Post #143: Amor Fati

21 Sep. 2024

“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: wanting nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not for all eternity. Thus not merely bearing what is necessary, much less concealing anything, but loving it.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (“Why I Am So Clever,” Section 10)

     Even the greatest wisdom, given a twist in the wrong direction, can easily turn to folly. Add just a letter and amor fati, love of one’s fate, becomes amor fatui, love of the fool.

     It may be a little harsh to say that borrowing one’s bullion from the sages of the past, then lending it out for personal profit, or mixing a little into medals and selling them at a handsome markup, turns the real thing into mere fool’s gold. Perhaps the debased currency is still valuable, despite the adulteration; but purity of intentions, meaning not always looking for a return, counts for something—if not always in a world bent on monetizing everything, then at least on the Path, whether Buddhist or Stoic.

     Epictetus was once a slave, as I have mentioned, possibly crippled through the fault of his master; that is not the whole story, but enough to protect him from any imputations of grandstanding. I have referred several times (#28, #79, and esp. #93) to the manly musings of James Stockdale. Once again, though even confirmed heroes should not be exempt from questioning, they are beyond suspicion of merely shamming it. We may be sure that during so many long, lonely hours of solitary confinement (adding up to years altogether), the likes of Mr. Stockdale could not escape looking into those forbidding inner pits and corners where the dark things lurk—what Goenka called the centipedes and scorpions of the mind (#54). If one does not lose one’s sanity or life in such trials, one can only emerge chastened, a sadder but a wiser man. Stockdale’s bluff soldierly style may not be to everyone’s liking, and may sound like bravado to some; but the inner boaster and buffoon does not do well when one is put through the ropes, or kicked into the darkness afterwards. Whether Stockdale’s adaptation of Epictetus’s teaching will work as reliably for others may perhaps be doubted; that he lived it for real is beyond doubt.

     It is a tall order, this talk of not only freely accepting but embracing things as they are, rather than as we would like them to be. (The element of destiny should not be misunderstood: neither for the Buddha nor for the Stoics was there ever any question of fatalism in a sense that might undermine human freedom and responsibility in their ordinary meaning.*) An awakened being, or a former slave turned sage, or a war-hero may speak to us of amor fati without risk of making themselves ridiculous; the rest of us cannot be so sure.

     What of Nietzsche, then? Who was he to speak as he did? Let us notice, first, that when we look past his thundering side (as so many have failed to do), and we pay a little more heed to his quieter tones, it becomes quite evident that he spoke as he did not with the bluster of easy victory, but because he struggled so frightfully with the misery that was besetting him on all sides—not only the relative obscurity and marginal relevance of a once-promising but not very successful academic (his books barely sold a few hundred copies each in his lifetime: he was not to his contemporaries the legend, good or bad or beyond good and evil, that he has become for us), but nerves so high-strung that it makes for terrifying contemplations.

     No one captured better the pitiable side (not a word Nietzsche would have relished, but then we must all sometimes listen to things we would rather not hear) to this would-be prophet of triumphant vitality than Stefan Zweig in his harrowing portrait, “An Apologia of Sickness”:**

Screams beyond count from a tormented body. A ledger with a hundred columns of bodily miseries and a horrifying bottom line: “At all ages of life, the surfeit of suffering has been tremendous for me.” And indeed, there is hardly a demonic torture missing from this frightful pandemonium of ailments: thundering, incapacitating headaches that nail their staggering victim to the couch or the bed for days on end; stomach cramps and bloody vomiting; migraines and fevers; lack of appetite, fatigues, hemorrhoids, constrictions of the bowels, cold shivers during the day, cold sweats at night—going round and round a horrifying cycle. Add eyes “three quarters blind,” which swell up and get teary with the slightest effort, allowing the mental laborer no more than “an hour and a half of proper eyesight in a day.” Nietzsche despises the hygienics of the body and keeps working at his desk for ten hours a day, for which excesses his overheating brain punishes him with more raging headaches and a nervous overflow such that, when the body has long been exhausted at night, the thoughts and visions cannot be switched off until they are forcibly subdued with medication. Ever heavier dosages are required to purchase a little slumber, upon which the stomach rebels at having to pay so high a price. The vicious cycle resumes: spasmodic vomiting, more headaches, more medication—a merciless, insatiable, passionate battle pitting the overstrained organs against each other, a wild game with a spiked ball of pain that gets thrown from one to the other without end, or pause even, relentlessly back and forth, up and down. Never any quiet period of shallow contentment, not so much as a few weeks of comfort and distraction. In twenty years it would be hard to find even a dozen letters in which there is not an audible groan in one of the lines. The screams get ever more frantic, ever more raving as Nietzsche’s hyper-vigilant, over-sensitive, and much-inflamed nerves pierce him through and through. “Give yourself a way out: die!” he calls out to himself; or he writes “The thought of a revolver is a source of relative pleasure to me”; or, “This horrible and nearly constant torture leaves me yearning for the end, and there are indications that a stroke may finally set me free.” He has long exhausted the superlatives with which to express his torments; the screams become almost monotonous in their shrill and rapid succession, they no longer even sound fully human and seem, instead, to rise from the “dog-kennel existence” that is Nietzsche’s life up to the human realm. And then, all of a sudden, in Ecce Homo, a leaping flame of contradiction so outrageous that one might get scared by it: a proud, forceful, stony confession that seems to put the lie to all the screaming, “All in all I have been healthy these past fifteen years.”

     The scene may owe something to poetic license, granted, but if so, it is not a falsification but an elaboration, an evocation. We need not belabor the point any further; suffice it to say that when Nietzsche wrote of amor fati, he was not speaking lightly, as of a trope or some accomplishment within easy reach, but of a mortal challenge, the struggle of a lifetime. Perhaps he succeeded, in the end, perhaps not; but he had, in any case, to fight for it through a vast host of agonies.

     What he reports in his Gay Science (par. 276) is likewise not an attainment so much as an ambition: “I want to learn, more and more, to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall become someone who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse, not even those who are accusers themselves. Looking away shall be my only negation! One day I wish to be someone who only says Yes.” I want to learn; then I shall become; one day. This is not the voice of proclamation, but of aspiration; and it redeems what might otherwise sound like mere bombast. So let it stand without derision.

*Marcus Aurelius was much impressed with the guidance he received (in response to what question we know not) from the oracle at Caieta: “It’s up to you!” (Meditations I.17 as translated by the brothers Hicks) Rather than qualifying freedom and responsibility, as we often do under more modern influences, Marcus took them to be the very cornerstones of the Stoical philosophy. A wise acceptance of the decrees of fate has nothing to do with lapsing into passivity; quite the contrary, it is about taking the fullest responsibility, making every effort possible, and then embracing how things turn out as coming from the gods. Thus the wise and virtuous man, as Marcus writes in book III, “delights from the depths of his being in whatever happens” (par. 4). Likewise, “the one distinguishing mark of the good man is his love for and delight in the thread of his own destiny” (par. 3).

**A section of the chapter on Nietzsche in Zweig’s Kampf mit dem Dämon, 1925, in my own translation.