Meeting of the Aristotelian Society held at Senate House, University of London, on 21 January 2013 at 5:30 p.m. VIII—NIETZSCHE, AMOR FATI AND THE GAY SCIENCE TOM STERN Amor fati—the love of fate—is one of many Nietzschean terms which seem to point towards a positive ethics, but which appear infrequently and are seldom defined. On a traditional understanding, Nietzsche is asking us to love whatever it is that happens to have happened to us—including (and perhaps especially) all sorts of horrible things. My paper analyses amor fati by looking closely at Nietzsche’s most sustained discussion of the concept—in book four of The Gay Science—and at closely related passag- es in that book. I argue that by ignoring the context in which Nietzsche writes about amor fati in The Gay Science, we are liable to ignore several exegetical and philosophical problems with the traditional understanding of the term. I’ll argue for a different interpretation which locates Nietzsche’s amor fati within the philosophical project of The Gay Science and which copes better with the objections that plague the traditional view. I The Trouble with Amor Fati. There are horrible things about our lives which we are powerless to change. Plenty of us think those things should be met, where possible, with dignity or even serenity. Indeed, perhaps the most fearful things are fearful precisely because they cannot be met with dignity or serenity; I am thinking, for ex- ample, of certain kinds of mental deterioration. But, according to most readers, Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati demands something more: we should not merely accept, but love the terrible things that befall us. This, prima facie, is not an attractive ideal. One problem is that we can’t choose what we love. Another: if we could choose to love, ‘love’ would be something different—simpler, perhaps, but much less magical. Yet another, and the most significant: even if we could choose to love, there are plenty of things we would choose not to, though they have shaped us and formed part of our fate. Put simply: ©2013 The Aristotelian Society Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. cxiii, Part 2 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2013.00349.x 146 TOM STERN fate isn’t lovable. Adorno is among the first to object in this way. Amor fati looked too much like the pathetic love of the captive for the bars of his cage: ‘It would be worth asking the question whether there is any more reason to love that which befalls one, to affirm what is, because it is, than to hold as true what one hopes for’ (Adorno 1951, §61, my translation). In other words: why admire those who change their desires to fit what they believe (lovers of fate), rather than those who change what they believe to fit what they desire (wishful thinkers)? After the Second World War, in par- ticular, amor fati looks utterly unconscionable—a bloated form of Stockholm syndrome, the condition that some captives reputedly experience when they fall in love with their captors. Presumably Stockholm syndrome (if there really is such a thing) is a ‘syndrome’ because we would like to treat the sufferers; we do not envy them for their ultimate, affirmative achievement.1 I’ll refer to this third objection as ‘the problem of unlovable fate’. There are plenty of reasons, then, to be suspicious of amor fati. This paper sees what we can make of it through a close reading of its earliest appearance (and the context of that appearance), which is also its most emphatic statement. This occurs in the opening apho- rism of book four of The Gay Science (gs), which I reproduce in full: For the new year. —I’m still alive; I still think: I must be alive because I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today every- one allows himself to express his dearest wish and thoughts: so I, too, want to say what I wish from myself today and what thought first crossed my heart—what thought shall be the reason, warrant, and sweetness of the rest of my life! I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them—thus I will be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage war against ugliness; I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation! And, all in all and on the whole: some day I want only to be a Yes-sayer. (gs 276)2 With the possible exception of the poem which immediately pre- cedes it, this is the only direct reference to amor fati in the whole 1 Christopher Hamilton (2000) attempts to construct a notion of affirmation according to which a total affirmation would be possible in spite of unlovable fate—but it’s a religious one which Nietzsche could not have accepted. 2 Nietzsche’s works are cited by abbreviated title and section/paragraph number; see the References section below for bibliographical details of translations used. ©2013 The Aristotelian Society Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. cxiii, Part 2 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2013.00349.x NIETZSCHE, AMOR FATI AND THE GAY SCIENCE 147 book.3 It is a highly suggestive passage—lots of big, meaty notions: thinking and being; necessity and beauty; not to mention love and fate. An outsider to the idiosyncratic world of Nietzsche scholarship might expect those who have tried to comprehend amor fati to take this passage, to look at the book in which Nietzsche published it, and to see what, if anything, he says in that book about these big, meaty notions with which amor fati is evidently connected. That, in any case, is the method of this paper. II Love (1). In a recent essay, the most thorough and direct treatment of amor fati to date, Béatrice Han-Pile (2011) employs an interpre- tation of the four loves of antiquity: agape, eros, caritas, philia— particularly agape and eros.4 On her understanding, eros is a love which responds (and can be trained to respond) to properties of ob- jects. Agape bestows properties upon its objects: they are worthy of being loved just because they are loved. Consequently, agapic love needs no training: it doesn’t matter what the love object was like be- forehand, because it is transformed by agape. The principle advan- tage of her agapic reading is that it solves the problem of unlovable fate: fate becomes lovable, transformed by agape. Conceptually, agapic amor fati leaves us with plenty of concerns. It’s paradigmatically a divine (Christian) form of love meant to ex- plain how God could love something as disgusting as us; so we might wonder how humans could generate it. The main problem, though, is exegetical. To begin with, though Nietzsche would have known the classical Greek and New Testament contexts from which they are derived, there’s no particular reason to think that he distin- guished between eros and agape along these particular conceptual lines. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche’s greatest philosophical influence, understands them completely differently, and, conventionally, eros has more to do with mania or delusion than training.5 Han-Pile pro- 3 The poet’s soul becomes ever healthier, ‘frei im liebevollsten Muss’. 4 There is no neat, uncontroversial characterization of the four, nor is there agreement that there are four in the first place. Schopenhauer, for example, follows many in treating caritas as a straight Latin translation of the Greek, agape (1969, vol. i, §§66–7). 5 Eros is selfish and world-affirming; agape (= caritas) is selfless and world-denying (Schopenhauer 1969,vol.i,§67); gs 14 has eros as a ‘craving’. ©2013 The Aristotelian Society Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. cxiii, Part 2 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9264.2013.00349.x 148 TOM STERN vides just one quotation to suggest that Nietzsche ever thinks of love in terms of (her) agape: eight years before he mentions amor fati, Nietzsche speaks of a ‘love that can bestow’. But the full context of this remark shows that love bestows something on the lover, not, as the agapic reading would have it, on the beloved (Nietzsche 1983, §6, pp. 162–3; Han-Pile 2011, p. 232). Generally, though, Han-Pile takes her projections to be legitimate because Nietzsche’s own pronouncements on love are so minimal (Han-Pile 2011, pp. 224–5). Her reader must find it odd, therefore, to see an aphorism devoted to love in the very same book of The Gay Science as the amor fati aphorism, which she does not mention. It is called ‘One must learn to love’. As even the title suggests, this aphorism, if taken to inform gs 276, would run directly counter to her preferred interpretation, in that a love that can be learned is (in her terms) erotic, not agapic. The content bears this out. We learn to love everything (says Nietzsche) as we learn to love music: detecting certain properties; indulgence; habituation; fear of loss; enraptured love. Far from bestowing, the listener learns to pick out features of the object and trains herself to appreciate and love them as the be- loved object ‘gradually casts off its veil and presents itself as a new and indescribable beauty’ (gs 334). On Han-Pile’s terms, this proc- ess is characteristic of erotic love. Looking back to the start of gs 276, note that Nietzsche wants to ‘learn more and more’ how to achieve amor fati, which certainly looks to connect it with the love- learning of gs 334.6 Now the problem of unlovable fate returns: some pieces of music, and surely some aspects of fate, do not pro- duce in us—no matter how patient and indulgent we are—anything like the love that Nietzsche describes.