Fate, love it or...

LISTEN. We finally caught up to the last installment of Ken Burns's marvelous Country Music, and Ricky Skaggs's "Don't Get Above Your Raisin'" is stuck in my head this morning. That tune is sure catchy, and if I'd heard it back before I came to Nashville I might not have been so puzzled the first time I heard a native Tennessean speak of her raisin'.

But are we fated to stay within our raisin'? Don Williams sang that great Bob McDill tune that somehow didn't make Ken Burns's final cut, that says "I guess we're all gonna be what we're gonna be." Is that true? Is it fatalistic? Can you really love it?

We were to have had a report in Happiness today on Nietzsche, whose notion of a life-affirming philosophy of life included a strong dose of fatalism. But fate intervened, calling one of our senior reporters away to deal with a family emergency. So as fate will have it, Nietzsche will wait.

But I can't wait to think about fate and stoicism. Is it true that, truly to love life, we must accept and embrace whatever has happened and even to wish that it all may happen again, and again, and again... eternally?  Eternal recurrence is harsh medicine, purgative and clarifying but possibly also dispiriting. Nietzsche called it a gift. A scene in When Nietzsche Wept, a film (unlike Country Music) I'll be grateful not to see again and again in its entirety, depicts him conveying that gift to his shrink. Thanks a lot.

Epictetus the slave said we could free our minds by not concerning ourselves with things beyond our power. "Demand not that events should happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do happen and you will go on well."

If Stoicism is acceptance of what was and what is, of events beyond our control construed as external realities beyond the reach of our wills, does that not entail advance acceptance of events yet to come? That seemed to be Spinoza's line on freedom, and seems to be Royce's too. The only thing presumed to lie within our personal power, for a metaphysical idealist and rationalist, would be the refashioning of our inner lives, calibrating will to synchronize with necessity, not presuming to possess real agency and efficacy. But why should fate respect a merely stipulated boundary between external reality and inner adjustment?

Might that boundary be a pragmatic stipulation, more or less arbitrarily drawn (but precisely vindicated when it "works"), without which we could not "go on well"? Might stoic pragmatism be an improvement on stoic fatalism? Might that be what Royce and James were really arguing about, all those years at Harvard and on the wall in Chocorua?

The Daily Stoic today offers this:

9. AMOR FATI: LOVE EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS
The great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would describe his formula for human greatness as amor fati—a love of fate. “That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backwards, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it….but love it.”

The Stoics were not only familiar with this attitude but they embraced it. Two thousand years ago, writing in his own personal journal which would become known as Meditations, Emperor Marcus Aurelius would say: “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.” Another Stoic, Epictetus, who as a crippled slave has faced adversity after adversity, echoed the same: “Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.”

It is why amor fati is the Stoic exercise and mindset that you take on for making the best out of anything that happens: Treating each and every moment—no matter how challenging—as something to be embraced, not avoided. To not only be okay with it, but love it and be better for it. So that like oxygen to a fire, obstacles and adversity become fuel for your potential.

The Book of Life, in the entry Nietzsche, Regret and Amor Fati, says:

One of the strangest yet most intriguing aspects of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas is his repeated enthusiasm for a concept that he called amor fati (translated from Latin as ‘a love of one’s fate’, or as we might put it, a resolute, enthusiastic acceptance of everything that has happened in one’s life). The person of amor fati doesn’t seek to erase anything of their past, but rather accepts what has occurred, the good and the bad, the mistaken and the wise, with strength and an all-embracing gratitude that borders on a kind of enthusiastic affection.

This refusal to regret and retouch the past is heralded as a virtue at many points in Nietzsche’s work. In his book, The Gay Science, written during a period of great personal hardship for the philosopher, Nietzsche writes:

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes 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.

And, a few years later, in Ecce Homo Nietzsche writes:

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… but love it. (BoL, continues)

Love it to death. Love it so much that he'd even "rush into a lion's jaws" in a fatal final act of "surrender to God," Nietzsche wrote in 1882. Surrender to God, said the guy who said God is dead?! That just seems a little weird.