Question

1. Summarize Nietzsche's notion of amor fati in your own words

Answer 1

Nietzsche introduces the idea of amor fati in GS 276 with the remark that he wants “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.” He spells this out to some extent in GS 341 (speaking directly to his reader or readers, as he often does) by asking her to imagine being visited by a demon who steals into her “loneliest loneliness” and informs her that the life she lives and has lived she will “have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it.” So absolutely everything that has been part of the life she now lives occurred in her previous lives and will recur in her subsequent lives without any alterations or additions. As Nietzsche puts it, “The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust.”4 How, Nietzsche asks, will she respond to this? The first alternative he mentions is that she will gnash her teeth and curse the demon. “Or”, he continues, “have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ ” In either case, if the thought “gained possession” of someone she will have been changed by it. One may be crushed by it so that the idea of living this life innumerable times more would “lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?