Loving One’s Fate: Nietzsche on the Death of God and Amor Fati

Since the time of Plato, a core tenet of traditional Western philosophy has been a distinction between how things “appear” versus how they really “are.” The implication of this idea is that our task as humans is to extricate ourselves from illusion to get in touch with the “real” that lies beneath the veil of appearance and rise above it to arrive at the “truth” about reality.

Nietzsche, however, believed that it is “this belief in a better world to come that is the source of our sickness” (Guignon & Pereboom, 2001). He believed that traditional theories of knowledge had become excessively abstract, and held that true human experience could not be accurately encapsulated solely through the lens of reason. In Nietzsche's view, the narrative that hard work and suffering will lead us to total knowledge, justice, or happiness always leads us to judge life in a negative light because it assumes that there is something bad or lacking in ordinary existence. This viewpoint creates distrust in our world and becomes life-negating.

The things we consider worth striving for are based upon a hierarchy of values that are typically regarded as transcendent, which implies the existence of absolutes that are unchanging and objective, such as the fixed order of the cosmos, causality, and reason. Contrarily, Nietzsche believed that “there are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths” (Nietzsche, 1986). He argued that rather than facts of nature, these absolutes are instead the product of our ways of thinking and acting; that is, they are expressions of our own hopes and needs and are cravings that we impose “onto experience rather than something we discover from experience” in order to satisfy our desire for metaphysical comfort (Guignon & Pereboom, 2001).

Before the rise of science and modernism in the West, the world was a place where everything was imbued with meaning and significance. When nature was perceived as meaningful, the perceived order of the cosmos and our position within it offered pre-given goals in life. Humans had an inherent God-given purpose, so to speak, and there was a sense of existing within a “great chain of being… in which each type of thing [had] a proper place” (Guignon & Pereboom, 2001).

The rise of modern science undermined this sense of pre-given meaning. The absolutes that had formerly breathed vitality and significance into the old ways of life, such as the value of transcendence and meaning, became disregarded and disenchanted, thus Nietzsche’s famous assertion that “God is dead” (Nietzsche, 1974).

Nietzsche regarded this loss of absolutes as a terrifying and shattering event. Without an intrinsically meaningful position within the universe, we find ourselves abandoned and thrown into a meaningless abyss with no sense of direction with which to orient ourselves (Guignon & Pereboom, 2001).

This development in Western culture has led us to a place where we lack a firm foundation for our lives. With no agreed-upon transcendent basis for our values and beliefs, and no consensus about what is right or wrong, we lack direction for our aspirations. This is evident in the sense of atomization, loneliness, hopelessness, directionlessness, and purposelessness that pervades modern life.

This leads to nihilism, the complete disbelief in all values, for when we have no assurance of a future worth striving for, we are left with no sense of purpose, and everything seems up for grabs. We have no weight to our existence.

Nietzsche's proposed antidote to this sense of directionlessness and weightlessness is to embrace life as it is in the here-and-now, to free ourselves from the longing for absolutes and instead say yes to life in all its pain without passing judgment or longing for something different.

It is a form of radical acceptance which acknowledges there is no undercurrent of life that gives it an inherent and overarching significance. Nietzsche held that if you can embrace life as it is, you will be freed from “the need to see your life as part of a wider cosmic story about our purpose on earth, and you would be able to appropriate the events in your own life without worrying about how they contribute to some greater cosmic purpose…as a result, you would be able to live fully and intensely in each moment, being totally present in your own life” (Guignon & Pereboom, 2001).

This is the idea of amor fati, ‘loving one’s fate.” When we give up the idea of having an overarching purpose, we are left with a lack of cohesiveness and feel disconnected; however, when we accept this and appropriate it through willing it, our lives begin to take on coherence and form.

By accepting your own life story as it is, by embracing all you have been and will be, you annihilate nihilism. When you say “yes” to life in this way, you are relieved of the craving for the legitimization of your existence. When you own all you have been, all you are, and all you will be, instead of realizing a pre-given potential, you are free to fully assume the identity you create for yourself.

It is not a matter of merely accepting yourself, but embracing your existence in all its aspects. The goal is to “appropriate and to organize as [your] own all that [you] have done…into a coherent whole. It is simply to become able to accept all such things, good and evil, as things [you] have done” (Nehamas, 1985).

This active will to go beyond all apparent boundaries in a quest for greater possibilities is what Nietzsche considered the path to a healthy way of life. By engaging with life in this way, we are able to play with the remains of shattered absolutes and rework the perspectives handed down to us by the past into new original perspectives that express a personal creative intent and give shape to our lives.

References

Guignon, C. B., & Pereboom, D. (Eds.). (2001). Existentialism: Basic Writings (2nd ed.). Hackett Publishing Company.

Nehamas, A. (1985). Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Harvard University Press.

Nietzsche, F. (1974). The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1882)

Nietzsche, F. (1986). Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1878)