Amor fati

All right, so today we're going to really dig into something pretty wild.

It's called Amor Fati.

Ooh, that's a good one.

Yeah, it's this idea from the Stoics.

Right.

And that's where the active part of acceptance comes in.

Amor Fati isn't about just giving up and letting fate happen.

So

Thanks for listening.

And until next time, my friends, big love, Godspeed and Amor Fati.

Mm-hmm.

So, there's a phrase, amor fati, the love of one's fate.

This was popularized by Nietzsche, talking about loving what happens to you.

So, there's a phrase by Epictetus, he says, do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to.

You can still learn from it because even though you did everything perfectly, perfectly, and you still didn't hit the target, you still have something to learn from the arrow going awry, even if it is just the love of your fate.

And that is the meaning, in my estimation, of amor fati and Stoic philosophy, because, in my opinion, unlike Nietzsche's great recurrence, or unlike eternal recurrence, or unlike Camus' conception of the myth of Sisyphus, I'm now taking out the premise that everything is meaningless and reinserting the notion that some of it has meaning and therefore your purpose and how you interact really only matters in those respects.

And the rest of it, you just learn to love rather than learn to hate.

Yeah, I don't subscribe to nihilistic tendencies either, to be fair.

And not just be in the world like everyone else is, but jump in in such a way that we must joyfully embrace every single moment, even during times of great strife and struggle and suffering.

This is the main point of Amor Fati and the Eternal Return.

They're ways for Nietzsche to communicate just how strongly he wants us to participate in the world, and in large part these concepts arise out of opposition to Schopenhauer.

Aestheticism is only one part of Schopenhauer's ethical equation.

Nietzsche's entire philosophy can be viewed as one big warning against this looming prospect of nihilism, against this last will into nothingness, against this disease that destroys everything lofty and great.

And he tried to take the first steps to provide an alternative to nihilism, to provide a philosophy of the future.

This is where concepts like the Übermensch, Amor Fati and the Eternal Recurrence come in.

But most of all, Nietzsche wanted to replace man's will to nothingness with a will to power, his antidote to the destructive, ironically named will to life, the main concept in Schopenhauer's philosophy.