Doctrine de Nietzsche qui préconise d’aimer ton destin, ton Expérience, pour éviter la Souffrance
Histoire de Jim Palmer
One day I (Jim Palmer) realized for myself I had two choices:
- Control life in order to make it the way I want (I gave this my all, but it didn’t work)
- Create a meaningful context and approach to life (this worked)
Enter philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who had a significant impact on my religious deconstruction.
One of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas was “amor fati”, translated, “the love of fate” or “the love of one’s fate”. Nietzsche saw it as flawed thinking to divide up one’s life into two categories of “good” (joys, comforts, successes, delight, pleasure, gratification) and “bad” (hardship, difficulty, adversity, sorrow, loss, affliction).
Nietzsche said that the human journey involves all of the above, and that we should not celebrate the good and despise the bad, but cultivate an acceptance and even an appreciation for the totality of it all, and how the spectrum of all our life experiences contribute to our becoming more liberated and actualized human beings.
Nietzsche was raised in a Christian family and his father was a pastor. There was hope that Nietzsche would follow in these steps. But ultimately Nietzsche denounced religion and Christianity, and believed that the emerging scientific view of the world made belief in God unreasonable, hence his infamous “God is dead” quote.
Nietzsche rejected the Christian view that human hardship and difficulty is a curse and consequence of sin, and that it is not a part of God’s perfect plan, and will ultimately be eradicate be God, at least for those who are approved by God for heaven in the afterlife.
In its place, Nietzsche offered the path of cultivating a love for all of life and the recognition that all of life provides the raw materials from which we become more fully what we are. Nietzsche wanted human beings to look at the totality of everything their life contained - the “good” and the “bad” - and to love all of it.
Nietzsche wrote:
“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, but to love it.”
In other words, Nietzsche explains this “love of fate” or radical acceptance of life, as an acceptance that is so complete that you would not turn back from living your same life over and over and over again, an infinite number of times.
It would be a misuse of Nietzsche’s idea to imply that it means we should pretend or characterize painful and traumatic experiences in our lives as desirable, or respond to the sufferings of the world with indifference and complacently. What Nietzsche was confronting was the way people are forever wishing that something different would happen in their lives - a perpetual wishing for a different fate. I know this can be true of me. My life is chock-full of preferences, and all the things I want my life to be to seem right.
Nietzsche’s idea of radical acceptance is based on the notion that fighting against a situation is a greater cause of suffering than the situation itself. Radical acceptance means accepting everything about yourself, your current situation, and your life without question, blame, or pushback. Amor fati advocates acceptance of yourself and circumstances in order to better move through and past them.
Many spiritual and philosophical teachers have re-framed the spectrum of life’s joys and sorrows in terms of acceptance. The typical mindset is to grasp for the joys and despise the sorrows. Our lives become a tandem ride of attachment to the “good” and “aversion” to the bad. But teachers and philosophers like Buddha, Jesus, Nietzsche, etc. offered a different perspective that faced all of life with acceptance, and made a place for the joys and the sorrows.
Back in my religious days I would often ask people, “If you were to die tonight, where would you spend eternity?” Now I ask, “If you were to live the last week of your life over and over and over again for time everlasting, would you be good with that?” This was a thought experiment that Nietzsche used to challenge people to examine the kind of life they were living. He called it “Eternal Recurrence.”
Eternal recurrence (or eternal return) is a philosophical concept which states that time repeats itself in an infinite loop, and that exactly the same events will continue to occur in exactly the same way, over and over again, for eternity. Nietzsche used this idea to challenge people on how they think about their lives.
Nietzsche wrote:
“What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you : ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unspeakably small or great in your life must return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’ Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or 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.‘”
Does this thought experiment make you shudder or would it be a source of comfort and joy?
In presenting the idea of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche wants us to carefully analyze our reaction if we discovered it was true. He assumes that our first reaction would be despair. The human condition is tragic, life contains much suffering, and the thought that one must relive it all an infinite number of times seems terrible.
But what Nietzsche ultimately wants and imagines is the possibility that we would have a different reaction. Suppose we could welcome the news, embrace it as something that we desire? That, says Nietzsche, would be the ultimate expression of a life-affirming attitude - to want this life, with all its pain and boredom and frustration, again and again.
The thought experiment is also a challenge not to accept a default life. In other words, if the life you are currently living in terms of your daily choices, actions, mindsets, priorities, values, and commitments, is not something you would be inspired to live again and again and again for all eternity, maybe it’s time to make a change.
Nietzsche connected the notion of eternal recurrence to amor fati. The idea is meant to convey an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary. Amor fati is characterized by an acceptance of the events or situations that occur in one’s life.
In the Will to Power, Nietzsche writes,
”The first question is by no means whether we are content with ourselves, but whether we are content with anything at all. If we affirm one single moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in us ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event—and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.”
He also wrote:
“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.”
Nietzsche’s spirit of acceptance occurs in the context of his radical embrace of suffering. For to love that which is necessary, demands not only that we love the bad along with the good, but that we view the two as inextricably linked. In the preface of The Gay Science, he writes, “Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit….I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’; but I know that it makes us more profound.”
Amor fati describes a mindset in which a person takes everything that happens in their life from an empowering perspective. Life is filled with 10,000 joys and sorrows. Consider that each of them is an invitation to make us more profound. Rather than recoil, reset, begrudge, despise, loathe, revile our struggles, difficulties, hardships, mistakes, adversities, disappointments, and upsets, what if we insisted upon being made more profound because of them?
What Nietzsche was confronting was the way people are forever wishing that something different would happen in their lives - a perpetual wishing for a different fate.
The goal of amor fati is not to teach you to be a cow standing in the rain, simply enduring and hoping to survive your fate. It is not to make you feel “okay” or even “good” when terrible things happen. Amor fati is more about how you interpret and respond to what comes in your life, what meaning you ascribe to the events and happenings of your life.
Marcus Aurelius wrote, “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.”
Anthony de Mello said ,“Every painful event contains in itself a seed of growth and liberation.”
Cheryl Strayed wrote, “You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live through it and love it and move on and be better for it.”
No circumstance can strip you of the choice to:
create an empowering context for yourself;
make good on what really matters to you;
have a breakthrough in transformation;
give expression to your true Self;
honor your highest truth;
be authentic;
love.
It’s often in the crucible of adversity, hardship and suffering where our character is forged and liberation emerges. Hence Nietzsche’s famous line, “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.”
In the life of every human being, there will be joy, peace, beauty, fulfillment and well-being. There will also be hardship, loss, adversity and suffering. Accepting the joys and despising the sorrows is living only half a life.
Instead, Nietzsche would say, learn to accept the totality of everything that happens and unfolds in your life - past, present, and future. What it means to “accept” any particular thing in your life will look different. For example, what it means to “accept” the experience of a beautiful sunset, is different from what it means to “accept” a painful loss or experience of hardship or adversity.
Only you know what it means to “accept” what comes in your life. To “accept” something is to choose to see it and respond to it in a way that reflects your highest values, deepest desires, greatest hopes, and empowers your continuing journey of growth and self-actualization.
Amor fati means “love of one’s fate.” It’s to love life… your life… in its entirety.
A question to ponder for yourself:
On what basis can I impartially accept and appreciate everything that is in my life - everything that my life has contained in its entirety to this moment, everything that is in my life right now, everything that will ever arise in my life from this day forward?
In other words, how would you frame the totality of your life (past, present and future) that would allow you to accept and love all of it, and even live it innumerable times over for all eternity?
Jim Palmer