Nietzsches Amor Fati:

The Embracing of an Undecided Fate

by Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen
published by The Nietzsche Circle, June 2007
by Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen
1 Ni etzsches Amor Fati
Amor fati
Nietzsches
The Embracing of an Undecided Fate
T
here is in Nietzsche an unequivocal afrmation of life, and it would be
precisely wrong to say, notwithstanding the equivocality that he injects
into his every assertion, for there is nothing in Nietzsche that withstands his
equivocality. Yet, it speaks to the essence of Nietzsches posture to observe
that there is nothing difdent or less than forthright in his workhe makes
assertions, enormously complex assertions, and they are clearly intended
to be taken as asserted. Nietzsche means what he says. It is his saying
that bears the complexity in its method, which practices the undermining
and enhancing of inherited terminology and philosophical principles, often
in ploys of overt contradiction, to propose what is unequivocally meant. One
must follow him in his every move, through each verbal gambit, to get at
a meaning that always constitutes straight answers to straight questions,
at a meaning that presumably requires the richness of literary strategy, of
complicated saying, to be formulated at all. The idea dissolves without the
verbal underpinning. It evaporates in the absence of his statement. It is so
subtle, even as it is so clear and unequivocal once grasped. In short, nothing
in Nietzsche goes without saying.
One could be clever and say merely that, with Nietzsche, his very equivocality
is itself equivocal, and it would be right to say so. However, left at that, such
a characterization initiates a spiral of thought that burrows itself into the soil.
It is the business of philosophy to digest such material, to sift it for its intrinsic
clarityotherwise, philosophy would be nothing more than gamesmanship
and scholarly fantasy. And so it is as much to the point to observe that
Nietzsche is dealing with conceptions that defy simple expression, that he is
laced in and trussed by conventional terminology that resists the statement
he needs to make, terminology that has been ltered by and formulated
according to the very conceptions he wishes to deny, conceptions that
frequently establish themselves as opposites, as choices one is required to
choose between, and that he is seeking to say that which has not yet found its
unequivocal terminology, which stands beyond the perimeters of established
options. His verbal play is a ploy. It is a means to an end, not the end itself, not
the thought but the only available statement for getting at the thought, and it is
our business to nd our way to it.
And so there is an unequivocal afrmation of life in Nietzsche, but it is not
such as one would think, nor perhaps one that many readers would be
prepared to afrm. The very category of expression becomes transformed
under Nietzsches hand, by his voice. An afrmation is, by denition, an act
of counsel: it is an attitudinal posture, a judgment of value, an expression out
of a principle of appropriateness, which is recommended to the reader, which
is voiced for the purpose of exhorting the reader to do likewise. Implicitly, it
is intended as guidance. But if one asks if this is Nietzsches intention, if he
The Ni etzsche Ci rcl e, February 2007 2
afrms life so as to suggest to readers that in a matter open to discretion they
choose to afrm life, the answer is as complex as is his personal rhetoric: it is
both yes and no. In essence, the category of recommendation does not t, not
even so far as to warrant denial. Something subtler is at work here.
One of Nietzsches most overt, and perhaps his best known, assertions of
afrmation for life is his clear exhortation: Amor fatithe love of fate, the
acceptance of necessity. From his rst expression of the thought in The Gay
Science, Nietzsche makes it clear that his reference to fate is a reference
to necessity: I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is
necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.
Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! . . . And all in all and on the whole:
some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
1
The issue of fate is not to be mis-
read here. Nietzsche means the necessary, but it is not the necessary in an
ordinary sense.
And so, to understand Nietzsches Amor fati, one must rst comprehend
what Nietzsche means by fate, what quality of the fateful is possible within
Nietzsches ontology, within his vision of the world. The idea of fate is not
to be understood as a xed and unalterable orientation of events on a
necessary outcome. It is not a promise and eventual achievement, extending
from some source capable of guaranteeing outcome, of a nal state, for
oneself, humanity at large, or the world, and after the accomplishment of
which, eventualitythe playing out of resultcomes to an end. There is no
teleology in Nietzsches universenothing comes to an end. The process that
is the world, that is reality, is incessant. And so, Nietzsches fate must not be
understood in the context of a determinism that takes the form of a nality that
the world or the self are fated, or promised, to achieve. Nor is it fate in the
sense of some categorical, transcendental moral imperative to which we owe
absolute allegiance and under which we are laden with a sense of absolute
responsibility. The incessant process, the continuous Becoming of the
universe, leads to nothing in the end, for there is no end: becoming aims at
nothing and achieves nothing.
2

Nietzsches fate is something more complex than the nominal concept of
fate as pure necessity, for as with everything in Nietzsches conception of
the universe, it is riddled with its own oppositethe intricacy of opposites
is the principle of relation in Nietzsches understanding of reality. Nietzsche
emphasizes the aspect of necessity in his rst explicit reference to Amor
fati, yet he again and again returns to linking necessity and freedom in his
conception of fate. It is an ideal, an ideal of Amor fati, that he envisions in his
characterization of Goethe and the poets fatalism: Such a spirit [as Goethe]
who has become free stands amidst all with a joyous and trusting fatalism,
in the faith that only the single is loathsome, and that all is redeemed and
afrmed in the wholehe does not negate any more.
3

The fatalism of Amor fati involves an insight into Being as that which is, as
Jacques Derrida phrased the comparable idea, a third irreducible to the
3 Ni etzsches Amor Fati
1
Friedrich Nietzsche, The
Gay Science, trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York:
Vintage Books, 1974),
276, p. 223.
2
Nietzsche, The Will
to Power, trans. Walter
Kaufmann and R. J.
Hollingdale, ed. Walter
Kaufmann (New York:
Vintage Books, 1968), 12,
p. 12.
3
Nietzsche, Twilight of
the Idols, Skirmishes of
an Untimely Man, in The
Portable Nietzsche, trans.
and ed. Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Penguin Books,
1968), 49, p. 554.
dualisms of classical ontology
4
whereby Becoming negates Being. For
Nietzsche, fate and the love of it involve us in a knowledge, amounting to
wisdom, of an excess
5
beyond Being with Becoming as its negation, beyond
the value of truth with non-truth as its negation, in a state of awareness that
is beyond normative conception and that leaves him who knows it only as a
Yes-sayer.
This saying as an intricacy of oppositesof those which are opposite from
the logical point of view, which functions by means of an operative stipulation
that everything is to be conceived according to what it is not, according
to its negationis a philosophical strategy, a tactics of proposition, that
Nietzsche initiated at the beginning of his career, in The Birth of Tragedy,
with his analysis of the tragic view of the world. There, the tragic, rather than
constituting the negating side to an opposed afrming, embodies, through
the conception of opposites as interpenetrating, what Nietzsche calls an
irreducible contradiction.
6
Contradiction, for Nietzsche, does not mean the
violation of binary logic, but an intricate relation
7
between opposites, such as
bliss and pain, that simultaneously unites them and holds them apart.
The tragic worldview, then, is a chiasmic unity of opposites, one with neither
negation nor afrmation, because as a medium that permits Yes and No
to interpenetrate, it afrms them both equally, leaving afrmation afrmed
precisely to the degree that negation is.
Thus, comparable to the tragic, as conceived in the tragic worldview, fate for
Nietzsche is a seeming contradiction in termsthe terms of freedom and
necessity. The solution is not a resolution, for no solution is required, for in
a truer sense than that conveyed by phrasing the matter as interpenetrating
opposites, there is no contradiction. Nietzsche does not attribute necessity
to fate as determinism vs. freedom; he ascribes both qualities to fate in
equal measure. The necessity of fate rests in Nietzsches insight that it is
unalterablyeternally, necessarilyfree in a playful elusiveness.
Nietzsche disabuses us of the interpretation of Amor fati as an embracing of
fate without interpolation of freedom by linking it to the poetic. This linkage is
particularly evident in one of Nietzsches Dionysus-Dithyrambs, Only a Fool!
Only a Poet! (Nur Narr! Nur Dichter!), which alludes to the foolishness, or
playfulness, of the poet as the epistemological frame within which to address
the excess beyond truth and its opposite, the excess that is fate for Nietzsche.
You, the suitor of truth? [. . .]
No! Only a poet! [. . .]

May I be banished
From all truth,
Only a fool! Only a poet!
8

The Ni etzsche Ci rcl e, February 2007 4

4
Jacques Derrida,
Dissemination, trans.
Barbara Johnson (Chicago:
The University of Chicago
Press, 1981), p. 165.
5
Nietzsche, The Birth of
Tragedy, in Basic Writings
of Nietzsche, trans. and
ed. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: The Modern Library,
1968), 4, p. 46. Excess
revealed itself as truth.
6
Nietzsche, The Birth of
Tragedy, 4, p. 46.
7
Nietzsche, The Birth of
Tragedy, 21, p. 130.
8
Nietzsche, KSA 6.377.
Der Wahrheit Freier
- du? [. . .] / Nein! nur ein
Dichter! [. . .] dass ich
verbannt sei / von aller
Wahrheit, / Nur Narr! Nur
Dichter! Translation by the
authors.
It is the playfulness/foolishness of the poet and poetrythat is, of the
ambiguity or indeterminacy of poetrys metaphorical corethat would be able
to capture the elusive truth of fate. But as before, Nietzsche ties together
the freedom of fatefreedom in the sense of not being restricted by the
oppositional logic of discursive languageand the dimension of necessity he
acknowledges in fate. Thus he writes in Praise and Eternity of his love of fate
as necessity:
My love is lit eternally
Only by the re of necessity.

Shield of necessity!
Highest constellation of Being!
Not reachable by any desire,
Not sullied by any No,
Eternal Yes of Being,
Eternally I am your Yes:
For I love you, oh eternity! - -
9

This interpretation of fatewhich braces each with its opposite, rendering a
conception that is above, inclusive of, paired normative conceptions in their
denition by opposition, and which Nietzsche renders late in his philosophical
careerhas been implicit in all of his thought, in various guises. It is present
in his view of the world as not being determined by the outside of some nal
cause or meaning that serves as its goal, that is not judged as guilty by the
No of the xity of transcendental Being for being playful in its ceaseless,
goalless Becoming. In other words, fate, as Nietzsche interprets it, is the
emblem of his insight that there is nothingnihiloutside the transitoriness of
the world of eternal Becoming. Fate, then, is the name for a totally immanent,
perpetually transitory world that is not subject to the nality of a goal outside of
it, the achievement of which would redeem the guiltiness of Becoming. Amor
fati is the embrace of the world that is as it iseternally Becomingnot as it
should be, for there is no should, no imperative that it be, or be transformed
into, something other than it is. Put differently, Amor fati is the embrace of a
world that is an implicate order of freedom and necessity: of freedom in that it
is free from any should that would judge it to be decient, and from any goal
that should be attained, and of necessity because the lack of a goal to be
achieved allows the world its must, its having to be what it is, not what it is
made by an authority beyond the perimeters of the world.
In particular, it can be said that Nietzsches appeal to love of fate is the
consequence of his thesis of the death of God, love of a supreme center
of the value of Being that guaranteed meaning to a meaningless world of
Becomingthe authority beyond the limits of the world. The fate of Amor
fati frees us, then, to a world of radical immanence, a world beyond the
5 Ni etzsches Amor Fati

9
Nietzsche, KSA 6.402.
Meine Liebe entzndet
/ sich ewig nur an der
Nothwendigkeit. / Schild der
Nothwendigkeit! / Hchstes
Gestirn des Seins! / - das
kein Wunsch erreicht / das
kein Nein beeckt, / ewiges
Ja des Seins, / ewig bin
ich dein Ja: / denn ich
liebe dich, oh Ewigkeit! - -
Translation by the authors.
dualism of immanence and transcendence. Nietzsche characterizes this
world as whole in the sense of an interconnectedness or web-like structure
Nietzsche describes as Verhngnis (literally a hanging together), a word that
also means fate. Given that the world of interconnectedness (Verhngnis)
is its own fate (Verhngnis), it is beyond any outside determinism because
there is no outside to the whole. Given a radically holistic world, there is no
outside to its Verhngnis, and thus we must be what we are: Verhngnis. As
Nietzsche puts it succinctly: One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness
[Verhngnis], one belongs to the whole, one is the whole.
10

It is clear that the freedom of Amor fati, of Nietzsches fate, of Nietzsches
universe, is a freedom from: a freedom from a fate imposed upon the world
from outside the world, the freedom from ultimate, absolute authority. The
recipient of freedom in the interpenetration of necessity and freedom is the
world, and thus is Becoming. With his appeal to Amor fati, Nietzsche afrms
the lack of a center of Being, and thus recognizes a world without the horizon
that Being would set to its Becoming. The world has been set free in this
thought, and is free to become whatever it will. It is not guilty for departing
from what it is or only approaching, eternally approaching, what it should be.
It is innocent in that it is free to become anythingnothing is disallowed, there
is no outside authority to disallow.
The realization of Amor fati thus brings us a new innite. Rather has the
world become innite for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject
the possibility that it may include innite interpretations.
11
A world open to
potentially innite interpretations is one without the institution of a given,
unalterable meaning stemming from the metaphysical source of meaning. And
with the death of God, with the realization that the necessity of the world is
that it must be free from the imposition upon it of any determining authority, At
long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright;
at long last our ships may venture out again . . . the sea, our sea, lies open
again; perhaps there has never yet been such an open sea.
12

Thus, Nietzsche is giving us Amor fati as the emblem of a world that demands
to be interpreted beyond the corner of metaphysics, that is, beyond the
reign of a dualistic perspective that insists on one interpretation of the world:
the interpretation, the ultimate truth, of the supremacy of Being and its
variants functioning as perfection, goal, meaning, and judge over the world
of Becoming, the world that is, apart from its interdiction, eternally in process.
The world is free in that no such interdiction is possible.
And the awareness of this freedom of the world, the freedom from a truth
about which it, and we, would have no choice, is for Nietzsche a new
knowledge and the sun of a new gospelthe gospel of necessity that sets
us free and returns us to an innocence in place of the guilt that is inherent in
being subject to an ultimate authority, an authority that sets a truth one can
never become and a responsibility one can never meet, caught in a state of
mutability, in a process of incessant change.
The Ni etzsche Ci rcl e, February 2007 6
10
Nietzsche, Twilight of
the Idols, The Four Great
Errors, 8, p. 500.
11
Nietzsche, The Gay
Science, 374, p. 336.
12
Nietzsche, The Gay
Science, 343, p. 280.
The sun of a new gospel is casting its rst beam on the
topmost summits in the soul of every individual: there the mists
are gathering more thickly then ever, and the brightest glimmer
and the gloomiest twilight lie side by side. Everything is
necessitythus says the new knowledge; and this knowledge
itself is necessity. Everything is innocence: and knowledge is
the path to insight into this innocence.
13

The necessity is the necessity of play, play that is aesthetic, as the world has
been for Nietzsche from the start, from the assertion in The Birth of Tragedy,
existence and the world seem justied only as an aesthetic phenomenon.
14

That play, that integration of integral opposites, qualies even the aspect
of existence, subtending beneath it both existence and non-existence. The
afrmation of life, the afrmation of fate that is life as necessity, as play, is,
as Derrida put it in his reading of Nietzsche, an afrmation that determines
the absence of a center of Being (presence) otherwise than as loss of the
center. This interpretation is one in which play must be conceived before
the alternative of presence and absence, that is, the alternative of Being and
Becoming. It is an interpretation that is not negative, nostalgic about the lost
center of Being but the joyous afrmation of the play of the world and of the
innocence of becoming, an afrmation that tries to pass beyond man and
humanism . . .
15

The sense of the afrmation of life, of fate, as a thought that moves beyond
man and humanism, of a qualication of existence that intertwines it with
non-existence as a condition of its existence, points to the reason that
underlies Nietzsches rhetorical strategies and that renders the terminology
he employs impertinent to the truth he wishes to revealfor there is a truth
to things. Meaning is innitely interpretable, but there is a reality to which
we are subject, of which we arethe reality whose meaning is innitely
interpretable. There is a reason that fate for Nietzsche is authentically fatalistic
and which compels all the standard terminology established for contending
with questions of meaning and existence capable of nothing better than
interpenetration and unending play.
The events of the world are not fatalistic in the sense that there is an ultimate
eventuality, an outcome, and thus a meaning to which they always are
trending and which puts an end to the process of eventuality. The process
is unending, and it is for us fatalistic in that it is beyond our capability to
inuence. The freedom in necessity is for the world, but it is not for us. We
cannot direct or curtail the course of events because we are not present within
the course of events. We are, as is all else, merely momentary presences,
our lives a sequence of disconnected, ashing events that demonstrate a
sequence only for our perceptions. In themselves, they are as glimmering
lights on an ocean of glimmering lights, in incessant motion but owing
7 Ni etzsches Amor Fati

13
Nietzsche, Human,
All Too Human, vol. 1,
trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987),
107, p. 58.
14
Nietzsche, The Birth of
Tragedy, 24, p. 141.
15
Derrida, Writing and
Difference, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1980),
p. 292.
nowhere. Here I sat waiting . . . all time without aim
16
all time without goal,
without nality.
We are without integrity, neither self-sustaining objects nor subjects in the
world, for nothing is a self-sustaining object. There is freedom only for the
world as there is necessity only for the world, for there is only the world. The
rejection of individual integrity, of individual existence, can be found at the
start of Nietzsches thought, as one can nd the philosophical foundation
of the aesthetic nature of existence and the world. In The Birth of Tragedy,
Nietzsche dismisses the reality of the principium individuationis,
17
the principle
of individuality, of the integrity of the object and its individual presence. There
are, for Nietzsche, no things, no existences that stand apart in any way from
all of existence. All exist only in the web-like structure of Verhngnis and exist
in no other sense. Our conception of individual existences is a function of our
error regarding the sense of unity. We need unities in order to be able to
reckon: that does not mean we must suppose that such unities exist. We have
borrowed the concept of unity from our ego conceptour oldest article of
faith. If we did not hold ourselves to be unities, we would never have formed
the concept thing.
18

There is thus no free will, not for individual beings, we realize the impossibility
of any liberum arbitrium, or intelligible freedom.
19
The Will to Power is the
motivating impulse to apparent eventualitymore, it is the substance of
constant eventuality rather than the power behind itbut the Will to Power
is not ours. Our personal impulses to action are not freely chosen, we do what
we do just as objects subject to interaction, subject to laws of physics, subject
to the slip of gravity, do what they dowithout motive, without intention. Our
motivating impulses function something more like instincts than intentions.
They function in a law-like fashion.
Weakness of the will: that is a metaphor that can prove
misleading. For there is no will, and consequently neither
a strong nor a weak will. The multitude and disgregation
of impulses and the lack of any systematic order among
them result in a weak will; their coordination under a single
predominant impulse results in a strong will: in the rst case
it is the oscillation and the lack of gravity; in the latter, the
precision and clarity of the direction.
20

Comparable to gravity. Law-like, but our impulses are as if controlled by
natural law within a universe free of outside imposition, free of imposed
requirement. We follow what the universe doeswe are of it, and are nothing
else.
And it is the nature of Nietzsches universe that necessitates the absence of
The Ni etzsche Ci rcl e, February 2007 8

16
Nietzsche, The Gay
Science, Sils Maria, p.
371.
17
Nietzsche, The Birth of
Tragedy, 1, p. 36.
18
Nietzsche The Will to
Power, 635, p. 338.
19
Nietzsche The Will to
Power, 8, p. 11.
20
Nietzsche The Will to
Power, 46, pp. 28-29.
integral, individual existencesspecically, the nature of his temporality. In
Nietzsches ontology, there is no time line, no movement from the past to the
present and into the future, not as a continuous ow upon which all events
and existences are buoyed, like leaves meandering down a stream. Time
has no currents. There is no continuance. There are but isolated moments in
time, points of timeIt is possible to speak only of points of time, no longer of
time
21
and nothing endures, thus there is nothing to endure, for there is no
time for anything to continue to exist.
The moment is an expansive idea, increasingly expansive over the course of
his career to the point at which it becomes the central image of his ontological
vision, comparable to, and explicative of, the Will to Power. It becomes the
setting for the realization of the truth of the world. On this perfect day [. . .]
a glance of the sun fell upon my life: I looked backward, I looked outward, I
never saw so much and so many good things at the same time. [. . .] How
could I not be thankful to the whole of my life?
22
It is important to realize that
the perfection Nietzsche refers to here is not the perfection of Being beyond
the world of Becoming but the contemplative experience of a moment, of a
wink of an eyeAugenblickduring which time is a Becoming without the
striving for a goal, and thus is not decient, that it is perfect, complete unto
itself, in the world of Becoming. The gratitude Nietzsche expresses for the
time of his whole life, out of the experience of the perfection of the moment,
is an afrmation of fate as the irreducible interplay of time and eternity, for the
moment and eternity as an immeasurable moment become interlaced. Can
we remove the idea of a goal from the process and then afrm the process
in spite of this?This would be the case if something were attained at every
moment within this processand always the same.
23
The moment is ever the
moment, what is attained is always the same, but it is always something
attained, always something newly achieved. The moment of attainment never
departs, and Being and Becoming are inextricably intertwined under the aegis
of the moment, of the point of time, as under the aegis of the Will to Power.
Yet, normally, we do not experience the moments, the time points, as always
the same attainmentwe experience them as constantly shifting, constantly
transforming into something different and following each other in a sequence.
The time points are isolated in the sense that each is a span of duration
limited by its nature as a dynamic atom of time, but they are not isolated
from each other in terms of inuencethey are not walled off from each other.
The point of time affects another point of time, thus dynamic properties are
to be presupposed.
24
Thus, a world can existit does not ash into and out
of existence, all time points compounded in some sense upon each other,
with no time line along which to distribute them. And thus we are capable of
interpretingmisinterpretinga personal history, a continuing appearance
of self, a memory. The appearance of distinct, individual, continuing identity
becomes what was analyzed in The Birth of Tragedy as the Apollinian
beautiful illusion
25
that obscures the Dionysian vision of continuous ux,
the ux of incessant moments of time that somehow are always new and yet
always the samethe article of faith of the idea of unity, which permits us to
9 Ni etzsches Amor Fati
21
Nietzsche, KSA 7.575.
Es ist nur von Zeitpunken
zu reden, nicht mehr von
Zeit. Translation by the
authors.
22
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo,
Vorwort, KSA 6.263. An
diesem vollkommenen
Tage [. . .] el mir eben
ein Sonnenblick auf mein
Leben: ich sah rckwrts,
ich sah hinaus, ich sah nie
so viel und so gute Dinge
auf einmal. [. . .] Wie sollte
ich nicht meinem ganzen
Leben dankbar sein?
Translation by the authors.
See also Ecce Homo,
Preface, in Basic Writings
of Nietzsche, p. 677.
23
Nietzsche, The Will to
Power, 55, p. 36.
24
Nietzsche, KSA
7.575. Der Zeitpunkt
wirkt auf einen anderen
Zeitpunkt, also
dynamische Eigenschaften
vorauszusetzen.
Translation by the authors.
25
Nietzsche, The Birth of
Tragedy, 1, p. 35.
reckon: the reduction of the ux down to the appearance of a coherence of
existence.
Thus there can be the appearance of personal outcome, of an inexorability
to personally signicant events, of eventuality on an individual levelof
personal fatebut the viewpoint of integrity is our own Apollinian construction.
It is error, but it is not our error, and it is not our Apollinian construction in
the sense of personal commission. The construction is made, the error of
interpretation committed, but they are not made and committed by us, for that
could be so only if we created ourselves. Only then would we be present to
construct the illusion of our own existence. We would then be causa sui, self-
generating, and in Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche committed himself to the
unacceptability of causa sui,
26
to the absurdity of the claim of self-creation, on
the basis of logical aw.
Which is to say that, in Nietzsches universe, we can exercise no inuence
over events because we do not exist. We are mere appearance, delusions
suffering the delusion of ourselves, apparent presences by our natures
strangely capable of being aware of ourselves as appearances and incapable
of seeing past the deceptive appearance of our natures. Mankind does not
advance, it does not even exist.
27
We are not the source of events, and thus
not in a position to be the source of any inuence over eventswe are events,
comparable to all other events, appearances thrown up by the dynamism of
the Will to Power, the active and sole reality of the world. In more technical
language, we are epiphenomenalmoved as are all apparent things and
incapable of moving them, patterns among the patterns woven and rewoven
into the tapestry, and thus the center of a philosophy that tries to pass beyond
man and humanism . . .
World wheel . . . blends us in too,
28
which is to say that Nietzsches is
a nihilistic vision, a vision in which all that we know and all that we are is
rendered void of reality: we are something done by something else. It
is only late that one musters the courage for what one really knows. That I
have hitherto been a thorough-going nihilist, I have admitted to myself only
recently.
29
But for Nietzsche, Nihilism is a complex matter: Nihilism. It is
ambiguous: A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active
nihilism. B. Nihilism as decline and recession of power of the spirit: as passive
nihilism.
30

Passive nihilism, also Nihilism as a psychological state,
31
is a widespread
and historically signicant condition of despair, following upon the collapse
of values that have been revealed to be untenable, that can no longer be
believed. This is the psychological repercussion of the death of God, the loss
of the sense of an outside authority to constrain the Becoming of the world and
give it a xed meaning, an ultimate and nal goal. For Nietzsche, after 2,000
years of Christianity and its moral interpretation of the world, its belief that the
world is organized by principles of good and evil, that principles of good and
evil are truea self-aggrandizing faith that envisions the world on the model of
The Ni etzsche Ci rcl e, February 2007 10
26
Nietzsche, Beyond Good
and Evil, On the Prejudices
of Philosophers, in Basic
Writings of Nietzsche, 15,
pp. 212-213.
27
Nietzsche, The Will to
Power, 90, pp. 55.
28
Nietzsche, The Gay
Science, To Goethe, p.
351.
29
Nietzsche, The Will to
Power, 25, pp. 18.
30
Nietzsche, The Will to
Power, 22, pp. 17.
31
Nietzsche, The Will to
Power, 12, pp. 12.
ourselves, that sees the world as centered on us and our fate, the hyperbolic
naivet of man: positing himself as the meaning and the measure of the value
of all things
32
the forced loss of faith in these values, the recognition of
their arbitrariness, their lack of truth, brings about the decline and recession
of power of the spirita general dispiritedness. Under the principle that
attitudes give way to their oppositesExtreme positions are not succeeded
by moderate ones but by extreme positions of the opposite kind
33
the loss
of faith results in a yearning for nothingness. At bottom, man has lost his faith
in his own value when no innitely valuable whole works through him; i.e.,
he conceived such a whole in order to be able to believe in his own value.
34

Once we realize the world does not have the value we thought it had,
35
we
become as nothing to ourselves, and the world loses all worth.
But there is also the form of active Nihilism, which in individuals of strength
the virtue that Nietzsche admires most, I teach the Yes to all that strengthens,
that stores up strength, that justies the feeling of strength,
36
a quality one
may think of as fortitudecan realize the new knowledge, the sun of
the new gospel, can observe the freedom of the world that is absent the
imposition of a fate imposed from without. In the same conditions that bring
about the despair that yearns for nothingness, in the collapse of all old values,
we nd the pathos that impels us to seek new values. In sum: the world
might be far more valuable than we used to believe; we must see through
the naivet of our ideals, and while we thought we accorded it the highest
interpretation, we may not even have given our human existence a moderately
fair value. What has become deied? The value instincts in the community
(that which made possible its continued existence.)
37

In this, we are given the indication of the new value, of the higher aspiration
that is revealed when we are made aware of the freedom of the world from
outside authority and forced meaning, when the scales fall from the eyes of
those who formerly believed in the values that imposed our image on our
vision of the universe. The new value is that of the community, as conceived
in the opening of The Gay Science, the species, that to which we are
sacriced: the existence that continues as we, as individuals, do not, but that
depends on our fortitude to preserve it. (Indicating what Nietzsche makes clear
in numerous passages: that which breaks the credibility of the values that
held sway over us for 2,000 years is evolution, the realization that we do not
come from a source outside the earth, that we are born of this world.) And, as
the title of the book conveys, the tragic philosophy has been re-envisioned as
something joyous.
Whether I contemplate men with benevolence or with an evil
eye, I always nd them concerned with a single task, all of
them and every one of them in particular: to do what is good
for the preservation of the human race. Not from any feeling
of love for the race, but merely because nothing in them is
11 Ni etzsches Amor Fati

32
Nietzsche, The Will to
Power, 12, pp. 14.
33
Nietzsche, The Will to
Power, 55, pp. 35.
34
Nietzsche. The Will to
Power, 12, pp. 12.
35
Nietzsche. The Will to
Power, 32, pp. 22.
36
Nietzsche, The Will to
Power, 54, pp. 33.
37
Nietzsche, The Will to
Power, 32, pp. 22.
older, stronger, more inexorable and unconquerable than this
instinctbecause this instinct constitutes the essence of our
species, our herd. . . .

Pursue your best or your worst desires, and above all
perish! In both cases you are probably still in some way a
promoter and benefactor of humanity and therefore entitled
to your eulogistsbut also to your detractors! . . . I mean,
when the proposition the species is everything, one is always
none has become part of humanity, and this ultimate liberation
and irresponsibility has become accessible to all at all times.
Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with
wisdom, perhaps only gay science will then be left.
38

As with Goethe, all is redeemed and afrmed in the whole. Here is the
afrmation of life, the essence of Amor fati: we must learn the joy of perishing
for the life of the species, of being sacriced, as we have no choice but to be,
for the continuance of life that both is ours and is not ours: not our individual
lives but the life of the whole of which we are a part. We must learn to face
with joy, with the Yes of afrmation, our part in a world that lives on itself: its
excrements are its food,
39
and we are among what is consumed. For that is
the continuing, unending eventuality of the Will to Power, and it is the counsel
offered, the recommendation made, that there is joy in realizing This world is
the will to powerand nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will
to powerand nothing besides!
40

But there is an anomaly in this afrmation; there is a logical absurdity in the
counsel offered. There is a aw in this Yes to life that recommends itself
to its readership. There is a ghostly presence haunting every proposition
that Nietzsche propounds, brooding and questioning the very core of the
philosophers reasoning. If there is no free will, then to what purpose the
recommendation of a posture toward existence, an acceptance of fatewhat
point to Amor fati? To what purpose advising an attitude toward existence
to those who do not exist, who are also this will to powerand nothing
besides? What is the point of a new gospel? How can it be possible to choose
to formulate new values in reaction to a recognition of necessity? How can
one be exhorted to afrm necessity? If we should acknowledge fate, if we
can, then isnt it all something other than fated? If fate is something to which
we owe absolute allegiance and from which devolves upon us absolute
responsibility, if that allegiance is ours to give or not, if the matter even arises,
then where is the fate? And if there is no mankind, if it does not even exist,
then to whom is Nietzsche writing, and who is speaking? Where is the sense
in all this?
The questions are right, for there is nothing in Nietzsche to indicate that fate is
merely a quality of large-scale patterns of events whereas the petty events of
The Ni etzsche Ci rcl e, February 2007 12
38
Nietzsche, The Gay
Science, 1, pp. 73-74.
39
Nietzsche, The Will to
Power, 1066, pp. 548.
40
Nietzsche, The Will to
Power, 1067, pp. 550.
an individual life occur freely, as if too unimportant to be noticedthe standard
bail-out position for those reading denunciations of free will, as if Cassandra-
like, we act and speak by our own discretion within an unalterable ow of
history. And it is right to say that non-existence is a chiasmic unity of existence
and non-existence and is not a pure quality different from its opposite, to
say that freedom and necessity are two sides of the same innitely self-
differentiating and ontologically variegated coin. It would even be necessary to
say it, but it would not be sufcient.
For just to say precisely what Nietzsche has told us is merely to say precisely
what Nietzsche has told us. That is mere reiteration, a parroting of endowed
phrasings, a demonstration of memorization, of received input, as if we were
without the freedom to consider, to understand. We have yet to digest what we
have been told. We have yet to see what sense it makes. We have yet to sift it
for its intrinsic clarity. We have yet to make something of it.
In the end, there is only one answer, if one is to take Nietzsche seriously and
not qualify what he has said without qualication, not partialize him where he
has been impartial, so as to leave room in what he says for his act of saying
it. Nietzsche is playing the game he must play, the game all philosophers
must play, in order to write at all, in order to think at all. The necessity, the
Nihilism of non-existence, of being an appearance generated by something
he is not, applies to him as much as to everyone, but he writes as if he is
exempt from his own conditions, from his own mental scenario, from the truth
he is tellingas if he stood outside and commented on what lay under the
gaze of his mind. To write at all, to think at all, is of necessity to do soone
cannot stand at both ends of the microscope at the same time. To announce
the non-existence of free will, and of us, is signicant only if the announcement
is freely made. If one could not have done other than say it, then there is
no signicance in its being said, no more signicance than there is in an
earthquake, or a tidal wave, or any natural eventno more signicance than
in the falling of a leaf. When something is said, there must be a reason, and if
the reason is that it had to have been said, that it could have not been other
than said, that it was compelled, mindlessly, there thinking is at an end.
Here, Nietzsche has no choice but to place himself in the position of the
Cretan Liarif he chooses to speak the absence of free will, then he gives
evidence of free will; if he says nothing to deny free will, then it is possible at
least that there is no free will. If he denies existence, then he cannot not exist;
if he does not arrive to deny it, then it might be there is no individual existence.
But then, this is what it is to philosophize. All philosophers place themselves
under the rubric of the Cretan Liar. All make themselves, as they have no
choice but to do as they theorize conditions, exemptions from the conditions
they theorize. To philosophize is that as much as it is anything more: to make
oneself, for the moment, apparently, an exemptionan eye gazing in from
somewhere else, from outside the philosophical vision.
However, there is a moral imperative herefor Nietzsche, for any thinker of
13 Ni etzsches Amor Fati
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integrity who confronts the image of deception entailed by the very attempt to
state the truth. Given that the acts of thinking and speaking necessarily falsify
themselves and imply the denial of what is being thought about and spoken
of, and given that one has no choice but to think and speakfor to refuse to
think about the absence of free will because there is no free will is as willful an
act as deliberately to proclaim the absence of free will because there is no free
willit is an obligation, an imposition not out of authority but out of a sense of
honesty, a sense against the odds, to speak so as to correct the inherent error
in speech, to militate against the implication that speech is free and there is
someone speaking, to speak what one seems to deny by speaking.
In the end, there is no guarantee, because there is no discretionwe
cannot choose to be able to choose, that too would be causa sui: freedom
creating itself. There is no set of appearances that could demonstrate that
the appearance of freedom is freedom, even when the freedom appears
through the act of deliberately denying freedom. It could well be that Nietzsche
writes what he writes because he must, because he is the creature he is, and
that there is no choice in his assertion of necessity or in his suggestion by
demonstration that there is freedom in the saying. So too, we could be reading
Nietzsche because we are fated to and thinking what we think of him because
it is determined that we will. And it could be we are certain that the constraint
of thought is palpably absurdbecause we have no choice but to so think.
Everything is necessitythus says the new knowledge; and this knowledge
itself is necessity.
41

But to philosophize at all, one must embrace the contradiction and remain
content that one will, of necessity, undermine the credibility of anything one
can say by the act of saying itone must afrm that contradiction. This would
make philosophy itself the very image of life, and of the afrmation of life,
and of Amor fati: the enthusiastic embrace of necessity, which is itself, in its
simplest sense, an utter contradiction, a nonsensical counsel, as if necessity
could care whether we embraced it. Thereby, freedom and necessity become
a contradiction that does not entail a violation of binary logic but rather an
intricate relation that simultaneously unites them and holds them apart.
Thereby, we become what we already are.
42
And thereby, Nietzsche can be
said to have afrmed life not so well by what he said as simply by his saying.

Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen, 2007
The Ni etzsche Ci rcl e, February 2007 14
41
Nietzsche, Human, All
Too Human, vol. 1, 107,
p. 58.
42
See Nietzsche, Also
Sprach Zarathustra: Fourth
and Last Part, The Honey
Sacrice, in The Portable
Nietzsche, p. 351. Become
who you are! - Werde, der
du bist!
published by the website of The Nietzsche Circle, www.nietzschecircle.com, June 2007