Amor Fati

My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future, not in the past, not for all eternity.
| Friedrich Nietzsche

Rooted in the wisdom of the ancient Stoic school, founded by Zeno of Citium, the Latin term amor fati translates to “love of fate,” or “love of one’s fate.” For the Stoics, this state in which one is in friendly acceptance of fate was the consummate achievement of human life, and the only path to happiness. The logic of this is fairly straightforward. “Fate” comprises all the events over which an individual has no control, events that, as the Stoics describe it, are “indifferent” to the will of man. The “sage” accepts with equanimity every situation, whether it obliges his desires or presents him with the greatest adversity, because no good can come from doing otherwise. To resist what is beyond our control is futile and the greatest ignorance, for it condemns us to suffering, compromises our strength, and squanders our resources.

One might take this to be promoting a kind of enlightened resignation, but the Stoics went further. They proposed that everything that happens unfolds with necessity, and that this necessity, described in some Stoic writings as the causality of Nature, in others as the Will of God, moves with inevitability toward some good if unseen end. To resist any event or situation is to set oneself against the whole, a futile and exhausting stance that cannot be justified in light of the inevitable limitations and fallibility of human vision, knowledge, and understanding. Thus, loving fate, given the necessity with which every event takes its place in the great causal unfolding, implies loving every “indifferent” thing that happens as necessary in the longterm evolution of the greater good. Free will is left intact within this “compatibilist” model, because our choices, while subject to the eternal chain of causes, are themselves proximate causes that are at least to some extent determined by our character. The Stoics described this through the idea that some things are “up to us.” This preserves free will experientially, even if one holds that our character itself is the ineluctable effect of all the causes that brought us forth and made us who we are. Put another way, fate unfolds with necessity through our participation in the causal chain. We do not choose, then, in the sense that we are free to choose otherwise in the moment, but rather because free will, too, is determined. In hindsight, it will turn out that we always choose as necessity dictates, but in the moment, because we do not see the imperatives of that necessity, we have no choice but to choose, and to make the best choice we can, all things considered that are available to us to consider.

There are, of course, any number of objections that could be raised here: How does the Stoic know that life is deterministic, that events occur with necessity? On what does the Stoic base the assumption that, even if one grants the assumption of determinism, the causal sequence has a purpose, let alone a good one? Furthermore, isn’t the compatibilist version of free will really just a clever denial of free will? And if philosophy were nothing more than reason and theory and the sort of endless wrangling one finds in philosophy departments in universities everywhere, such objections might be hard if not impossible to satisfy. But it isn’t. Especially for the ancient Greeks, philosophy was a living thing, a lamp that illuminated one’s life and one’s way. Its value lay not in scholarly proof or polemics but in the degree of happiness and excellence in living conferred by its practice.

The directive to “love one’s fate” has much more to offer us than simply a method for avoiding the pointless, frustrating, and often self-defeating attempt to control or manage circumstances that enter our experience without our permission, affect us greatly as though with a will of their own, and move on only when something greater than our will has spoken the releasing word. If we look more closely at amor fati, we see an invitation and a challenge—to find in the events of our life, however adverse they may be, a meaning that we can embrace and affirm, one for which we even will feel grateful. A practical, if general, example shows how this works. Suppose that something adverse happens to you, something that in the moment you would regard as “bad.” Perhaps it tests your strength, your courage, your resilience—and as a result, you emerge from the experience stronger than you were, or wiser, or more enlightened. Was the adverse event bad? Or was it made good by what you took from it? The answer depends on whether or not you can find it in yourself to love your fate, to find the redeeming value or meaning that reveals the telos of a greater good.

We might allow that this resolve to see the good in even the most daunting adversity makes sense in hindsight. After all, who hasn’t bemoaned some turn of fate only to look back, perhaps years later, and see the diamond that was hiding in the lump of coal? But to do this before the fact? Or during the fact, while under fire? To anticipate and trust that the good is working out when everything is falling from our hands—it seems to be asking too much. It is indeed a great deal to ask of oneself, something the Stoics understood only too well, but it is not too much, because as they saw it, there is nothing in life more worth achieving. The practice of amor fati places in one’s open hand the key to happiness, quickening the ability to meet life and its many challenges with head high, and even to meet death with equanimity and that sanguine expectation that, in the heart of the sage, performs the ultimate alchemy of transmuting suffering and complaint into joy and gratitude.