Essay Today - Nietzsche The Gay Science - Amor Fati and Fatalism

Aphosrism 312
My Dog - I have named my pain and called it 'dog'.

That is it - my complete essay in one sentence... wild.... neh??
Ohhhh Yeahhhhh -I did soooo use a Shogun reference

Fatalism (Amor Fati)
Taking risks requires accepting the consequences, and this sort of fatalism appeals to Nietzsche. I think that in this he is very much in league with Sartre, who may not have believed in fate but certainly did insist that one must accept the consequences of his or her actions. Fatalism appealed to Nietzsche in his analysis of the ancient Greeks, their acceptance of life and their fate in the face of absurdity and suffering. It appealed to him in considering his own miserable life, the triumph of his genius in the face of his own absurd suffering. “Not just to accept fate,” he exclaims, toward the end of his life, “but to love it, amor fati!”  I will have a good deal more to say about Nietzsche’s “classical” concept of fatalism in the next chapter. But taking fatalism as a virtue, it is of a piece with his overall insistence on “life affirmation” and his rejection of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. To accept joyfully rather than bitterly curse one’s fate—and Nietzsche surely had a good deal in his life to bitterly curse—is one of life’s greatest virtues.

The question then becomes whether Nietzsche’s many comments and occasional arguments in favor of “the love of fate” (amor fati) and against “free will” undermine any interpretation of his philosophy in existentialist and “self-making” terms. I take it that some such conception of self-making or self-creation is central to both Kierkegaard and Sartre, at least, and as such I take it to be the definitive core of that exquisite sensibility called “Existentialism.” I want to argue that Nietzsche’s fatalism and his “self-making” are ultimately two sides of the same coin and not at odds or contradictory. Nietzsche embraces the notions of responsibility—in particular, the responsibility for one’s character and “who one is”—but without invoking “free will.”

Nietzsche's Amor Fati and Becoming What One Is - Some surprising conclusions to my investigations!

Fatalistic themes recur throughout Ecce Homo. Explaining why he returned to Rome while writing Zarathustra, Nietzsche comments that “some fatality was at work” (EH III: Z-4).

He declares that “amor fati” is the mark of “greatness”: that one does not merely “bear what is necessary . . . but love[s] it” (EH II: 10). Later he remarks (not surprisingly) that “amor fati is my inmost nature” (EH III: CW-4).

The depth of Nietzsche’s fatalism regarding his own life becomes most apparent in a long passage from the second chapter of Ecce Homo. Nietzsche is here discussing his development as a philosopher, after noting that, “To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is” (EH II: 9).