The Philosophy of Amor Fati: Nietzsche’s Guide to Making Peace with Your Past
The phrase Amor Fati is Latin for love of one’s fate. This concept is found to have been discussed and referenced by stoic philosophers Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius first. However, this notion found its most relevant expression in the work of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who made love of fate central to his philosophy.
Towards the end of his life, Nietzsche secluded himself to a life of loneliness and despair in the swiss alps and went through a period of deep self-reflection over a life that was filled with hardships and failures. His work was essentially all he had and sadly that wasn’t enough, at least at the time. His books didn’t sell well and his philosophy went mostly unnoticed. His life was beset with failure after failure and misery after misery. Until he died, a relatively horrible death.
Of course, we know now that he will go on to become a prominent figure and arguably one of the most dynamic philosophers of all time, with his ideas being the cornerstone of morality and modern intellectuality. So how did such a brilliant philosophical mind deal with such a dreadful existence?
He attempted to philosophize it, to draw wisdom and understanding from it. He conceived and modeled his view of Amor Fati.
My formula for human greatness 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 — all idealism is deception in the face of what is necessary — but love it.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
For Nietzsche when talking about amor fati he is talking more generally about the love of one’s life. His usage of the word love is also crucial here. It suggests more than a stoic acceptance. It's a feeling of enthusiastic candidness, or rather, a declaration against the tendency to regret.
Important takeaways and Implementation guide:
- Make peace with the present.
We regret now and yearn for otherness. It appears as though there were options to have done differently, for things to go differently, to be better, In a theoretical sense, this may be true. But in this reality, the one we must live, there were no options to have done differently and there is no other way for things to go. - Trust Yourself.
Every decision you have made is the best and is the only decision you could have made at the time, with the information you had and the state of mind you were in. and every condition of life that either that decision led to or that are fundamental to life in general, you have no control over and cannot change. - No one has power over the past.
To regret and desire to go back and edit the past assumes that the things that we wish to change are 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 somehow one would still not find themselves in a likely similar situation of regret again. - Create/Find Beauty.
It is not that life could have been better 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 to the now. - The true challenge of life and the task of life, Nietzsche writes, is to fall in love with what you are actually experiencing. Right now, as it is, in all the ways it is.
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?
Amor fati is the embrace of fate, not as a burden to bear, but as a joyous affirmation of life in all its chaos and beauty. To love one’s fate is to find meaning in the midst of suffering, to transform even the bleakest moments into opportunities for growth and self-discovery
Thank you for your time. And huge respect for this revolutionary thinker and his work. I would definitely explore more of his work in the next few articles. Please refer to the links attached if you’re looking to explore more of Nietzsche’s philosophical writings. Amor Fati.
