LISTEN. Time to close Sarah Bakewell's fine Montaigne bio. Our time with him for now is ended, but not finished. I think he's now in a dead heat with David Hume as one of my favorite skeptics. But I do have reservations.
For instance, if amor fati means "cheerful acceptance of whatever happens" I cannot join him in being firmly wedded to such a complacent-sounding stance. Loving one's fate, as I understand the concept, does not mean loving everything about everyone's fate and cheerfully renouncing the meliorist's mission to work for better futures all around. The tenor of Bakewell's discussion, in terms of Christian salvation, suggests a narrower focus--on one's personal fate--than pragmatic meliorists prefer.But if amor fati is more about renouncing impotent, debilitating, self-destructive regret for one's own past errors and fallibilities ("18. Reflect on everything; regret nothing") while still learning from them and cultivating conscientious, humane regard for others and a "willingness to leap between different people's points of view," that elicits my cheer... (continues)
I pondered on the concept of Amor Fati as it was mentioned in Nietzsche's philosophy a while ago. For Nietzsche, we must imagine (hypothetically) that our life is a continuous cycle, that we will continue to experience our life on a loop forever. The catch is, while you will be able to experience your life over and over again, you will never be able to change anything. All your regrets, your fails, your losses, you will relive those exactly as they first happened. For most people, this cycle would be a heinous curse, as if a great demon had damned them.
ReplyDeleteNietzsche then said that we should be that person that ecstatically thanks the demon for this curse, that we should love all parts of our life so deeply that the thought of spending an eternity reliving them (the good AND the bad) is an act of supreme joy.
I believe Nietzsche's reaction to the cyclical curse, and Amor Fati, comes from the ability to appreciate the entire cycle of existence- from life to death, and to appreciate suffering as the necessary antithesis to liberation, as well as to get out of your head with your "failures" and "losses" and marvel at the beauty of the world, even in its bitter moments.
I also think that reflecting on Amor Fati as well as the bulk of stoic/stoic-related thought gives us the impression that everything in life can be taken away, including our existence, at a moments notice. The only thing that no one and nothing can take away from us is our inner state. For Sartre, this is our ability to interpret the world, and it gives us freedom even while in chains. For stoics and Buddhists, acting virtuously and cultivating an inner peace allows us to live to the fullest and without regrets, even if our actions end in failure or we experience calamity in our lives. Because of Amor Fati, we are taught to enjoy life, but not rest our notions of happiness or meaning on the whims of our material world.
ReplyDeleteThat's right, amor fati should remind us to take nothing--not a moment of life--for granted, and to be grateful for life when the odds favor our permanent non-existence. We might well never have been born, we might be gone in an instant. For most of us, just about any fate is better than none.
ReplyDeleteBut given that we ARE here, it's clear that improvements should be made. Better fates, arranged through our deliberate exertions, are more loveable still.
Nietzsche was no meliorist in the pragmatic sense, though he thought he could improve his own personal experience by affirming this life and no other. Pragmatic meliorists want to improve everyone's experience, and engineer better fates, by identifying and aspiring to the better possibilities of existence. Their conception of fate, in other words, is more flexible and less self-centered. It's less fatalistic.