From: "Ben B. Day" <bday-AT-cs.umb.edu>
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2000 00:14:06 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: What is amor fati?


> This is sloppy scholarship at best. Amor Fati (love of fate-directly from
> Latin Fatum is in dative, n, 1st declension....)  "To see what is necessary
> and beautiful in things then I will become one of those who make things
> beautiful.  Amor fati let that be my love henceforth!" FW276

I've recently begun to suspect - and I'm curious what some of you may
think in regards to this - that Nietzsche's amor fati may be, at the
very least, influenced by, at most a modified expression of, Spinoza's
conception of freedom.

For Spinoza, being a determinist, freedom is obviously not freedom
from having one's actions determined by external conditions. And so
he establishes freedom as the /recognition/, on the one hand, and
the /embracing/, on the other, of what must be.

Nietzsche isn't a determinist, but for him the human will is responsible
for very little when compared to that which has been sublimated into
instinct. Additionally, the human will is inherently problematic, linked
to that late and troublesome development - consciousness.

We also might view amor fati as the flip side of the dictate of the
eternal recurrence - the embracing of one's future to complement the
embracing of one's past.

In any case, as a lover of brief habits, I'll stop here,
----Ben


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