Overview
“Amor fati” translates from Latin to “love of fate,” reflecting an attitude of embracing everything that happens in life whether it involves pleasure or pain. It’s a phrase that invokes a lifestyle of radical acceptance of the world in order to empower oneself into action every moment.
History and Etymology
A popular misconception is that “amor fati” is ancient Stoic motto, but the major Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus wrote their works in ancient Greek. The ideas of Stoicism certainly played an influential role in the development of the term and concept, but it’s a far more modern invention.
The phrase was actually coined by Friedrich Nietzsche, who was likely inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s beliefs about transcending external limitations by aligning one’s will to something independent of them, and Baruch Spinoza’s concept of “Amor intellectualis Dei,” which translates to “love of God or Nature” as a love for everything that happens in the universe as a necessary unfolding of its existence. Nietzsche, whose philological background exposed him to ancient Stoic metaphysics, derived a thought experiment called the Eternal Recurrence in which time is an infinite loop so that every person is bound to repeat every moment of their life for eternity. The only way Nietzsche could handle the existential anxiety of this idea, as he suffered from many physical health issues throughout his life, was to move beyond traditional Stoicism that focused on “tolerare,” or the enduring of hardship, and into an active love for the role suffering plays in life. To give meaning and even love to that suffering made the idea of repeating it forever more tolerable. He also sought to find empirical evidence for his thought experiment, eventually forming an argument relying on the Law of Thermodynamics to reason that a finite number of particles over an infinite amount of time would achieve and repeat every possible combination of their arrangements.
Nietzsche didn’t use the term often though. Robert Greene, a pop psych author, popularized the term in his books like The 48 Laws of Power (1998) and The 50th Law (2009) for high-powered ambitious individuals as a type of strategy for setbacks. Rather than processing the typical emotions around a problem or a defear, one could simply embrace it as something meant to happen for a reason in order to pivot into a new strategy. Ryan Holiday, a former research assistant for Greene, blurred the lines of its origin in his works like The Obstacle Is the Way (2014) and The Daily Stoic, tying “amor fati” directly to the lineage of Stoic writers like Aurelius and Epictetus. The Daily Stoic sells merchandise like brass medallions that are marked with “Amor Fati.”