible its continued existence.)” (37)
In this, we are given the indication of the new value, of the higher aspiration that is revealed when we are made aware of the freedom of the world from outside authority and forced meaning, when the scales fall from the eyes of those who formerly believed in the values that imposed our image on our vision of the universe. The new value is that of the “community,” as conceived in the opening of The Gay Science, the species, that to which we are sacrificed: the existence that continues as we, as individuals, do not, but that depends on our fortitude to preserve it. (Indicating what Nietzsche makes clear in numerous passages: that which breaks the credibility of the values that held sway over us for 2,000 years is evolution, the realization that we do not come from a source outside the earth, that we are born of this world.) And, as the title of the book conveys, the tragic philosophy has been re-envisioned as something joyous.
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As with Goethe, “all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole.” Here is the affirmation of life, the essence of Amor fati: we must learn the joy of perishing for the life of the species, of being sacrificed, as we have no choice but to be, for the continuance of life that both is ours and is not ours: not our individual lives but the life of the whole of which we are a part. We must learn to face with joy, with the Yes of affirmation, our part in a world that “lives on itself: its excrements are its food,” (39) and we are among what is consumed. For that is the continuing, unending eventuality of the Will to Power, and it is the counsel offered, the recommendation made, that there is joy in realizing “This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!” (40)
But there is an anomaly in this affirmation; there is a logical absurdity in the counsel offered. There is a flaw in this Yes to life that recommends itself to its readership. There is a ghostly presence haunting every proposition that Nietzsche propounds, brooding and questioning the very core of the philosopher’s reasoning. If there is no free will, then to what purpose the recommendation of a posture toward existence, an acceptance of fate—what point to Amor fati? To what purpose advising an attitude toward existence to those who do not exist, who “are also this will to power—and nothing besides”? What is the point of a new gospel? How can it be possible to choose to formulate new values in reaction to a recognition of necessity? How can one be exhorted to affirm necessity? If we should acknowledge fate, if we can, then isn’t it all something other than fated? If fate is something to which we owe “absolute allegiance” and from which devolves upon us “absolute responsibility,” if that allegiance is ours to give or not, if the matter even arises, then where is the fate? And if there is no mankind, if it “does not even exist,” then to whom is Nietzsche writing, and who is speaking? Where is the sense in all this?
The questions are right, for there is nothing in Nietzsche to indicate that fate is merely a quality of large-scale patterns of events whereas the petty events of an individual life occur freely, as if too unimportant to be noticed—the standard bail-out position for those reading denunciations of free will, as if Cassandra-like, we act and speak by our own discretion within an unalterable flow of history. And it is right to say that non-existence is a chiasmic unity of existence and non-existence and is not a pure quality different from its opposite, to say that freedom and necessity are two sides of the same infinitely self-differentiating and ontologically variegated coin. It would even be necessary to say it, but it would not be sufficient.
For just to say precisely what Nietzsche has told us is merely to say precisely what Nietzsche has told us. That is mere reiteration, a parroting of endowed phrasings, a demonstration of memorization, of received input, as if we were without the freedom to consider, to understand. We have yet to digest what we have been told. We have yet to see what sense it makes. We have yet to sift it for its intrinsic clarity. We have yet to make something of it.
In the end, there is only one answer, if one is to take Nietzsche seriously and not qualify what he has said without qualification, not partialize him where he has been impartial, so as to leave room in what he says for his act of saying it. Nietzsche is playing the game he must play, the game all philosophers must play, in order to write at all, in order to think at all. The necessity, the Nihilism of non-existence, of being an appearance generated by something he is not, applies to him as much as to everyone, but he writes as if he is exempt from his own conditions, from his own mental scenario, from the truth he is telling—as if he stood “outside” and commented on what lay under the gaze of his mind. To write at all, to think at all, is of necessity to do so—one cannot stand at both ends of the microscope at the same time. To announce the non-existence of free will, and of us, is significant only if the announcement is freely made. If one could not have done other than say it, then there is no significance in its being said, no more significance than there is in an earthquake, or a tidal wave, or any natural event—no more significance than in the falling of a leaf. When something is said, there must be a reason, and if the reason is that it had to have been said, that it could have not been other than said, that it was compelled, mindlessly, there thinking is at an end.
Here, Nietzsche has no choice but to place himself in the position of the Cretan Liar—if he chooses to speak the absence of free will, then he gives evidence of free will; if he says nothing to deny free will, then it is possible at least that there is no free will. If he denies existence, then he cannot not exist; if he does not arrive to deny it, then it might be there is no individual existence. But then, this is what it is to philosophize. All philosophers place themselves under the rubric of the Cretan Liar. All make themselves, as they have no choice but to do as they theorize conditions, exemptions from the conditions they theorize. To philosophize is that as much as it is anything more: to make oneself, for the moment, apparently, an exemption—an eye gazing in from somewhere else, from outside the philosophical vision.
However, there is a moral imperative here—for Nietzsche, for any thinker of integrity who confronts the image of deception entailed by the very attempt to state the truth. Given that the acts of thinking and speaking necessarily falsify themselves and imply the denial of what is being thought about and spoken of, and given that one has no choice but to think and speak—for to refuse to think about the absence of free will because there is no free will is as willful an act as deliberately to proclaim the absence of free will because there is no free will—it is an obligation, an imposition not out of authority but out of a sense of honesty, a sense against the odds, to speak so as to correct the inherent error in speech, to militate against the implication that speech is free and there is someone speaking, to speak what one seems to deny by speaking.
In the end, there is no guarantee, because there is no discretion—we cannot choose to be able to choose, that too would be causa sui: freedom creating itself. There is no set of appearances that could demonstrate that the appearance of freedom is freedom, even when the freedom appears through the act of deliberately denying freedom. It could well be that Nietzsche writes what he writes because he must, because he is the creature he is, and that there is no choice in his assertion of necessity or in his suggestion by demonstration that there is freedom in the saying. So too, we could be reading Nietzsche because we are fated to and thinking what we think of him because it is determined that we will. And it could be we are certain that the constraint of thought is palpably absurd—because we have no choice but to so think. “Everything is necessity—thus says the new knowledge; and this knowledge itself is necessity.” (41)
But to philosophize at all, one must embrace the contradiction and remain content that one will, of necessity, undermine the credibility of anything one can say by the act of saying it—one must affirm that contradiction. This would make philosophy itself the very image of life, and of the affirmation of life, and of Amor fati: the enthusiastic embrace of necessity, which is itself, in its simplest sense, an utter contradiction, a nonsensical counsel, as if necessity could care whether we embraced it. Thereby, freedom and necessity become a contradiction that does not entail a violation of binary logic but rather an intricate relation that simultaneously unites them and holds them apart. Thereby, we become what we already are. (42) And thereby, Nietzsche can be said to have affirmed life not so well by what he said as simply by his saying.
© Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen, 2007
All Rights Reserved
IMAGE: Pieter Pauwel Rubens, Prometheus Bound, 1610-11.
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