Amor fati
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Amor fati is a Latin phrase loosely translating to "love of fate" or "love of one's fate". It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one's life, including suffering and loss, as good. Moreover, it is characterized by an acceptance of the events or situations that occur in one's life.
The phrase has been linked to the writings of Marcus Aurelius, who did not himself use the words (he wrote in Greek, not Latin). Simone Weil in a letter to Father Perrin (published in "Waiting on God") explains the phrase in relation to God:
The duty of acceptance in all that concerns the will of God, whatever it may be, was impressed upon my mind as the first and most necessary of all duties from the time when I found it set down in Marcus Aurelius under the form of the amor fati of the Stoics. I saw it as a duty we cannot fail in without dishonoring ourselves.
The phrase is used repeatedly in Friedrich Nietzsche's writings and is representative of the general outlook on life he articulates in section 276 of The Gay Science, which reads:
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! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
Quote from "Why I Am So Clever" in Ecce Homo, section 10:
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it.
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