The person in the modern world is thrown back into a mode of existence corresponding to a rung of collective culture - in having to abandon the systematic misinterpretation of experience that is the condition of self-contained philosophizing, he lives within a socio-culturally embedded interpretation of existence which he is fundamental conflict with precisely because it functions as a complement, as a facilitation, and a support to the fundamentally life-affirming, life-sanctifying orientations and capacities of individuals who have been able to act upon the world to create effective mechanisms which reflect their preferences in the conditions of their flourishing. (This sanctification is a precondition of all postconscious acting.)
That is, collective cultures reflect the conflict of interpretations - they are its products, and the process and product of interpretation are themselves based upon the makeup of individual psychologies.
That is the role of social and genealogical critique in Nietzsche: to reveal, by example, the underlying mechanisms through which culture is disseminated and reinforced: he envisages a larger, unified social science which can reveal how conditions of need (psychology, biology) create conditions of interaction (ideologies, philosophy, beliefs), through facilitating mechanisms and factors (politics, economics, sociology, anthropology, social psychology) to condition and guide the existing actualities within lived experience, bearing in mind that the reflexively conditioned historian at bottom always contradicts.
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Love of fate is a transition back to a starting point of an approach to the world that embraces lived experience as the object of our investments of emotional and intellectual attention.
The individual has transcended lived experience, he is situating himself behind a skeptical veil of abstraction, of concepts and ideas, from which to organize and explain away the inherent unpleasantness of lived experience.
He structures lived experience according to these ideas, ordering his thoughts, creating moral systems, and approaching life from the lens of these ideas, acting in accordance to the totality of the thought out ideal as applied to the substantive content of the lived experience.
That is the equilibrium of the philosophical type - one who throws the net over the motley whirl of the senses, and seeking to distance himself from the nature of existing as the fundamental condition, the primary mode of living which the mob instinctively pursues and excels in.
However it is the failure of these ascetic ideals which throws the philosopher back into the world in which living as others do is a requirement which he is in some way maladapted to. It is the tension of the failure of the ascetic ideal which is instinctively, and intuitively felt, and the essential hatred of existence which is the chief motivating force of one who constructs philosophical systems, which drives the post-Romantic philosopher into explicitly pessimistic hatred and denial of the will-to-live, which, when deprived of the metaphysical narrative of the truthfulness of salvation, and therefore its accordant prescriptive mode of life, collapses into a denial of the validity of the conditions of existence, and its contents, with the absolute skeptical hypothesis as its epistemic creed.
The love of fate is explicitly addressed to the types who are unable to live without justification, whether metaphorically-speaking, of God's guilt, or of one's own, for the suffering one has inflicted upon the world.
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Why love fate?
Fate refers to a series of circumstances which are predetermined in some way and in which essential characteristics one observes and lives through but cannot change. There are several possible candidates for this series of circumstances which can be construed as ‘fate’. First, the claim of ‘Character is Fate’, which significantly structures and limits the ways one lives or can choose to live, second, the aspects of the external environment which one is unable to control, and third, the kinds of experiences and situations generated when these given irreversible conditions come into contact with each other.
At the outset, we can pose an essential problem of definition: how does love of fate differ from pure resignation, or fatalism? The love of fate and fatalism share in the acknowledgement of the significance of our failure to control the conditions in our lives that do cause displeasure or suffering. This obstruction of the will toward attaining a desired state has swelled to such a point of concern that an ostensive approach has to be taken towards dealing with it, in the form of therapy, as it were. However, the love of fate preserves an active form of directedness towards the world, re-channelling the desires for the unobtainable state toward the conditions of that unobtainability. It reinterprets the failure or inability to achieve a certain object as a cause not for regret, misery or guilt, but as a condition of one’s life that is to be embraced and affirmed. Conversely, fatalism creates and breeds a passive form of hopelessness towards the task of attaining the desired object without specifying the attitudes which are directed towards the object of desire, or the situation of hopelessness. Insofar as the agent is unable to relieve himself of the desire, the situation descends to a state of pessimism or despair, and one that drains individual health.
But of course, in order to love fate, one has to believe in fate and in the lack of ability, despite our best efforts, to improve the given situation to our satisfaction, in the first place. Given that Nietzsche views the truth of this claim to be inconclusive, why affirm the lack of free will in this regard – don’t we want to affirm or assert the presence of free will instead? We may reply that Nietzsche tires of the intellectual dishonesty of metaphysicians of free will, who attempt to establish the dogmatic belief in the fact through arguments, when it remains essentially unknown. But this fails to account for the converse danger of believing in fate where it does not exist. The practical effects of misdirected belief in either may be equally damaging. While a belief in absolute free will breeds a sense of responsibility and guilt for all our acts, which becomes a cause for unjustified unhappiness and unhealthy inhibitions, a belief in fate may lead to indolence, or pessimistic fatalism, or lowered ambition, and wasted opportunities for individual, or world-development. And if we acknowledge the possibility of a reflexively conditioning power of this belief, it might seem that the price of believing in unavoidable fate is too high.
An answer may be suggested: if we take Nietzsche's aim in the denial of free will to be primarily one of the eradication of guilt, then amor fati might be interpreted as a solution to the problem of guilt: the agent adopts a sense of responsibility for the present and future, but is absolved of the past. The past belongs to the circumstances classed under ‘Fate’- its only relation to the living present existing as a cause - and we are to accept it without guilt or regret; as a given. We do not allow the past to colour the present moment in which we act. This requires a “form of robust health”, an ability defined as “forgetfulness”, or a good “digestive system”, as its precondition. But this solution does not eliminate the problem of the need for a degree of responsibility in the present as an intuitively forceful guide to action. The inhibitive power of a sense of responsibility in the present implies the ability to make and keep promises by definition – ie, to create fixed identities over time through which to structure our approach to the world – and this ability of the “protracted will” to extend projects over long periods of time is crucial to the development advocated by Nietzsche. So Nietzsche attempts to remove the phenomena of guilt as a stain on mankind while retaining the notion of responsibility. This is possible insofar as a sense of responsibility is not to be defined as a fear of guilt, but either as a love of honour, or genuine generosity of spirit, or a commitment to an ideal of virtue.
But the question remains: Is the admission of fate not in contradiction to the possibility of Nietzsche’s normative calls to develop mental discipline and to pursue an individualistic programme of self-cultivation? And wouldn’t the belief in the ability to control or reshape our circumstances in this respect be an important contributory factor, and not mere epiphenomena, for this process of development? Cultivating a belief in the lack of free will sets an unhealthy precedent, and encouraging emotional attachment to their conditions could easily overwhelm the drives to self-cultivation. An obvious possible reply is that Nietzsche interprets the individual's belief in his ability to impose his will on a given set of circumstances as a symptom of strength or weakness of will rather than as effective cause, but to assert this as a blanket justification for the opening of the floodgates of fate seems to me to overestimate the sovereign power of individuals against the influence of ideas that are taken to be true. And Nietzsche clearly does not take the crude epiphenomenalist view that our conscious commitments have no effect on the development of our character or our acts, even as he develops a physiologically-grounded character typology in terms of ideal binaries such as “weak” versus “strong”, which do point to certain unchangeable aspects in a person's character: “To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, a desire to overcome, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd of weakness to demand that it should express itself as strength.”. Is Nietzsche therefore suggesting that the acknowledgement of selective fatalism is a test to tempt the strong to overcome it, while it serves as justification for the weak among themselves to feel contented and unresentful at their lot? I think an answer to this question lies in understanding the larger context of amor fati, or “Dionysian pessimism”, and in exactly what it defines as fate.
We can gather certain hints about the nature of the Dionysian pessimist and his relation to fate. In GS370, he is “richest in the fullness of life...[and] cannot only afford the sight of the terrible and questionable but even the terrible deed and any luxury of destruction, decomposition and negation...owing to an excess of fertilizing, procreating energies that can still turn any desert into lush farmland.” So he is one who does not turn away from the sight of the ugly or the nausea-inducing, because of his ability to transfigure it into something beautiful. He wants to “learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then [he] shall be one of those who make things beautiful.” So it is firstly the change in perspective created by cultivating an eye for beauty in all things, and secondly in making things beautiful by weaving its existence as necessity into a narrative thread through actual outcomes, giving it meaning by turning it into a cause for a desirable result. Now let us pursue this further. If one adopts the view of oneself in the larger scheme of things, that is, as the living causal product of an immense and complex historical process of human ideas, events, and exchanges, great and small, stretching from the present into pre-history, then the aim of making things beautiful extends into a project of world-affirmation, incumbent upon each agent at every moment, at least insofar as the world is an idealist construct of a mind that has to be justified anew within each subject, and is intuitively felt, in isolated Being, to be so. Therefore the Dionysian adopts a growing sense of responsibility for the “universe”, and the heightened state of desire to justify all the conditions of the present, insofar as he is the world, but the pessimist must acknowledge an eventual point where one is unable to justify all existence-as-such - one of which, for example, is the failure in philosophy to provide absolute grounds for knowledge claims about existence – and therefore one must relent in one's need to justify, and to love the necessity of the meaninglessness and ugliness of existence, for its own sake. For the Dionysian pessimist who engages in these activities, dangers loom, and love of fate may be construed as an instrument, a method of mental discipline one develops to overcome the effects of one's pessimism, or as a guiding principle and an indicator of one's progress towards an affirmation of life.
A danger which amor fati seeks to prevent are the effects of Pity and Nausea. Pity refers to both self-pity and pity of others. One begins by pitying oneself, in the dissatisfaction caused by our essentially-desiring and insatiable will, which Schopenhauer sums up in a quote: “If we compare life to a circular path of red-hot coals having a few cool places, a path that we have to run over incessantly, then the man entangled in delusion is comforted by the cool place on which he is just now standing, or which he sees near him, and sets out to run over the path.” (WWRI/380) This pity at oneself can be extended to others in a recognition of universal suffering, notwithstanding the more visible forms of mental and material suffering in the world. Nausea in turn refers to nausea at oneself, nausea at others, and nausea at existence in general. Nausea at others for the Dionysian refers to the sickness induced by the perversions of man revealed by honest intellectual inquiry, expressed forcefully by verbal gasps of “More air! More air!” that pervades Nietzsche's later texts; also the presence of others, and the “art of associating with people”, especially at table, consists in “swallowing one's nausea”, also nausea at people defined as the “weak and the hopelessly sick” – those who are full of ressentiment. Nausea at oneself consists in being “sick of [oneself]” due to envy towards others, or in disgusted loathing at one's identity and character. Nausea at existence refers to disgust at life itself, revealed in Schopenhauer's highly-charged pessimism and ideal of the elimination of the will-to-life. Nietzsche views these two tendencies as conducive to nihilism and the will to nothingness, the antithesis of his philosophy. Therefore love of fate becomes a programme of mental hygiene, a means to overcome the negative affects towards things which are necessary.
The love of fate serves another function: that of balancing the possibly ascetic tendencies of the doctrine of life-affirmation with an embrace of life-in-itself. In this sense, the tension between the normative thrust of Nietzsche’s ethics of self-development and the fatalism implied in amor fati can be directly addressed. While Nietzsche’s philosophy may be seen to advocate a form of virtue ethics that celebrates the cultivation of the drives, and the development of one’s capacities of creation, and self and world-overcoming, he takes the view that this ideal must be subordinate to the higher goal of “Life” itself, the flourishing of one’s individual and unique psychologically-conditioned Being. However, it is precisely this normative thrust of the texts, the singularity of the goal of self-overcoming, mastery of the affects, and cultivation of the drives, that threatens to become a form of morality, or an ascetic ideal, or a form of living as if it were an experiment or a craft, that “has a leaden ceiling over it that presses and presses down upon the soul until that becomes queer and crooked.” Therefore the love of fate might be read as a counter-approach to life which the free-spirit requires to complement his vigorous self-overcoming, just as, for example, art is required to temper the immoderate effects of a fervent intellectual honesty. In GS 276, Nietzsche “permits” himself, as a form of self-indulgence justifiable during a new year, “the expression of his wish and his dearest thought”, the love of fate – as “the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth.” It is clearly espoused as a balance to the arduous tasks of his philosophical inquiry, or any creative endeavour. And it must surely serve as a great balm for one who suffers greatly from life.
i See BGE19 (1973): “Willing seems to me above all something complicated, something that is a unity only as a
word. See BGE 21: “Unfree will is a mythology: in real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills...one
ought to employ cause and effect only as pure concepts, that is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of
designation, mutual understanding, not explanation...In the in-itself there is nothing of causal connection, of
necessity, of psychological unfreedom, there the effect does not follow the cause, there no law rules.”
ii Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, (Penguin Books Ltd, 1973), 19 p.48
iii Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (Random House, 1967), Second Essay, Section 1, p.58
iv ibid, p.58
v ibid, p.57
vi ibid, p.59
vii ibid, p.45
viii Nietzsche, The Gay Science, (Vintage Books, 1974), 370, p.328
ix ibid, p.223
x Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, (Penguin Books Ltd, 1973), 56 p.82
xi Nietzsche, The Gay Science, (Vintage Books, 1974), 360, p.324
xii Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (Random House, 1967), Third Essay, Section 14, p.124
xiii ibid, p.122
xiv Schopenhauer, “The World as Will and Representation”, (Dover Publications, 1969), pg. 397
xv Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (Random House, 1967), Third Essay, Section 14, p.122
xvi Sebastian Gardner , “Schopenhauer, Will, and the Unconscious” in Christopher Janaway, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.401
xvii Nietzsche, The Gay Science, (Vintage Books, 1974), 366, p.322
xviii ibid, 276, p. 223
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