Cupid fati

The Italian city of Genoa (Acquaverde Platz), where Nietzsche first saw the sea in 1876. This first find in the hopeless search for the right place became his “favorite city on earth” for several years. Photo by Giorgio Sommer (1834–1914)

Amorfati ( latin for " Love to fate ") is a from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche coined maxim by which he wants to make the state the highest possible affirmation of life tangible for the people.

Concept history

This Latin motto was not, as often stated, coined by the Stoics in antiquity , but only in January 1882 in Genoa by Nietzsche himself in the fourth book of the gay science . Although he saw himself as the “last stoic”, he did not believe in “ world reason ” and did not want to numb the sensitivity, on the contrary. The expression “amor fati” contains more of a polemical echo of Spinoza's “ Amor intellectualis Dei ” (intellectual love for God ) and means a pagan yes to the world as a whole, with the knowledge that God is “dead” in the time of nihilism . Nietzsche prophesied a European crisis of values ​​through which the self-overcoming of nihilism was to be reversed from “will to nothing” to wanting the eternal return , transformed into a Dionysian affirmation of the “fatality of everything that was and what will be”. This tragic- heroic attitude was already modeled on what he later called “ pessimism of strength” and “amor fati”.

Moral meaning

Nietzsche's "wish" is initially only the "reduction of morality to aesthetics": "Let us learn to see things beautifully and always feel comfortable: this is how we will make things beautiful". In the so-called “fair copy” he adds to this resolution: He now wants to see things as beautiful and “necessary”. The recording, in which the term amor fati appears for the first time in the autumn of 1881, is also about the embellishment of the necessary, the love of the necessary:

"First what is necessary - and this as beautifully and perfectly as you can!" Love that which is necessary "- amor fati this would be my morality, do him all the best and raise it to you above his terrible origins."

"Amor fati" is thus the ethical-aesthetic manifestation of a fatalism that is supposed to serve to overcome nihilism. In the gay science , the "amor fati" then turns out to be the anti-inihilistic formula for designating the "highest state that a philosopher can achieve: Dionysian standing for existence ":

“ Amor fati: from now on that be my love! I don't want to wage war on the ugly . I don't want to prosecute, I don't even want to prosecute the prosecutors. Looking away is my only negative ! And, all in all: at some point I just want to be someone who says yes! "

Nietzsche thus rejects romantic pessimism , as it would have found its most expressive form in Schopenhauer's philosophy of will and in Wagner's music , as "the last great event in the fate of our culture" and names the pessimism of the future as " Dionysian pessimism". This also contains "the desire for destruction, change and becoming", but as an "expression of the overflowing, future- laden strength" and the will to perpetuate it comes "out of gratitude and love". In the legacy fragment from autumn 1887: "My new way to 'yes'", Nietzsche interweaves the topos of the Dionysian with that of Amor Fati.

In Ecce homo, the late Nietzsche radicalized his formula of “[a] mor fati” once again, even if he even defines it as the “greatness of man” that he affirms his “physiological contiguity”, his bodily randomness, in the natural context of the world recognizes:

“My formula for greatness in people: Don't just endure what is necessary, even less hide it, but love it. "

Interpretations

Among the so-called conservative revolutionaries around Ernst Niekisch and Ernst Jünger , Nietzsche's "amor fati" was verbally evoked. Under this banner, Jünger wanted above all to affirm the fate of modernity, its technology, its violence, its social upheavals. The philosopher Martin Heidegger said in 1937 about "amor fati - the love of necessity":

“This word alone only expresses Nietzsche's metaphysical basic position if we understand the two words amor and fatum and, above all, their amalgamation from Nietzsche's own thinking and do not mix in any common ones. Cupid - love, not as a sentimentality, but metaphysically as will, the will that wants the beloved to be in its essence what it is. The highest, broadest and most decisive will of this kind is the will as transfiguration, which places what is essentially wanted in the highest possibilities of its being. Amor fati is the transfiguring will to belong to the most existent of beings. The fatum is desolate and confused and depressing for those who just stand by and allow themselves to be attacked. But the fatum is sublime and the highest pleasure for those who know and understand that they, as a creator, and that is, always as a decisive one, belong to it. But this knowledge is nothing else than the knowledge that necessarily resonates in that love. "

Karl Jaspers commented:

"If Nietzsche sees the 'completion of fatalism' (13, 75) in his teaching, then this is by no means the compulsion as it is thought of in the category of necessity as a law of nature or as any recognizable order." The fate does not escape only of all definite conceivability, but become contradictory in the statement itself: "The highest fatalism is identical with chance and creativity."

In Nietzsche's doctrine of amor fati , according to Walter Schulz , the mediation of subject and world occurs . Saying yes to doom is a thoroughly paradoxical concept. It says that man surrenders himself to his freedom because he has always been detached from it by the senseless price.

Babette Babich describes the connection between science (necessity) and art (creativity) as "the art of life, the deepest achievement of Nietzsche's joyful science", as he did after the lyrical opening credits of the Sanctus Januaryis in the introductory aphorism (276) “Expresses his wish and dearest thoughts”.

See also

• Heroic realism

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Quoted from Peter Villwock: Genua , in: Schaefer, A. T: Nietzsche. South, ed. v. Board of Trustees Nietzsche House in Sils-Maria. Innsbruck 2000, pp. 50-57.
2. ↑ Klaus Bernath refers, for example, to the "stoic affirmation of the Heimarmene, represented for example by Kleanthes". Klaus Bernath: "Amor fati", in J. Ritter (Ed.): Historical Dictionary of Philosophy, Vol. 1, Basel / Darmstadt 1971, p. 206. Quoted from Kiyoshi Nishigami: Nietzsches Amor fati. The attempt to overcome European nihilism, Frankfurt / M., Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, Vienna 1993, p. 227. See also Marco Brusotti: The passion of knowledge. Philosophy and aesthetic lifestyle with Nietzsche from “Morgenröthe” to “Also sprach Zarathustra” , Berlin 1997, p. 456.
3. ↑ Aphorism 276, KSA 3, p. 521.
4. ^ Pierre Hadot: La Citadelle intérieure: Introduction aux Pensées de Marc Aurèle , pp. 102f.
5. ↑ Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil , §227.
6. ↑ Kiyoshi Nishigami: Nietzsche's Amor fati. The attempt to overcome European nihilism, Frankfurt / M., Berlin, Bern, New York, Paris, Vienna 1993, p. 227.
7. ↑ Alexander-Maria Zibis: The virtue of courage. Nietzsche's doctrine of bravery, Würzburg 2007, p. 91 ; Henning Ottmann, Philosophy and Politics in Nietzsche, Berlin 1987, p. 210.
8. ↑ See Yirmiyahu Yovel: Spinoza and Other Heretics, vol. 2: The Adventures of Immanence, Princeton 1989, p. 104 ; Marco Brusotti: The passion of knowledge. Philosophy and aesthetic lifestyle with Nietzsche from “Morgenröthe” to “Also sprach Zarathustra” , Berlin 1997, p. 454.
9. ^ Aphorism 125 of the Merry Science . Cf. on this Manfred Geier: Geistesblitze Another history of philosophy Rowohlt 2013, p. 154.
10. ^ Friedrich Nietzsche: Götzen-Twilight, Errors 8; KSA 6, p. 96.
11. ↑ Young-Im Yang: The phenomenon of negation: - examined philosophically, psychologically and in a cultural comparison, Würzburg 2005, p. 24.
12. ^ Heinz Malorny: On the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Berlin, GDR: Akademieverlag, 1989, p. 86; Damir Barbarić, In the Face of the Infinite. On Nietzsche's criticism of metaphysics, Würzburg 2011, p. 82.
13. ↑ Quoted from Marco Brusotti: The passion of knowledge. Philosophy and aesthetic lifestyle with Nietzsche from “Morgenröthe” to “Also sprach Zarathustra” , Berlin 1997, p. 456.
14. ↑ Kiyoshi Nishigami: Nietzsche's Amor fati. The attempt to overcome European nihilism, Frankfurt / M. u. a. 1993, p. 264.
15. ↑ Eike Brock: Nietzsche and the Nihilism , Berlin 2015, p. 11.
16. ↑ Friedrich Nietzsche: The happy science , fourth book, aphorism 276 "For the new year" (KSA 3, p. 521). See also The Twilight of the Idols, 115: “The necessary does not hurt me; amor fati is my innermost nature. "Nachlass, XII, 141:" Yes! I only want to love what is necessary! Yes! amor fati be my last love! "
17. ↑ Friedrich Nietzsche: The happy science , fourth book, aphorism 370. Quoted from Günter Gersting, Nietzsche's art of crossing over: a provocation, [Dissertation Friedrich Schiller University Jena], Jena 2013, p. 67.
18. ↑ Jutta Georg and Claus Zittel: Nietzsche's philosophy of the unconscious. Berlin / Boston 2012, p. 120.
19. ↑ Sarah Bianchi: Being necessary for one another: Existential recognition in Nietzsche, Fink, 2016, p. 89.
20. ↑ 6, 10, 297.
21. ↑ K. von Beyme: Political Theories in the Age of Ideologies 1789-1945. Wiesbaden, Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002, p. 501 .
22. ↑ Thomas Hettche in: Ernst Jünger: Späte Rache: Erzählungen , p. 92 .
23. ^ Martin Heidegger: Nietzsche I, GA 44, Frankfurt a. Main 1975, p. 232.
24. ↑ Karl Jaspers: Nietzsche: Introduction to Understanding His Philosophizing , Berlin 1981, p. 366.
25. ↑ KSA, NF, 11, 292.
26. ^ Walter Schulz: Subjectivity in the post-metaphysical age . Pfullingen: Neske 1992, p. 217.
27. ↑ Babette E. Babich: Hearing and Reading, Music and Science Nietzsche's "gaya scienza" in: Beatrix Vogel (Ed.): The human being - his own experiment ?, Munich 2008, p. 514.