Nietzsche's Amor Fati
Your philosophical antidote to suffering
Nietzsche’s Amor fati
The concept of Amor fati is genuinely life changing idea, It can make your suffering a positive experience, Increase your creative freedom, is your antidote to resentment and will help you enjoy/affirm life more! So what is Amor fati?
One loving life
Amor fati translates to loving one's fate, and it's a development from a much earlier stoic ideas. The stoics thought that whatever happened that was outside of our control we should just learn to accept rather than let it burn us up inside. This is what gives us images like the noble soldier who is unwavering in his courage even as he's led to the executioner block.
But Nietzsche was unsatisfied with this mere acceptance he wanted to go one step further he wanted us to not just accept our fates but actively love it. He wanted us to energetically take it in our arms, embrace it, hug it, kiss it, and be grateful for its existence.
If you break your leg Nietzsche says that you should still love life and love your fate. Love the fact that your leg is broken, and this is not just a passive attitude this is an active one. for Nietzsche you must be genuinely and energetically grateful that the leg is broken and may even jump or in this case hop for joy about it. Nietzsche recommended this attitude because he had a very particular philosophy on life. He held that any experience good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant had the potential to lead to a richer experience of life itself. This is contrasted with other philosophers such as Jeremy benson who thought that life was only good if it led to pleasure. Nietzsche valued the complexity or the fullness of life over it being merely pleasant.
Whatever you think of this as a philosophy it certainly allowed Nietzsche to do and argue things that a thinker like Benson could not. It allowed him to say that life was worth living in any circumstance and it allowed him to assign value to experiences that may initially seem to have no upsides at all. As Nietzsche puts it “my formula for greatness in a human being 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 but love it” so now we know what Nietzsche means by amor fati.
Positive suffering
Positive suffering Nietzsche viewed it as a great strength of his doctrine of Amor fati- It is that we can turn suffering into a positive and edifying experience by truly believing that it's worth loving. My favorite example of this that a lot of people can already relate to is being at the gym. When you're working out you are sweating you will feel pain in your muscles and fear at the next set of weights but despite this seasoned veterans of the gym describe it as an overwhelmingly positive experience. This is because they recognize the pain itself as a sign of muscle growth, the suffering is the point of the exercise, if it were easy then they would not be achieving what they want to achieve, they would not be doing what they want to do.
Amor fati allows you to do this on a much wider scale, it achieves this by changing the evaluative terms for your experiences rather than asking is this experience pleasant or not, you ask how can I love this experience and then you do your best to find a way to do that.
Nietzsche had to make great use of this principle in his own life when he was bedridden for months due to illness he said he turned this experience into a positive one by making his suffering the fire that fueled his thinking. I myself have delt with a period of my life where I to suffered from a pretty painful chronic illness and I turn to Nietzsche idea of amor fati when things are truly tough because without it I would struggle to see the point in going on, or not giving into despair.
Neitzche is not arguing this in a trite everything happens for a reason sort of way, Amor fati is not a fully rationally held belief in fact it's not really a view he argues for on the basis that life is actually worth loving, he instead frames it as a sort of philosophical therapy that will prevent you from going insane since we're stuck, with life we may as well love it for it is the only sensible thing to do. We all suffer at various points in our life there is not a single person on this earth who has never experienced sadness or fear or loss or pain in fact if they had not experienced any of those things they would probably bear the suffering of boredom instead and they'd be no better off. Nietzsche in this context is your philosophical psychotherapist and amor fati is his prescribed medicine.
Creative freedom
To focus on the active energetic nature of Amor fati it is not simply lying backand taking one's fate willingly but, embracing it with both hands this allows you to emotionally love it, but also puts you in a good position to shape it. Nietzsche did not think that loving your fate meant letting life happen to you, but thought it was the way to seize it most fully.
What are the emotions that lead to sluggishness and lack of action? they are despair sadness and frustration and these are all exacerbated by despising one's Fate. By contrast being loving and energetic in that love is a great stimulus for action and this action will help you shape your life in whatever direction you want within reason of course.
Imagine someone who has truly managed to embrace Amor fati, and despite whatever happens to them that person has the biggest and most resilient emotional safety net anyone could ask for. They do not need to fear failure or fear their life blowing up in their face they are free to approach life in whatever creative way feels best to them they are truly liberated not only from societal constraints but from the constraints imposed on them by their own emotional reactions.
In Nietzsche’s other works he hints at this ideal figure who has managed to fully internalize the concept of Amor fati. Nietzsche speaks of a type of person that he affectionately dubs the “child”. The child is the embodiment of the type of person Nietzsche thinks could exist in this post-enlightenment world. The child is spontaneous, creative, joyful, and is fully liberated in their desires. They do not feel societal constraints, but pursue life with all of the innocent wonder of a toddler. This is what theoretically might arise from a full embrace of Amor fati.
Antidote to resentment
Antidote to resentment- Think about how much of our lives are wasted in resentment. Tit for tat, having sour grapes, envy and jealousy. Nietzsche amor fati is an antidote to such an awful existence. One non-obvious consequence of amor fati is that since other people's actions do form your fate (with being outside of your direct control) you must also love what other people do and this by default bars off resentment.
Loving fate itself does sort of entail loving the fate of other people, which also entails being happy for someone when they succeed. This goes doubly for friends who you're already emotionally invested in. In affirming all of life you simultaneously affirm the lives of the people around you even if they would not consider their lives worth living.
There is a German concept of shardon freuder- (the pleasure that is felt at another's pain). I've wondered whether we can reliably feel pleasure at another's pleasure. Imagine the potential enjoyment one could have often if you could feel pleasure whenever someone else was having a good time. You would then have a whole world's worth of positivity available to you at any moment. After all just as there's always someone somewhere who is suffering there's always someone somewhere who's having the best day of their life.
I think that Nietzsche concept of Amor Fati can really help here and it also seems very difficult to feel resentment when you're fully in love with your own fate. Resentment is at least partly caused by being dissatisfied with your place in life and Amor fati allows you to be both perfectly content with what you have, yet still strive for more. you can be full of gratitude and yet throw yourself wholeheartedly into ambition treating it like a fun game. This may seem like a contradiction in terms, but Nietzsche makes it all hold together with his concept of Amor Fati and the affirmation of life.
Affirmation of life
Ultimately the main benefit of Amor fati is that loving one’s fate is the greatest affirmation of life one can give and this is the source of all of its other benefits. Most philosophers before Nietzsche took some sort of pessimistic view on this life they saw it as either a precursor to a life that is much better or had a generally negative view of life on Earth. As in the case of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche saw this as a sign of madness he saw it as the natural human states to love life and thought these philosophers were essentially mentally ill.
Nietzsche would probably see this mental illness everywhere in today's world I'm always struck by the conception of life shown by many on social media and I know I do sound like an old man but bear with me there is a fixation on the elements of life that most people would find awful a general lack of personal meaning and a view that optimism about life is some somehow the standpoint of the fool.
We are to a certain extent living in a world of showing house without a joyful face in sight Amor fati challenges us to be that joyful face and raise our joyful voice to say that even in the darkest of circumstances life it is worth living to follow our basest instinct to continue struggling on even when times are genuinely horrible and to always say yes to each passing day no matter how bad it gets because of the simple idea that life is always something worth affirming this doesn't mean that we shy away from hardship or ignore suffering and struggle but rather that we kick against the reflex to reject life in the face of it being deeply unpleasant and instead run towards life not away from it.