1.1 Introduction

This Element explores Nietzsche’s thinking about fate. There are good reasons for finding this topic worth attention. Not only is fate often referred to in Nietzsche’s writing, but the concept is linked with some of his most original ideas – such as amor fati and ‘becoming what you are’, both to be looked at closely here. What is more, the theme of fate or destiny (I will take these as synonyms) raises broad issues about becoming, necessity and chance, all important themes in Nietzsche’s philosophical thought.

Given all this, one might expect to find expert commentary on the topic. In fact, this is a side of Nietzsche that scholars prefer to avoid. One reason is that the idea of fate has a bad reputation. Now, ‘fate’ is not a philosopher’s word but belongs to ordinary language. Similarly, the concept it stands for is part of popular thinking, where it maintains a stubborn presence, despite the disapproval of both science and religion. Hence, fate has seldom been taken seriously by philosophers. In modern times, the word is often seen as suggesting a power that prevents humans from having any influence at all on the course of events. It is then pointed out that this is disproven by everyday experience – a quick and easy refutation. Nietzsche is one of the few modern thinkers to give serious attention to the idea of fate. Here as elsewhere, he is an isolated figure, a philosophical outlier. However, in this Element, I want to show that both interest and value can be found in his thinking on the theme.

While my topic is fate, I will also be discussing fatalism. In everyday discourse, the word ‘fate’ refers to a higher power governing the course of events. ‘Fatalism’ is often used by philosophers for the thesis that whatever happens does so of necessity. But ‘fatalism’ in general usage means something else: a mood or attitude of passive resignation in the face of outside forces that humans have no power to resist. Philosophers might wish to keep the word to themselves as a theoretical term; however, in practice, they must live with other language users. Hence, we will have to take care with both words in order to avoid confusion.

Because of these differences, ‘fate’ and ‘fatalism’ do not always go together. Michael Allen Fox’s recent book Fate and Life: Who’s Really in Charge? is specifically about fate. As the author explains, his aim is ‘to show that we both need to and are able to detach the concept of fate from fatalism and can view fate in its own right, within the rich context of lived experience’ (Fox Reference Fox2024, p. 129). What Fox wants is fate without fatalism, a concept that he thinks comes with too much philosophical baggage. Freed of that added burden, he argues, the concept of fate can help us to make sense of our lives by highlighting the givenness of circumstance as a presence within all experience, and so helping us to arrive at a better grasp of what is and what is not within our power. So understood, fate becomes a valid and useful tool for our thinking.

In contrast, the debate over fatalism amongst American analytic philosophers of the late twentieth century (key readings can be found in Wallace Reference Wallace, Cahn and Eckert2010) excluded fate from its discussions of the doctrine of necessity and its consequences for human deliberation and action. Readers of Steven M. Cahn’s book Fate, Logic, and Time will not come across the first word of its title in the text, except in two quotations from other writers (Cahn Reference Cahn1967, pp. 17 and 18). Similarly, with other contributors to this philosophical debate, ‘fate’ is merely an idiom for a final outcome (Bernstein Reference Bernstein1992, pp. 15 and 25). In effect, then, what these writers hold up for our consideration is a fatalism without fate.

In these examples, we see the disadvantages of separating fate and fatalism. Without fatalism, fate becomes a psychological concept, located in subjective experience, and any usefulness it may have there is limited by its lack of further grounding. On the other hand, without fate, fatalism is just a conceptual problem for philosophers, a good exercise for their analytic and critical skills but making few demands on anyone else’s attention. By keeping fate and fatalism together, we can engage in theorising that has relevance to our own lives, and even some practical bearing, while accessing the reasoning that underpins these lessons with an intellectual grasp of the world and life in general.

What is Nietzsche’s attitude towards these terms? Joan Stambaugh draws a contrast: ‘Fate is his own positive concept; fatalism is his polemical target. He loved fate, not fatalism’ (Stambaugh Reference Stambaugh1994, p. 81). There is certainly evidence for her view. The expression amor fati means ‘love of fate’, and this idea is strongly advocated in Nietzsche’s middle and late writings. Further, he endorses the concept of fate, writing: ‘Fate is an elevating thought for the person who grasps that he belongs to it’ (KSA 11, 26 [442]). Nietzsche’s concern with fate had begun at school, where he wrote two essays on fate, both highly sympathetic to the concept (KGW I/2, pp. 431–440). It remained one of his themes at every stage of his later work, as we shall see.

As for ‘fatalism’, a section of one book is devoted to attacking what he calls ‘Turkish fatalism’, accusing it of making a ‘fundamental error’ (WS 61). This is the polemic that Stambaugh has in mind. Yet ‘Turkish fatalism’ seems to refer to one kind of fatalism.Footnote ¹ What about other kinds? ‘Fatalism’ without a qualifier is treated more favourably elsewhere. Writing of Goethe, he says: ‘Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathsome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole – he does not negate any more’ (TI ‘Skirmishes’ 49). He even describes his own thought of eternal return as a ‘completion’ (Vollendung) of fatalism (KSA 11, 25 [214]) – hardly a rejection. What he does reject out of hand is what he calls ‘determinism’, arguing that it relies on unjustified assumptions about causality and laws of nature (see, e.g., KSA 12, 10 [57] and 10 [138]). One text opposes this directly to his own concept of fate: ‘Determinism: “I am a fatum for everything to come!” – is my answer to determinism!’ (KSA 10, 16 [64]).

Clearly, Nietzsche does not take a negative attitude towards ‘fatalism’. If anything, he is attracted to the word just because of its bad reputation. As with a term important in his later thought, ‘nihilism’, he wants to take it over as his own. From here on, then, I will be treating fate and fatalism as corollaries within his thought. If separating them has drawbacks, as I suggested, conversely, Nietzsche’s thinking gains from maintaining the link. It enables him to move back and forth between personal and conceptual topics, so that each can inform the other. But what is the essential content that they have in common? In the rest of this section, I will focus on two more basic concepts: necessity and chance. As we will see, Nietzsche’s concept of fate relies on both as primary aspects, and for that reason they belong together. Further, both play a role in linking fate with fatalism, since they are abstract concepts that on occasion characterise features of personal experience: they are not just thought but encountered, one might say. So, after looking into each in turn, I will sketch out a general picture that gives us a useful model for approaching what Nietzsche has to say about fate.

The connection between fate and necessity is plain to see. Traditionally fate is taken to mean that every human life necessarily follows one particular course rather than others. We can imagine that things might have gone differently in the past, and similarly that more than one future is possible. For the fatalist these are illusions, and sometimes attempts are made to show how the error might arise. Very often a more general claim is made, that everything in the world is governed by the same strict necessity – in other words, that whatever happens does so necessarily. This is fatalism in the narrow philosophical sense, a doctrine that we find Nietzsche endorsing in many places. One might simply identify fatalism with the doctrine of necessity, but that would leave the word’s associations unexplained. It would not account for the personal concern that is expressed in the word ‘fate’. Whatever fatalism is, it is something that we take personally. That is what makes it a crucial concern for Nietzsche.

But what about chance? The concept of fate is often applied to the events that we call ‘chance’, throwing a new light on them and even placing the word ‘chance’ in question. In the 1934 musical film The Gay Divorcee, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, comedic play is made out of a secret password that goes: ‘Chance is the fool’s name for fate’. The running joke is that the password is entrusted to a blockhead who keeps on garbling the words. Yet there is more to the line than that. Belief in fate often involves finding a meaning in chance events that they would not otherwise have. Then it amounts to claiming an insight that is not available to less perceptive people. Thus, Nietzsche can write: ‘Looking ahead, all our events may look only like the combination of chance and nonsense: looking backward, I can for my part no longer find anything of either in my life’ (KSA 11, 40 [46]). Now, a hard-headed sceptic might comment that fate is the fool’s name for chance – but this also asserts that they are two ways of understanding the same thing, and so which version is right is an open question.

If I begin with a general sketch of what it means to say that Nietzsche is a supporter of fatalism, we can become more specific later on. The two main themes will be necessity and chance. As we will see, these are intrinsic aspects of Nietzsche’s idea of fate, and the relation between them is an issue that needs some attention. Let us start with necessity, a concept that is not as straightforward as it may at first appear.

1.2 Necessity

Many ancient thinkers support a doctrine of necessity, although not always for the same reason. Some rely on causal determinism, while others offer definitions of possibility and necessity that refer directly to occurrence in time. The Megarian logician Diodorus Cronus proposed a ‘Master Argument’ designed to establish that ‘only what either is true or will be true is a possibility’ (Cicero 1942, p. 13). Similarly, to say that something will never happen is to say that it is impossible. The opposite view was expressed by Alexander of Aphrodisias: ‘It is possible for that to come to be which is not prevented from coming to be by anything, even if it does not come to be’ (Alexander of Aphrodisias 1983, p. 51). The Diodorean doctrine is unusual in that it relies on logical argument alone. Given Nietzsche’s familiarity with ancient thought, it may be that he had something like this in mind.Footnote ² However, modern logicians attempting to construct the line of reasoning used by Diodorus Cronus run into difficulty, especially given the common-sense belief that some things are possible but never happen (see Prior Reference 68Prior1955). It may even be that Nietzsche’s thinking goes the other way round – that he assumes a doctrine of necessity because he accepts fatalism as a philosophy of life.

That Nietzsche believes in necessity is not in doubt. He writes: ‘Occurrence and necessary occurrence is a tautology’ (KSA 12, 10 [138]). The statement raises a question: what might support such a dramatic generalisation? Nietzsche’s reasons are quite complex. They include some reflections about his own life, but also ideas drawn from his knowledge of the philosophical tradition that goes back to ancient Greece. Leucippus, the founder of atomism, is supposed to have said: ‘Nothing occurs at random, but everything for a reason and of necessity’ (Kirk and Raven Reference Kirk and Raven1957, p. 413). This is the tradition that Nietzsche is following when he writes:

The waterfall image recalls the world view of Leucippus and Democritus: nature as an eternal flow of particles through boundless space, continually colliding and interacting to form bodies of all kinds (Kirk and Raven Reference Kirk and Raven1957, pp. 410–411). At the same time, the theory at work in this passage is orthodox causal determinism. Nietzsche’s endorsement probably shows the influence of his philosophical ally of that time, Paul Rée. Rée devotes a chapter to this theme in his book The Origin of the Moral Sensations, written at the same time. Just as the behaviour of animals is simply the result of their physical and mental states, he argues, so too with humans: ‘when someone has chosen one among various things, this choice has been produced by causes that themselves have certain causes, and has therefore occurred with necessity’ (Rée Reference Rée2003, p. 106). Looking back, people say ‘I could have done otherwise’, but this is true only if it means ‘if there had been other impulses or different circumstances, I would have done otherwise’. Everyone can agree on that.

Rée wants to rebut the concept of free will because he sees it as a main element in moral concepts of responsibility and guilt. Similarly, in Nietzsche’s ‘free spirit’ period, the doctrine of necessity is the main weapon in his campaign against moral thinking in its usual form. He takes it for granted that we are not responsible for our actions, since they follow necessarily from the circumstances, together with our own personality. ‘All our actions are absolute necessities’ (KSA 9, 6 [120]). What is more, we are not responsible for this ongoing personality: ‘No one is accountable for his deeds, no one for his nature; to judge is the same thing as to be unjust’ (HAH 39). This could be written by Rée. In a few places, Nietzsche even takes over Rée’s account of the moral sense as a product of habitual associations of ideas (HAH 39 and WS 40). Yet he has hardly any concern with the issue of free will, and does not try to explain how the belief might arise. His own objection to morality is based on another premise: that moral judgement is an expression of the spirit of revenge. For Rée, moral responsibility is simply a mistake, the outcome of faulty thinking. For Nietzsche, that is an inadequate account. The moral world view is powerful because driven by strong forces: only this can explain the vast amount of outright cruelty found in the history of punishment. Vengefulness itself is not just wounded self-esteem, as Rée supposes (Rée Reference Rée2003, p. 145), but something far deeper and therefore harder to overcome.

The determinism of the ‘free spirit’ period is only a phase in Nietzsche’s thinking. Before long, his rejection of moral responsibility is extended to a critique of causality, understood as the action of one subject on another. Alongside this destructive critique, he rejects any notion of a ‘law of nature’ as an external power controlling things that would otherwise go their own way. In reality, things do go their own way, and that is just where their necessity is found. Yet necessity as an immanent principle is hard to define further. Nietzsche tends to fall back on an appeal to the law of identity: ‘against seeming “necessity” – this is just an expression of the fact that one force cannot be another one as well’ (KSA 12, 9 [91)], ‘something happens in this and not another way’ (KSA 13, 14 [81]) and ‘One and the same force cannot also be another force’ (KSA 12, 2 [139]).

What can we make of this reduction of necessity to identity? Nietzsche’s view of causality seems to be that each causal process is a one-off, because it is simply one force expressing its essential nature. But is the idea of an effect-producing process that does not correspond to a law of nature so unusual? After all, this is what people who believe in free will take human decisions to be like, although adding in a distinction between subject and action to support the notion of accountability. According to them, every free act is a unique causality, and not a particular instance of some general law. But just as laws of nature are ruled out by a realisation that there is nobody who obeys, so too free will is ruled out by a realisation that there is nobody who chooses or decides. This is a far more radical criticism than that of Paul Rée, who retains a conventional view of human agency. When Nietzsche calls for ‘abolition of the concept of necessity’ (KSA 11, 26 [283]) he is rejecting a notion of causal necessity which relies on an anthropomorphic image of compelling force. Yet he does so in order to replace it with a genuine concept of necessity. If he continues to concur with Rée’s claim that free will and moral responsibility are illusions, it is because his own belief in ‘the unconditional necessity of every event’ (KSA 12, 1 [114]) leads to the same conclusion.

In considering Nietzsche’s view of necessity, we cannot avoid the thought of eternal return. This occupies a unique place in his thinking: for its sudden appearances and sporadic reappearances, and for the importance he places on it. The doctrine states that everything in our present lives must be relived again and again, and as a corollary, that we must already have lived these same lives, infinitely many times. Thus, whereas causal determinism asserts that our actions occur of necessity owing to immediate causes, the thought of eternal return takes a different line: it implies that what we do in our present lives must be what we have done in previous cycles. This looks like a kind of explanation, and it also predicts what must happen in future cycles.Footnote ³ Yet there can hardly be a direct connection between events very distant in time. We must conclude that this element of necessity has no identifiable source, since every past cycle is due to a previous one, going back into infinity: ‘there is no first cycle’ (Kain Reference Kain1983, p. 377; Loeb Reference Loeb and Ansell Pearson2006, pp. 173–174). In his ‘Free Will and Fatum’ essay the schoolboy Nietzsche writes, borrowing from Emerson’s ‘Fate’: ‘The Hindu says that fatum is nothing but the deeds we have committed in a prior state of existence’ (KGW I/2, p. 438). This is also what the eternal return implies, but with an infinite regress added in.

An 1884 notebook entry reads: ‘My completion of fatalism: (1) through the eternal return and pre-existence (2) through the elimination of the concept “will”’ (KSA 12, 25 [214]). Another entry reads: ‘Such an anticipatory conception for the winning of the highest power is fatalism (ego – fatum) (most extreme form “eternal recurrence”)’ (KSA 11, 27 [67]). In both passages, the eternal return is identified not just as fatalism, but as a fatalism that has been taken to the limit. This might be understood in several ways, but our discussion has made one relevant point: the eternal return separates necessity from any kind of intervention: there is no hand of fate, and yet the same particular events must occur in every cycle of recurrence. This is an accidental necessity, building in a strong element of chance. The eternal return includes every aspect of one’s life and experience, including the most trivial and accidental details: as Zarathustra puts it, ‘And this slow spider, which crawls in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself ’ (Z III: ‘On the Vision and Riddle’). In this way, the eternal return gives every event the same status. There is no justification for taking some aspects to be more important as others, and that levelling undermines the making of value judgements in a different way from the denial of moral responsibility that any version of fatalism brings with it.

1.3 Chance and Accidentality

So far we have been looking at the idea of necessity. What about chance, the other concept I identified as an essential feature of Nietzsche’s fatalism? Whereas fate is always linked with necessity, an identification with chance may come as a surprise. In what seems to be a summarising comment on Z II, Nietzsche writes: ‘Highest fatalism but identical with chance and creativity’ (KSA 11, 27 [71]). The ‘but’ (doch) hints at paradox. How do we think of these concepts together, given that they seem so different and even contradictory? Chance means what cannot be predicted, but when an event happens of necessity, there is usually a reason for its occurrence – for example, a cause that produces that outcome. Thus, necessity seems to entail predictability and to exclude chance. This suggests that some events have a cause and some have no cause, and that ‘chance’ refers to the second kind. But philosophers typically prefer to live in a universe where nothing happens without a reason, and every event has a cause. So do scientists, whose search for causes relies on a firm belief that they are there to be found. The readiest interpretation of a chance event – that it has no cause – is thus unacceptable. Yet nobody can believe that chance is a power in its own right, bringing about events, even if idioms involving ‘luck’ or ‘fortune’ suggest something of the kind.

For these reasons, many thinkers have followed Boethius in claiming that ‘chance’ is ‘a wholly empty term’ (Boethius 1999, p. 97). On this view, it acts as a cover for human ignorance. In other words, we refer something to chance when we do not know its cause, and especially when we suppose that the cause will be difficult to identify.Footnote ⁴ Now, there are valid excuses for such failures. Our ability to perceive what happens in the world is very limited, as Nietzsche often points out. Yet this reading of ‘chance’ as an empty word, covering our ignorance of causes, does not satisfy everyone. It evidently does not satisfy Nietzsche, going by his assertion that ‘“Chance” actually exists’ (KSA 12, 2 [167]). This is part of an argument for the innocence of becoming: a critique of causality will also count against accountability. But it also provides a riposte to those who dismiss the word ‘chance’ as meaningless. Hence, we need to look at other approaches to chance, especially those that give the concept a useful and valid descriptive role.

One answer, going back to Aristotle, takes chance events to be accidents or, more specifically, coincidences. A coincidence occurs when two distinct courses of events cross paths. As Aristotle explains, the result is an event for which an explanation is not available. This event will have further consequences, but when we are explaining those, ‘the process goes back to a certain starting-point, but this no longer points to something further’ (Metaphysics, VI.3, 1027b, in Aristotle Reference McKeon1941, p. 782). In other words, no single cause can be found for this event, even though each of the sequences of events leading up to it is marked by necessity. A corollary of lack of explanation is the lack of predictability that leads us to call it a chance event. The best-known illustration is Aristotle’s: if a man goes to a marketplace on business and runs into someone he did not expect to meet, then there is an explanation for his being there at that time, and an explanation for the other man’s being there at that time, but there is no explanation for their being there at the same time. Thus, the meeting is what we call a chance event.

‘Chance’ is not an empty word here, since it refers to a particular kind of event. It is not a cover for ignorance on our part, since we know what led up to the meeting: each of the men went to the marketplace on business. Thus, while the event is unexpected, a fuller account takes us back to the safe epistemic ground of processes that run their course in accordance with predictable patterns. In fact, for a being who could observe the entire state of the world and estimate its consequences, their meeting would be wholly predictable. In this way, chance seems to be recognised without abandoning causal determination. Once again, talk of chance refers to knowers whose powers of perception and prediction are limited, like the men in Aristotle’s example. It is not surprising so many philosophers point to coincidence as a solution to the puzzle of chance. Chance events in this sense are not an exception to the rule of determinism, but simply a special case.

Can Nietzsche’s concept of chance be identified with coincidence? His friend Heinrich Köselitz explained the idea to him: ‘The points of intersection of two causal chains are what we call accidents’ (KGB III/2, 93). Nietzsche sometimes appears to think along those lines, as when he writes: ‘I recognised the active force, the creative, within chance events. Chance is itself only the collision of the creative impulses’ (KSA 10, 24 [28]). In his ‘untimely’ essay on history, he borrows a passage from the playwright Franz Grillparzer describing human society as a dynamic system, governed by a general necessity: ‘But every human being also has his own separate necessity, so that millions of courses run alongside one another in parallel, in curved and straight lines, crossing one another’s paths, helping or hindering one another, striving to and fro, and thereby assuming the character of chance for one another’ (HL 6, quoting Grillparzer Reference Grillparzer, Frank and Pörnbacher1964, vol. 3, p. 1171). The conclusion he draws is that the historian is not justified in assuming the presence of an overall pattern, even if the human world is as governed by necessity as the natural world.

In these places, Nietzsche does understand chance as coincidence in the Aristotelian sense, a view that has the advantage of being consistent with an overall determinism. But that is overshadowed by his more radical statements about chance. Some of them suggest that everything that happens, happens by chance. Chance as coincidence cannot be what is meant there. Aristotle stipulates that chance events are unusual events, occurring ‘neither always nor for the most part’ (Metaphysics VI.2, 1026b–1027a, in Aristotle Reference McKeon1941, p. 780). If they did occur usually, we would take them to be the normal course of events. Thus, while some events may be unexpected, nature cannot be chance all the way down, so to speak, because the underlying processes whose intersection produces an accidental event are regular and predictable, taken by themselves.

Can we find Nietzsche saying that every event is a chance event, in parallel with his statement ‘Occurrence and necessary occurrence is a tautology’? His critique of ‘laws of nature’ points towards some such thesis. It asserts that chance is not a rare exception in an ordered world, but the general state of affairs: it is order that is an exception, one that is itself due to chance (KSA 9, 11 [313]). He is fond of characterising the course of becoming as a dice game, an image that certainly suggests chance (e.g., KSA 13, 14 [188]). In print he refers to ‘the whole purely chance character of events’ (D 13) and asserts that ‘Nature is chance’ (TI ‘Skirmishes’ 7). In those cases, though, it may be argued that the scope of the claim being made is restricted by its particular context.Footnote ⁵ The first text is a polemic against the notions of responsibility and guilt, and an affirmation of the ‘innocence of becoming’. Hence, ‘chance’ may mean only an absence of agency or purpose.Footnote ⁶ The other text is about the relation between nature and art. Nietzsche criticises artists (and ‘psychologists’) who claim to follow nature, merely absorbing its content (perhaps the Impressionists are meant). His objection is that nature does not provide ready-made form: it is arbitrary, haphazard and patchy. For the artist, therefore, working ‘from nature’ is mere weakness and passivity. In both of these cases, the critic may argue, the word ‘chance’ is tied to a particular debate, and therefore should not be read in a general sense.

Are these grounds for discounting what look like general statements about chance and reality? If so, why not do something similar for the assertions about necessity cited earlier? I think that a general thesis does run through these passages: that chance is found everywhere, and that it is a feature of becoming in general. It appears in particular forms because what interests Nietzsche is those problem areas, not a broader metaphysical issue. To support that reading, let us approach the issue from a different direction.

A solution lies in Nietzsche’s immanent notion of necessity – that is, in what I have called ‘one-off ’ causality. As Herman Siemens puts it, ‘“necessity” names that which remains after subtracting laws of nature’ (Siemens Reference Siemens and Lemm2015, p. 88). Yet it might also be said (and I think more naturally) that chance is what remains after subtracting laws of nature. Given that prediction is normally based on reasoning from general propositions, without such laws it will be impossible, and so every event will be a chance event. In this conception, accidentality and necessity go together. Nietzsche writes: ‘When the ancients speak of necessity: ἀνάγκη, they mean the realm where things occur arbitrarily (by chance), where it is not the case that from every cause its effect must follow’ (KSA 9, 4 [288]; cf. Mandalios Reference Mandalios2008, p. 109). In contrast, he adds, nature is nowadays regarded as a realm of order and regularity, and freedom is reserved for spirit. But this is just the concept of causality, separating a subject from its actions, that he repeatedly condemns as incoherent. Further, he argues that despite the common assumption that causality is opposed to teleology, the two notions share that assumption. Hence, it appears that the ancient identification of necessity with chance is a far more accurate view of the world.

1.4 Fate, Knowledge and Life

We can reflect on necessity and chance without taking them personally, but that is not the case with fate, which by its nature bears upon ourselves and our lives. So, how do we get from abstract concepts to such a concrete and individual application – one might say, from fatalism to fate? In this section I will try to answer that question by considering fate as a way of understanding our lives that includes both necessity and chance. As a first indication, we can say that ‘fate’ implies that for every individual life there is an overall pattern, and that this pattern is the source of the necessity of the events that make up that life. This means that they have an explanation which is not the standard causal explanation of events – that is, accounting for them by pointing to the causes that brought them about.

But what is involved in such a pattern? The problem is to grasp how the big picture, often taking in an entire life, is related to the many details of the individual’s life history. Does it rule out the presence of chance? And if not, how do chance and necessity coexist? Let us start with a helpful answer provided by Robert Solomon, who defines the typical form of fate in a nutshell: ‘the outcome is fated but the path to the outcome is not’. He explains this further, drawing a contrast with the rival model of causal determinism: ‘Fatalism, in contrast with determinism, begins at the end, that is, the outcome, and considers the outcome as in some sense necessary, given the nature of the person’s character, which in turn entails a protracted narrative which, all things considered, encompasses the whole of that person’s life, culture, and circumstances’ (Solomon Reference Solomon and Ansell Pearson2006, p. 422). Within this narrative there is scope for chance to operate in a way that does not bring it into conflict with the necessity of the fated outcome but, on the contrary, may enable it to make a prominent contribution.

It is important to note that this pattern, in which an end is determined but what lies between the here-and-now and that outcome is left largely open, is the model for much of human behaviour. We often have some goal but are flexible in working out how to get there. In fact, only the simplest, most immediate acts are not like this. Most of our actions, looked at more closely, include improvisation and problem-solving as we monitor the situation in its development over time. An ability to deal with the unexpected is always an advantage for living things in an uncertain environment.Footnote ⁷ We may also take advantage of an accidental occurrence to further some purpose. As Joan Stambaugh points out, one sense of the word ‘chance’ is opportunity: ‘It is the chance to show what you can do’ (Stambaugh Reference Stambaugh1999, p. 95). In Aristotle’s example, a chance encounter in the marketplace is one person’s opportunity to collect money from the other – in fact, that is the main point for Aristotle, given that his interest is in a type of action that does not arise out of deliberation but is still voluntary.

The pattern is of especial interest when a goal is set up in a deliberate fashion – for example, when we make a promise or vow to do something at a future time. In doing that we are, in effect, adopting the mode of operation that Solomon attributes to fate – that is, determining the end but not the exact path that leads to it. As Nietzsche might say, we are making ourself into a fatum or necessity for all that is to come (TI ‘Morality as Anti-Nature’ 6). This may explain why it comes naturally to personify fate by thinking of it as a kind of agent that sets about to achieve aims of its own, but is flexible where the means are concerned. Writers who take fate seriously often depict it as open-minded and resourceful: if one opportunity is missed, another will appear in due course. Like life, fate will find a way.

Let us consider a test case for this model of fate to see how it deals with necessity and chance. My example is one of the greatest heroes of Greek tragedy, Oedipus. The element of chance is prominent in his life history, yet it is about fate from the start. When Oedipus was born, the oracle at Delphi predicted that he would kill his father and marry his mother. The infant Oedipus is abandoned to die by his fearful father Laius, but by chance is found by a shepherd and raised by the ruler of Corinth. As a young man, Oedipus is travelling through Greece, having left home to avoid his fate. At a crossroads, he happens to meet another man, with whom he quarrels over the right of way, and the altercation ends with Oedipus killing the other man. Later this man is revealed to have been his father Laius. Thus, Oedipus has committed the crime of killing his own father, and terrible consequences must follow for him and those around him.

Now, it was predicted that Oedipus would kill his father, yet the oracle did not say when and how that is to happen. The events leading to it are left open to circumstance. As we see, they contain elements of chance, starting with the finding of the abandoned infant and moving on to the fatal conflict at the crossroads. In the play of Sophocles, news later comes to Thebes of the death of Polybus, the man Oedipus believes to be his father. When the messenger is asked how this death occurred, he replies that Polybus was an old man, and old men are often carried away by some stray event. Jocasta, the wife of Oedipus, seizes on this as proof that he has been wrong in fearing the fate predicted for him. That is, she believes that the death of his father has been brought about by the hand of chance and not by Oedipus. At this point she makes a comment which is, in effect, a view of human life as governed by chance rather than fate.

So, if the oracles are unreliable, and there is no framework of fate for our lives, then we can only improvise our way through whatever it brings. But she is wrong in concluding that the fate of Oedipus has been avoided: in fact, the oracle’s prediction has already been fulfilled. And while Polybus may have been killed by chance, Laius was killed by Oedipus: their chance encounter was only the occasion that made this act possible.

Chance as coincidence is a recurrent element in the story of Oedipus. Those events lead to the fulfilment of the oracle’s prediction. Yet they are neither sufficient nor necessary conditions for the fated outcome. The crossroads encounter could have ended differently. Oedipus could have killed his father in some different context. In those alternate cases we would find it natural to say that fate found a way to reach its goal, just as (to repeat my earlier point) human agents do all the time, as they cope with factors outside their control. This is a personification that cannot be taken literally, but it acknowledges the way in which contingency enters into the conception of fate.

It is in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that Nietzsche confronts the theme of chance and fate at length. Zarathustra has far more to say about chance than about necessity. This is, in fact, the form in which fate enters into the work. Rather than confronting the power of necessity, Zarathustra is concerned to deal with what is accidental in things. Both the task and his own strategy are expressed in metaphorical language. When he describes the ‘It was’ (that is, the unchangeable past) as ‘a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful accident’, he is talking about the human race’s lack of wholeness. He describes individuals who are little more than a single organ, the reverse of those ‘cripples’ who are lacking in one organ: ‘And when my eyes flee from the now to the past, they always find the same: fragments and limbs and dreadful accidents – but no human beings.’ Later he returns to the theme using almost the same words, but with a substitution: ‘riddles’.

This is not easy to follow, especially given the several meanings of the key word dichte, translated here as ‘create’ but implying condensation as well as poetic writing. (The word ‘compose’ is an English counterpart.) The common element of ‘fragment’ and ‘riddle’ is incompleteness, the idea that something whole has been broken into pieces or that a question remains unanswered. Similarly, ‘limbs’ suggests organs that can be fully what they are only as parts of a living organism within which their function can take place. Conversely, the creative will’s activity is defined as a ‘carrying together into one’. But if the will cannot will backward, then the past must go on lacking this completeness. Hence, the frustration of the creative will that makes the past an intolerable predicament. While that situation persists, Zarathustra says, ‘We are still fighting step by step with the giant, Chance’ (Z I: ‘On the Gift-Giving Virtue’). Yet defeating the opponent by means of violence cannot be the intended answer. As with necessity, a different solution is needed.

The first step is to overcome the prejudice against chance as something that is both alien and hostile. In Thus Spake Zarathustra the expression ‘von Ohngefahr’ (‘by chance’) is singled out for special treatment.Footnote ⁸ Zarathustra says playfully that this is to be taken as a family name implying noble status: ‘that is the most ancient nobility of the world, and this I restored to all things: I delivered them from their bondage under purpose’ (Z III: ‘Before Sunrise’). He identifies chance with innocence, playfulness and the high-spiritedness (Übermuth) that is elsewhere taken to be a leading feature of the ‘over-hero’, as distinct from the heroically striving personality who remains tied to the serious task of overcoming obstacles and dangers (Z II: ‘On Those who Are Sublime’). As with fate, hostile confrontation is a strategy that will inevitably end badly. Zarathustra is, he tells us, a tamer of accident simply by virtue of the greater power of his will (Z III: ‘On Virtue That Makes Small’). This idea is expressed in a sketch for one of his discourses: ‘You speak falsely of events and accidents! Nothing will ever happen to you that is not yourself! And what you call accident – you yourself are what befalls you and falls upon you!’ (KSA 10, 22 [1], p. 611).Footnote ⁹ Here we have ‘seeing chance as fate’ in action. The point is that chance is not something external that happens to us. Rather, we are as much part of it as anything else – another expression of Nietzsche’s view of fate.

This section has focussed on the concepts that are basic to fatalism as it figures within Nietzsche’s thought. As we have seen, necessity and chance are concepts that he subjects to a radical rethinking, enabling them to come together in his understanding of fate. We noted the parallel between the model of fate proposed by Solomon (‘the outcome is fated but the path to the outcome is not’) and a familiar pattern in human behaviour, a flexibility of goal-directedness that is unlike the linear course of cause and effect. The survival of the concept of fate in modern culture may be due to the remarkable strength of this metaphor. We all think in metaphors, and a blanket objection to that practice would be fairly obtuse. That we tend to forget the origin and ‘sensuous force’ of our metaphors is a point made by Nietzsche in early writings such as TL and PT. This might be described as a criticism, since it implies a certain lack of understanding. Yet a more qualified judgement is made in a late note: ‘We cannot change our means of expression at will: what is possible is to grasp the extent to which it is mere semiotic’ (KSA 13, 14 [122]). That proviso provides a context for Nietzsche’s own use of the concept of fate.Footnote ¹⁰

Fate and tragedy are closely linked themes. As we have seen, the case of Oedipus highlights aspects of fate that inform Nietzsche’s thinking. In his early academic career, he formed theories about ancient tragedy that contradicted established opinion. According to these, the modern conception of tragedy fails to explain the original Greek form because it does not recognise the tragic world view out of which that arose. One contrast appears in the tragic hero’s relation to fate. Modern thinking about tragedy, Nietzsche says, sees the hero as struggling against fate, but being overpowered by the authority of an established world-order (BT 22). This picture overlooks the pessimism of the Greek world view. As he explains: ‘The hero of tragedy shows himself not, as modern aesthetics imagines, in the struggle against fate, nor is he subjected to what happens to him. Rather, he throws himself toward his doom, blind and with head covered’ (ST). This hero does not meet with his downfall because he has made some bad decision. It is comedy, not tragedy, that presents us with the consequences of imprudence. In doing so, it confirms the optimistic belief in rational practicality that, in Nietzsche’s view, replaces the original world view of Greek culture and brings about the disappearance of tragedy and its replacement by comedy.

Greek tragedy is certainly not the only source for Nietzsche’s ideas about fate, even if its influence was early and lasting. The next section will discuss his encounters with other versions of fatalism, both ancient and modern. Having added these into the picture, we will be more able to address the role of fate and fatalism in Nietzsche’s mature thought. That is the task of the second half of this Element. In Sections 3 and 4, I will focus on two themes for which he has devised specific names: amor fati and ‘becoming what you are’. These ‘formulae’ (as he calls them) are featured in several of his most important books.Footnote ¹¹ They are designed to get attention and have certainly done so over the years. Each promises an answer to a crucial question: how are we to live with fate? If we include the concept of fate in our personal understanding of the world, what effect will it have on how we think and feel about our own lives? Further, will it have consequences for the process of living by being brought to bear on our actions and decisions? As we will see, for Nietzsche the importance of fate lies precisely in the uncertain and troubled relation between knowledge and life, an issue that preoccupies him throughout his career as a thinker.

2.1 Introduction

Nietzsche encountered the idea of fate in many places along his path: as a student of ancient Greek literature, from Greek tragedy, as a keen reader of Ralph Waldo Emerson and as a mixed admirer of the ancient Stoic school in philosophy. In this section, I will look at these influences and how they inform his thinking about fate and fatalism. The most important are Emerson and the Stoics, and so the central parts of this section will be devoted to them. After that I will more briefly discuss two versions of fatalism to which Nietzsche gives his own names: ‘Turkish fatalism’ and ‘Russian fatalism’. These are figurative expressions, but they stand for attitudes to life that Nietzsche thinks are real enough to call for some consideration and response.

Before turning to these encounters, I will refer to one philosopher whom Nietzsche found an inspiring model: Arthur Schopenhauer. Is Nietzsche’s thinking about fate influenced by Schopenhauer? He nowhere signals a link. Yet Schopenhauer did write about fate, in an essay (‘Transcendental Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual’) that is of some interest. He begins with the doctrine of necessity: ‘Without exception everything that happens takes place with strict necessity and this is a truth to be understood a priori and consequently to be regarded as irrefutable; here I will call it demonstrable fatalism’ (Schopenhauer Reference Schopenhauer1974, vol. 1, p. 202). In contrast, ‘transcendent fatalism’ is the doctrine that a hidden purpose guides the course of events in our lives. Schopenhauer thinks that this is a common belief, especially in old people who look back at their lives and see a pattern that they were not aware of earlier on. After some reflections on the presence of this notion in many cultures and on the idea of a personal guiding spirit, Schopenhauer brings in a Kantian theme: the role of teleology in our understanding of living things. He gives examples and then comments:

This description suggests not simply fate but providence, which acts for the benefit of the individual person. While that doctrine must be regarded as false if taken literally, Schopenhauer argues, it has a legitimate function as a metaphor or myth that helps us to ‘get our bearings’ and find meaning in our lives. But he insists that ‘this can never be demonstrated; on the contrary, it can only be imagined’ (p. 209). He sums up: ‘Consequently, all the events in a man’s life are connected in two fundamentally different ways: first in the objective causal connection of the course of nature: secondly in a subjective connection that exists only in reference to the individual who experiences them’ (p. 220). A helpful analogy is with a work of art such as a drama, in which the succession of scenes has a necessity of its own, but one that is determined by an overall plan which exists in the mind of the artist.

Schopenhauer’s idea of fate recalls Kant’s distinction between ‘regulative’ and ‘constitutive’ concepts, as found especially in the Critique of Judgement. Nietzsche was familiar with this idea. In 1868 he considered undertaking a doctoral thesis in philosophy. The suggested topic was ‘the concept of the organic since Kant’. The idea lapsed after his appointment to a university chair in Basel, but preliminary notes throw light on his thinking at the time. They include various sources dealing with teleology, starting with Kant and moving on to the recent neo-Kantian writers. Here as elsewhere, F. A. Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus (Lange Reference Lange1866) is a source of information (KGW I/4, 62 [19]). In his working materials, Nietzsche notes Kant’s concept of ‘natural purpose’. Kant asserts that biologists must always assume that every part of an organism serves some purpose, just as researchers in general must assume that every event has a cause (Kant Reference Kant1987, p. 249). This regulative principle would have been a central theme in Nietzsche’s teleology project. As it is, echoes can be found in his work and perhaps in his thinking about fate. We can see the parallel: if fate is about the individual life as a whole, then it can enable us to understand particular episodes without pretending to be a ‘constitutive’ principle: that is, without offering the kind of explanation that would compete (probably unsuccessfully) with a causal account, or with the concept of accidentality.

Schopenhauer’s ‘transcendent’ concept of fate, however, is not put forward as having even the heuristic function of Kant’s concept of the organic, which is said to guide any scientific investigation of living things (Kant Reference Kant1987, p. 256). In fact, he warns at the start that what may seem a positive tone in his discussion ‘is not to be taken seriously’ (Schopenhauer Reference Schopenhauer1974, vol. 1, p. 201). But fate is not an optional concept for Nietzsche. He takes it as seriously as he does concepts like the will to power or the eternal return. Further, like those it is not simply a theoretical concept, but involves feeling and willing, as a concept such as amor fati demonstrates.

Nietzsche may have been aware of Schopenhauer’s essay on fate, but his own thinking on the subject draws on other sources, both explicitly and more extensively. This section will start with the earliest in Nietzsche’s life – Ralph Waldo Emerson. The presence of Emerson continues to the final writings of 1888, where themes related to fate make a prominent appearance. Just as important for Nietzsche, but in a different way, is his engagement with a philosophical tradition that gives a good deal of attention to fate: Stoicism. He is aware how much he has in common with the Stoics, an affinity that is consistent with several outbreaks of exasperation and some pointed criticisms, as we will see.

Finally, I will remark on passages in Nietzsche’s work that discuss what he designates as ‘Turkish fatalism’ and ‘Russian fatalism’. In both cases, the name is incidental. It is true that Nietzsche makes comments on what he takes to be the Russian national character (e.g., TI ‘Skirmishes’ 39) that have some affinity with ‘Russian fatalism’. However, the attitude to life is what interests him, and he even gives his own behaviour during difficult years as an illustration (EH ‘Wise’ 6). With ‘Turkish fatalism’ the label is meant even less literally, if only because the idea it involves was debated by ancient thinkers, long before any European encounter with either the Turkish culture or the Moslem faith. Here I will take it as an opportunity to address an important issue about fatalism – and to clear up a common misunderstanding, as Nietzsche is intent on doing when he introduces the phrase ‘Turkish fatalism’.

2.2 The Influence of Emerson

An influence that begins during Nietzsche’s schooldays and runs through to his last years of thinking is that of Ralph Waldo Emerson. While he read many of Emerson’s essays with care, one stands out here. Entitled ‘Fate’, it is in The Conduct of Life, the first book of Emerson that Nietzsche acquired. His 1862 schoolboy essays ‘Fatum und Geschichte’ and ‘Willensfreiheit und Fatum’ follow Emerson closely (KGW I/2, 13 [6] and 13 [7], pp. 431–440). Each of them quotes from ‘Fate’, and so that is where we must look for a comparison.

The theme that dominates Emerson’s essay is the relation between the individual person and the external world. This is introduced as an absolute opposition, a conflict that seems to be inevitable and insoluble. As the discussion proceeds, that impression turns out to conceal a hidden relation that is quite different. Emerson starts by emphasising the dominating power of nature over humanity, not just in catastrophic events but also in the determining influence of physiology and heredity over our lives. Nature, he says, lays down ‘a floor of granite’ upon which further layers are added over the course of time, as with the earth that we live on. The contrasting characters of human groups reflect the differences between the environments in which they have evolved. All this shows the power of fate. Yet, Emerson continues, there is another power as well, ‘the impulse of choosing and acting’, through which we can withstand and oppose these influences. ‘We would be crushed by the atmosphere if there were not the reaction of the air within us.’ The point is that the power of fate is of the same kind as the power that lies within us. Emerson writes: ‘if Fate is so prevailing, man is part of it, and can confront fate with fate’ (Emerson Reference Emerson and Ferguson1971, vol. 6, p. 13). The idea that we are a part of fate is taken up by Nietzsche in much the same form.

At this point, Emerson’s argument seems to have reached a conclusion. However, he then reopens the issue. ‘But Fate against Fate is only parrying and defence: there are, also, the noble creative forces.’ These are intellectual and moral power, independence of thought and will. He asks: ‘Now, whether, seeing these two things, fate and power, we are permitted to believe in unity?’ We see hostile forces turned to advantage by bold and wise people, and similarly each of us must exploit our personal qualities, including both defects and talents, in order to achieve our goals. Understanding oneself as belonging to fate is an inspiring and invigorating thought, according to Emerson: ‘’Tis the best use of fatalism to teach a fatal courage.’ He notes that the cultures that produce the fiercest warriors are those that regard life and death as determined by fate. The idea seems to be that a personal fate provides one with protection against every other fate. An old saying makes the point more cynically: ‘He who is born to hang will never drown.’ Nietzsche draws a similar lesson from the doctrine of necessity: ‘Absolute necessity must be totally freed from ends: otherwise we should not be permitted to sacrifice ourselves and let ourselves go. Only the innocence of becoming gives us the greatest courage and the greatest freedom!’ (KSA 10, 8 [19]).

Only now do we come to the passage that had the deepest impact on Nietzsche. The ultimate lesson of Emerson’s essay is the inner unity of the individual and his or her fate. In effect, this idea overtakes and replaces the dynamic imagery of equilibrium between inner and outer forces. Now the two sides are not just similar or equal, but the same. ‘The soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts.’ This last idea is dramatically generalised in another essay, ‘The Poet’: ‘The Universe is the externalization of the soul.’ In the poem preceding the essay ‘Fate’, Emerson makes that hidden unity the source for omens or premonitions of what is to come in the course of life:

Yet he also emphasises our inability to gain any such insight into our own fate. A favoured example is Oliver Cromwell, a man who rose to become a ruler, but (as Emerson supposes) without having any such aim in mind. A similar contrast between conscious intentions and underlying directions will appear in Nietzsche’s concept of ‘becoming what you are’.

The theme of correspondence between individual and world is prominent in another of Emerson’s essays. ‘Spiritual Laws’ is one of his most striking texts, dogmatic in its assertion of a reality hidden behind appearances and polemical in its rejection of familiar notions of practical wisdom. In one passage Emerson expresses his theme as the inner bond between the individual and fate, and adds detail by using the phrase ‘selecting principle’.

To be grasped, this needs to be read in its context. Since we are united with nature by an inner correspondence, Emerson explains, we should allow our lives to be governed by its laws, rather than trying to impose plans that disregard the individual person’s uniqueness. For each of us, there is a guiding spirit or ‘genius’ who indicates the direction that our lives should take. If we open ourselves to that hidden source of wisdom, he argues, our calling and the companions we need will appear in due course. Clearly, Emerson is not talking about any ‘principle’ that acts as a premise in practical reasoning. If anything, he wants us to abandon that sort of deliberation and to put a different kind of thinking in its place, one not dominated by an insistence on exercising control over events.Footnote ¹⁴

A closely parallel passage appears in Ecce Homo. This is Nietzsche’s most Emersonian book, as it could equally be said that ‘Spiritual Laws’ is Emerson’s most Nietzschean essay. Nietzsche begins by describing the ‘decadent’ as someone who is drawn to what is harmful for him. He then asks: ‘What is it, fundamentally, that allows us to recognise who has turned out well?’ (EH ‘Wise’ 2). Unlike the decadent, this person understands what benefits him, and acts accordingly:

There the link to Emerson’s ‘Spiritual Laws’ is evident. It is confirmed by Nietzsche’s use of the expression ‘selecting principle’.Footnote ¹⁶ The point being made is very similar: the individual person’s experiences of others and the social world are systematically filtered in accordance with a hidden pattern.

So, is Nietzsche simply taking over Emerson’s idea of the individual as a selecting principle? One problem is that in Beyond Good and Evil he writes: ‘Why make a principle of what you yourself are and must be?’ (BGE 9). Yet a careful reading of that passage reveals that it is directed against a different kind of principle – one that is a false substitute for what he and Emerson have in mind when they take the individual as a ‘selecting principle’. To see this, we must consider the section as a whole. It is one of a sequence in which Nietzsche criticises well-known philosophies. Here the target is the Stoic concept of ‘living according to nature’, and his tactic is the ‘reversal of perspective’ that he often relies on and even claims as a special talent (EH ‘Wise’ 1). The qualities that the Stoics attribute to nature, and want us to conform to, are just their own personality traits, projected externally. In that way, their valuing of order and measure is turned into an independent ‘principle’.Footnote ¹⁷ For Nietzsche, this is a falsification – and he thinks there is no real need for it. The genuine principle here, as Emerson might have said, is ‘what you yourself are and must be’ – or, as Nietzsche might add, ‘must become’. Let us now look more closely at his comments on Stoic philosophy.

2.3 The Dialogue with Stoicism

An active and often intense engagement with Stoicism runs through Nietzsche’s thinking. He has a strong affinity with the Stoic tradition, with its emphasis on life in the present world and its commitment to strategies of living well (see, e.g., Ure Reference Ure2009). Important here is the Stoic recognition of fate as an element in human life and close attention to the individual person’s attitude towards it. Stoicism presents a strong alternative to the Christian tradition, not only in relation to morality but also more generally. Its philosophy of life provides practical directions that are as definite as those of Christian morality, but quite different in kind. As Nietzsche puts it in Daybreak ‘You say that the morality of pity is a higher morality than that of Stoicism? Prove it! But note that “higher” and “lower” in morality is not to be measured by a moral yardstick. So take your yardstick from elsewhere and – watch out!’ (D 139). From then on, he often applies his own yardstick to Stoicism, with mixed results. If the alternative is Christianity, his judgement is not in doubt. But there are other options as well. He often sets up a contest between Stoicism and Epicureanism. In addition, he engages in periodic outbursts of criticism which, taken by themselves, look like attacks.

Much of the Stoic philosophy of life is a search for strategies to deal with fate. That makes it suitable for people living in troubled times, when unexpected misfortunes are common. Perhaps this is why Stoicism, in a repackaged version, has gained prominence as a self-help philosophy for today’s world (typical are Sellars Reference Sellars2020, Pigliucci Reference Pigliucci2020 and Tuitert Reference Tuitert2024). What Stoicism teaches is, first of all, a coming to terms with fate. Seneca’s often quoted line is Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt: ‘The fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling’ (Seneca 1925, p. 228). Now, Nietzsche’s attitude towards fate goes well beyond acceptance. He wants an active engagement, and in Sections 3 and 4, we will look closely at two aspects of this concept: the idea of amor fati, in which fate enters into hopes and aspirations, and the idea of ‘becoming what you are’, in which the process of realising or fulfilling one’s personal fate is given more content.

Underlying these contrasts is a common ground: acceptance of a doctrine of necessity that includes human action and what is usually called ‘naturalism’, here meaning the claim that humans are a part of nature and cannot be understood apart from the rest. The Stoic teaching is explained by Diogenes Laertius: ‘For our individual natures are all part of universal nature; on which account the chief good is to live in a manner corresponding to nature; and that means corresponding to one’s own nature and to universal nature’ (Diogenes Laertius Reference Diogenes1931, vol. 2, p. 291). Anyone who lives in this way will also be following the will of the god – variously called mind or fate or Jupiter ‘and many other names beside’ (p. 308) – who is the ruler of nature.

Nietzsche’s sharply expressed disagreements with Stoicism are largely about the overlaps between his thinking and Stoic teaching. We are part of nature, according to Nietzsche (BGE 230 and A 14). With Darwin’s biological revolution in mind, he writes: ‘We no longer derive man from “the spirit” or “the deity”: we have placed him back amongst the animals’ (A 14). Traditional morality is condemned as being ‘anti-natural’ (TI ‘Morality as Anti-Nature’ 4). In On the Genealogy of Morals, asceticism is described as ‘an incarnate will to contradiction and anti-naturalness’ (GM III: 12). Yet these assertions are accompanied by a warning against ‘humanising’ nature (KSA 9, 11 [238], 532). In fact, Nietzsche wants to go in the opposite direction: ‘My task: a dehumanisation of nature, and then the naturalisation of humanity – as soon as the pure concept “nature” has been achieved’ (KSA 9, 11 [211]; cf. GS 109).

The order is important. The ‘dehumanisation of nature’ comes first, and for a good reason. There are other thinkers who want to ‘naturalise’ humanity, but in Nietzsche’s view, their view of nature is biased towards their own preferred form of life. Amongst the ancient philosophical schools, the one that comes closest to Nietzsche is Stoicism. Despite that link, or because of it, he singles out the Stoics for criticism, focusing on their key ethical principle. According to Diogenes Laertius, this goes back to the school’s founding thinker, Zeno of Citium. ‘Zeno was the first (in his treatise On the Nature of Man) to designate as the end “life in agreement with nature” (or living agreeably to nature), which is the same as a virtuous life, virtue being the goal towards which nature guides us’ (Diogenes Laertius Reference Diogenes1931, vol. 2, p. 195). ‘Nature’ here means not just our own human nature but the nature of the universe as a whole. This is what we are supposed to understand and take as our guide in dealing with the challenges of life.

One might suppose that any naturalistic thinker could endorse the idea of living according to nature. Yet Nietzsche not only rejects it but also criticises the Stoics for, amongst other things, making a virtue of necessity. In Beyond Good and Evil he addresses them directly in a lively polemic:

Nietzsche’s line of argument in this passage is complex because he is struggling to clarify his own position as well. One of his claims is that the Stoic conception of nature is mistaken. They think of it as a disciplined community of citizens who (apart from obtuse human beings) accept the laws that ensure justice and harmony when followed. On the contrary, Nietzsche responds, nature has no such purposes or preferences. The world is not a well-ordered household but a chaos of forces in continual interaction. If there is harmony here, it occurs as a momentary phase (or ‘high point’) which gives way to a new outbreak of conflict and contradiction. The problem with the Stoics, in Nietzsche’s eyes, is that they will not allow nature to be itself. They are intent on imposing upon it their own values and ideals, which privilege order and measure. The Stoic’s pride – his ruling passion – has been displayed in his determination to exercise power over his own nature. Now, Nietzsche suggests, he is extending this project to encompass nature as a whole.

Yet this assumes that nature is, like himself, willing to let itself be ‘tyrannised’. After all, Nietzsche asks, ‘is not the Stoic – a piece of nature?’ Here his critique turns back on itself: the Stoic’s error is actually a genuine insight into the unity of humanity and nature. Further, the Stoic’s injustice towards himself and, by extension, all other things, is precisely an injustice that is typical of nature. The Stoic does not respect nature, but then, nature does not respect itself: it is arbitrarily harmonious or contradictory. As an attack, this would be more like a vindication of Stoicism, if not for the unanswered charge that Stoicism is wrong in its conception of law and justice, both for the individual person and for nature as a whole. When Nietzsche describes the general character of the world as ‘chaos’, he explains what this implies: ‘in the sense not of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms’ (GS 109). This is framed as a negation of the Stoic conception, but a notebook entry from the same period offers a positive version, as ‘my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, eternally self-destroying’ (KSA 11, 38 [12]), an expression of the will to power that is never satisfied with its own achievements.

Ultimately, according to Nietzsche, what Stoicism takes as wisdom is merely a truism. To choose to conform to nature is to make a virtue of necessity: that is, to pretend to bring about what is already the case. ‘Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be?’ A choice of values is only an expression of the form of life within which any choosing occurs: this is true even of those moralities that turn their face against life as a natural process, such as the ‘ascetic ideals’ analysed in On the Genealogy of Morals: they match one kind of life, a weak and unhealthy one. In that sense, the rejection is not what it claims to be at all, for the values that it holds up have no higher origin than life itself. Hence, it is not life in general, as Nietzsche seems to say, but its typically human form that is described as ‘estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different’. These are attempts to impose our own necessities on things that have necessities of their own. Inevitably, we will fail.

This is very different from, and even seems to be in opposition to, the Stoic position on fate. Yet the difference may be that Nietzsche goes further in the same direction. He takes being one of the willing (volentes) as more than just accepting what has been given by fate: that facile demand ignores the typical condition of the individual person, who is held back by the negative and backward-looking feelings for which Nietzsche uses the word ressentiment. A positive response to fate is a task to be undertaken, or a hope to be fulfilled in a future that is not yet in view. All these ideas come together in the Nietzschean concept that will be the theme of Section 3: amor fati. Before turning to that, though, I will take note of what Nietzsche says about attitudes towards fate that do not involve affirmation or commitment to a task, but instead point in the direction of passive resignation.

2.4 Turkish and Russian Fatalism

In two places Nietzsche refers to kinds of fatalism that are identified with particular nations. The labels ‘Turkish’ and ‘Russian’ are loose associations: what matters for him are patterns of thinking and behaviour that he evidently thinks can be found closer to home. Whereas ‘Russian fatalism’ is essentially a behaviour that cannot readily be identified with any belief, what he calls ‘Turkish fatalism’ is very much a doctrine and a target for criticism in the final instalment of Human, All Too Human.Footnote ¹⁸

Nietzsche now offers his counter-argument, that fate is not something outside us, because it is equally present within us. That is, we ourselves are a piece of fate, a variation of Emerson’s ‘part of fate’.

This critique of one version of fatalism has a predecessor in debates over fatalism in ancient philosophy. Opponents of the doctrine of necessity argued that it made any practical deliberation over courses of action pointless, an unwelcome conclusion that is used as an objection to the doctrine itself. The contribution of the Stoic Chrysippus is of particular importance because it gives this objection a standard form and then provides a response designed to expose it as fallacious. Here is the argument, as presented by Cicero with a typical illustration in his essay ‘On Fate’.

This is called the ‘idle argument’ because it has a practical conclusion that there is no point in taking any action, since whatever happens is fated to happen in any case. The inference is carried out by means of a dilemma: any action we consider must either coincide with or contradict what is destined to happen. In the first case, the action is superfluous, since the event will occur in any case. In the second case, the action is futile, since the contrary will occur in any case.

The ‘idle argument’ is really an argument about deliberation – that is, about practical reasoning. It purports to show that deliberation over one’s future actions makes no sense for anyone who accepts the doctrine of necessity. It is not uncommon to see this view held by recent writers, including Nietzsche scholars (e.g., Reginster Reference Reginster2006, p. 294). The supporting argument appeals because of its apparently logical character (for a critical analysis, see Small Reference Small1988). Hence, it is not surprising if this looks like a strong objection to fatalism in its usual form.

Cicero’s response to the idle argument depends on the concept of ‘co-fatedness’ (Cicero 1942, p. 227). Attributed to Chrysippus, it claims that some things are bound up with other things and are therefore fated to occur (or not to occur) along with them. To use Cicero’s example, my calling in a doctor may be a necessary condition of my recovering from the illness. On the other hand, it may not be a necessary condition: that is, I may recover from the illness even though no doctor is called in. In the first case, calling the doctor is not superfluous – on the contrary, it is the reason for my recovering. Thus, the idle argument fails to prove its conclusion. Now, there is no reason for a fatalist to deny that things are often bound together as described by Chrysippus. In fact, a fatalism based on causal determination is already committed to this proposition. Hence, a fatalist is not compelled to support the ‘idle argument’.

How familiar Nietzsche was with this debate is unclear, though he may have seen it summarised by Schopenhauer (Schopenhauer Reference Schopenhauer1969, vol. 1, p. 302). His own idea of ego fatum is close to the Stoic ‘co-fatedness’, as one can see here: ‘The single human being is a piece of fatum from the front and from the rear: one law more, one necessity more for all that is yet to come and to be’ (TI ‘Morality as Anti-Nature’ 6). Nietzsche also has a ‘formula’ for this idea: ego fatum – another expression of his own devising.Footnote ¹⁹ It does not appear in any published work, although one section of EH has the heading: ‘Why I am a destiny (Schicksal ).’ It is tempting to link ego fatum with amor fati and yet, apart from the verbal overlap, a real connection is hard to pin down. Nietzsche may have been pleased on coining the phrase ego fatum, but he did not find a real use for it, except as a slogan or a heading. In contrast, ‘piece of fate’ is put to use, starting with a passing mention in RWB 8 and then to more purpose in the critique of ‘Turkish fatalism’ (WS 61).

His remarks on ‘Russian fatalism’ can be dealt with relatively briefly. This is not a doctrine but a behaviour: a retreat into passivity when no action is available. Here the individual’s refusal to respond to the outside world is not despair, but a defence strategy that in the circumstances may be the only one available. ‘Russian fatalism’ appears first in a passage about the history of punishment. For many centuries, Nietzsche says, wrongdoers who were punished had no hard feelings about suffering: ‘they submitted to punishment as you submit to illness, misfortune or death, with that brave, unrebellious fatalism that still gives the Russians, for example, an advantage over us Westerners in the way they handle life’ (GM II: 15).

In Ecce Homo, the idea is approached from another direction, the theme of illness, which so often brings out a striking of attitude in Nietzsche’s writing. No longer is it assumed that ‘you submit to illness’, but rather that every sick person looks for someone to blame for the suffering that the illness brings with it. If no suitable person is available, an ‘ascetic priest’ will suggest that the sick person is to blame for his own suffering. The only solution, Nietzsche now says, is to withdraw from engagement:

The argument is simple: ressentiment and vengefulness use up energy and so undermine the process of regaining health. Later in this passage he returns to the theme:

Now the tone shifts from passive to aggressive, or a combination of the two, as Nietzsche describes his insistence on maintaining a policy of unresponsiveness.

Readers of Ecce Homo may wonder how far Nietzsche’s anecdotes are intended as exemplars for others faced with the task of managing their own lives. By saying ‘in such cases’, he invites generalisation. Thus, ‘Russian fatalism’ becomes not so much a description of a certain pattern of behaviour as a policy that, he implies, has proven its worth in one case, his own. As with many of his practical tips, this may be of value to some readers, while it can safely be noted and set aside by others.

This section has been a survey of the background to Nietzsche’s thinking about fate. Given the marginal status of fate in philosophy, it is not surprising that a familiar kind of direct influence is hard to find in these assorted links. Instead, we have observed encounters in which both sympathies and antagonisms provide an occasion and a stimulus for original thinking on his part. Even so, one broad theme appears as a concern running through these encounters. It is most sharply formulated as a question: how are we to live with fate? The sections that follow will address two important ways in which Nietzsche tries to find an answer to that problem.

3.1 Introduction

Nietzsche is fond of expressing important ideas in what he calls a ‘formula’: that is, a short phrase that acts as a summary, label, brand name or slogan, depending on the context. While they attract attention, these expressions usually stand for more complex sets of ideas, and so a closer look will soon raise issues of interpretation. Amor fati is a good example, and it is a debated topic amongst Nietzsche scholars. The phrase is Nietzsche’s coinage. It means ‘love of fate’ – but why put that in Latin? One possibility would be: to recall the expression amor dei, especially associated with Spinoza’s thought. That comparison is implicitly invited by Nietzsche’s statement in an 1881 letter to Franz Overbeck: ‘I am in a fatalistic “submission to God” – I call it amor fati ’ (KSB 6: 236). The word Gottergebenheit, signifying submission to God, or to the will of God, is put in inverted commas to indicate that it is not to be taken literally. Yet it does refer to something – to an attitude or mood for which the religious expression is used because no other description is available, although another option is immediately provided by a new term: amor fati, or ‘love of fate’.

In this section, I will be looking at the ideas summed up in the formula amor fati. Nietzsche’s uses of the expressions are varied. While realising that the phrase was an arresting one, he was never altogether decided about its proper use. Amor fati appears in two 1881 notebooks, in GS 276, in a letter from the same period, and finally seven years later, in two of the books he wrote in 1888, along with a final notebook entry from that time. Some of these are arguably more important than others. (For a more thorough survey, see Gaasterland Reference Gaasterland2017.) The early notebook entries are rough sketches in dialogue form that Nietzsche evidently decided were not suitable for further use. (Monologue was now clearly his natural style.) The link with Gottergebenheit is quite significant, given that this phrase appears in other letters as well, and not simply because these passages give an insight into Nietzsche’s state of mind at a critical time. That leaves the published texts as our most useful resource for assessing amor fati as a philosophical concept.

There is an air of paradox about amor fati, and yet the tension that we sense there is not unique to this particular formula: closely related examples can be found elsewhere. To make that clearer, here is a case in point. Nietzsche did not admire Thomas Carlyle’s writing style, but he might have appreciated a story about Carlyle told by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience:

The ‘some one’ was the author’s father, Henry James, Sr, who had met Margaret Fuller at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house and possibly heard her say this, or something similar. While living in London, James was on friendly terms with Carlyle, and less polished versions of the anecdote were told in and about the James family circle for many years before this one was published.Footnote ²⁰ At least in essence, it is apparently a true story. (We might note in passing that Carlyle and Fuller later met in person and, by all accounts, got on well together.)

In further remarks, William James explains his reason for including the Carlyle story. He suggests that the question is not whether we should accept the universe, since there is no other option, but how we should do so. ‘If we accept the whole, shall we do so as if stunned into submission, – as Carlyle would have us – “Gad! We’d better!” – or shall we do so with enthusiastic assent?’ The religious believer adopts the second answer and makes it a rule of life: ‘Dull submission is left far behind, and a mood of welcome, which may fill any place on the scale between cheerful serenity and enthusiastic gladness, has taken its place.’ This must be what James identifies as Fuller’s attitude. As he notes, it leaves open a range of possibilities, and Fuller may have been at the ‘enthusiastic’ end of the scale. Her friend Emerson sympathised with her views but was uneasy about this element. He wrote to her: ‘I find or fancy in your theory a certain wilfulness and not pure acquiescence which seems to me the only authentic mode’ (Emerson Reference Emerson and Myerson1997, p. 227).

Nietzsche’s amor fati meets with a similar range of responses from scholars. Many see it as a call to affirm the world, and even as a willing of responsibility (e.g., Magnus Reference Magnus1978, p. 150 and Gillespie Reference Gillespie2017, p. 54). In contrast, Emerson’s warning to Margaret Fuller is paralleled by Béatrice Han-Pile’s pointed comment: ‘note that the proper attitude to amor fati is one of surrender, not of erotic pursuit, affirmation or wilfulness’ (Han-Pile Reference Han-Pile2009, p. 232). The first view may have more support amongst the commentators, but Han-Pile makes a strong case for her reading.

What about Nietzsche himself? Certainly he is aware of the central issue posed here. It is suggested with startling directness in an often cited 1881 note: ‘My doctrine declares: the task is to live in such a way that you must wish to live again – you will anyway!’ (KSA 9, 11 [163]). In this statement Nietzsche casts himself, in effect, as both Fuller and Carlyle. That is, he affirms the eternal return as a guiding principle for the conduct of life and then as a necessity governing our actions as much as anything else. Many readers have taken ‘the task is to live in such a way that you must wish to live again’ as an imperative: we are being told what to do. But the statement might be read in other ways: for example, as an opportunity or even as a challenge to the individual person: ‘Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to live in such a way that you must wish to live again.’ Still, that is perhaps not so different. Tasks are in some sense given, as the German word Aufgabe implies. We respond to them or not, as with imperatives. Hence, the issue remains.

Many Nietzsche scholars (e.g., Magnus Reference Magnus1970, p. 29 and Reference Magnus1978, p. 111) have seen ‘the task is…’ and ‘You will anyway!’ as a conjunction that is simply incoherent in its given form. Yet a close parallel appears in Nietzsche’s published work: in the dramatic scenario of GS 341, where a ‘demon’ announces the thought of eternal return to a solitary hearer who may be either crushed or elated by the prospect of living the same life endlessly many times. The demon (speaking with Carlyle’s Scottish accent, as I suppose) takes the initiative there, in contrast to the James anecdote, but the forceful impact of his message is matched (in the positive case) by the bold response of a Fuller whose acceptance takes the form of an enthusiastic affirmation: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more godlike.’

The pattern that runs through these cases is like the one in amor fati. There is clearly a tension between two sides, but no straightforward contradiction – and no agreement, either. The demon’s hearer makes no reference to anything he has actually said. Conversely, the demon pays no attention to any response, positive or negative, as far as one can tell. It is as if the two sides speak, if not different languages, then at least different dialects. Yet there is an interaction here, and even a dynamic at work. The joyful hearer is standing up to the demon and pushing back against the ‘greatest weight’ of the eternal return (Small Reference Small2020, pp. 110–115). The passive resignation that Nietzsche calls ‘Turkish fatalism’ is not in evidence. The puzzling statement ‘My doctrine declares: the task is to live in such a way that you must wish to live again – you will anyway!’ needs to be approached similarly, as a dialogue. In touch with both his inner Fuller and his not-so-inner Carlyle, Nietzsche enables their voices to be heard together, in an exchange whose tensions are not expected to be replaced either by consensus or by one side’s prevailing over the other. Let us now see whether this also holds for the idea of amor fati.

3.2 Amor Fati in 1882

In notebook entries from the period leading up to The Gay Science, amor fati is identified with an intention or resolve to ‘love what is necessary’, and the reader is warned that the great difficulty is the ugly or horrific aspects of what one is supposed to love (KSA 9, 15 [20] and 16 [22]). These fragments are pieces of dialogue, although there is nothing to identify who is supposed to be speaking, or what the dramatic context might be. It is at least clear that amor fati means love for what is necessary, and being able to see its beauty, despite a ‘horrible origin’.

Confrontation with what is dreadful is the crucial challenge in these sketches, and yet the issue is not present when amor fati is introduced in GS – in fact, it is explicitly set aside. Nietzsche claims to be reporting what first entered his mind in the New Year of 1882. He describes it using two terms: it is at the same time a wish and a thought. (One thing it is not is a New Year’s resolution, if that implies intended actions.) As a wish, it expresses itself in a series of ‘I want…’ and ‘I do not want…’ statements. As a thought, it is given a name of its own: amor fati.

The ‘new year’ is the beginning of 1882. The first month was a period of well-being for Nietzsche: his health had improved, and the Genoa weather was unusually fine for the time of year. He was able to go on long walks and formulate the ideas that appeared in The Gay Science under the heading ‘Sanctus Januarius’. His buoyant mood is expressed in GS 276, and especially in the phrase amor fati.

What are we to make of this? Nietzsche’s 1882 notebook shows that the sentence ‘Amor fati: let that be my love from now on!’ has been added from a separate note.Footnote ²¹ Nietzsche puts it in the middle of the text, disrupting the flow of thought from ‘I want…’ to ‘I do not want…’ and unexpectedly introducing two new themes: love and fate. The result is a puzzle: we may identify ‘what is necessary in things’ with fate, but what does ‘seeing as beautiful’ have to do with love? The shift to ‘making beautiful’ is another puzzle. Nietzsche says that he wants to be ‘one of those who make things beautiful’. What can that mean? During his 1882 stay in the Thuringian forest village of Tautenburg, he took an interest in the local Verschönerungsverein (Beautification Committee).Footnote ²² His letters to home talk about support for its work in placing benches along the paths where he took his daily walks, at first alone and then in the company of Lou Salomé (see, e.g., KSB 6: 262). However, given that GS 276 was already written, ‘those who make things beautiful’ cannot refer to these activities, which is just as well, given that their everyday character does not match the high aspiration expressed there. Hence, ‘making beautiful’ must be a figure of speech. If we can see what is necessary in things as beautiful, then they become beautiful for us, and that in turn could be called making them beautiful.

So: what is involved in learning to see what is necessary in things as beautiful? The concept of ‘learning to see’ recurs in Twilight of the Idols, in a list of tasks that amount to a curriculum for an education of the future: ‘learning to see, learning to speak, learning to read and write’.Footnote ²³ The first of these entails a kind of openness to what is seen, a withholding of judgement for the time being. Nietzsche suggests that this restraint is a hallmark of good philology. What is interesting here is that ‘learning to see what is necessary as beautiful’ may not be the devising of some new interpretation of what is necessary, but rather a letting go of existing interpretations, leaving in their place an attitude of acceptance. Could it be that this, rather than the exercise of aesthetic judgement, is the essence of what Nietzsche means by ‘seeing as beautiful’? Consider this example. It took many years for European settlers in Australia to see the landscape there as beautiful, given that it was so different from their place of origin – indeed, seemingly alien and hostile. Their early attempts to represent the Australian environment in painting show how unable they were to see what was before them without European imagery. A process of unlearning (to use a word that Nietzsche finds helpful) had to occur before an authentic art of landscape could be achieved in Australia. Now, we could read GS 276 along somewhat similar lines. Admittedly, many scholars prefer to read GS 276 as calling for a new interpretation of the world, one that transforms what is ugly and even horrible into something beautiful. But what would achieve that outcome is hard to imagine.

Further insight into what amor fati means for Nietzsche in 1882 can be found in his correspondence. There he reports experiencing a feeling for which he uses an unexpected word: Gottergebenheit (or Gott-Ergebenheit). This means ‘submission to God’ (or ‘to the will of God’), but Nietzsche usually adds inverted commas, indicating that the phrase is not to be taken in a literal sense – yet implying that it may be the only available term for what it describes. At one point, the idea is identified with amor fati. It appears first in a January letter to Heinrich Köselitz, evidently written shortly after the draft version of GS 276, since Nietzsche remarks that he has ‘just committed to paper my peaceful way of thinking and submission to God’ (KSB 6: 190). In May and June he uses the phrase fatalistische ‘Gottergebenheit’ in four letters. Writing to Paul Rée, Lou Salomé and Heinrich Köselitz, he explains that it describes his current state of mind, a strong feeling that everything will turn out for the best. Recent travel misadventures that led to a fortunate change of plan are given as examples (KSB 6: 223, 243 and 244). Writing to Ida Overbeck, he affirms his newly acquired trust in fate: ‘Basically fate always strikes me for my benefit and at least for the benefit of wisdom – how could I be afraid of fate, especially when it meets me in the completely unexpected form of L(ou)?’ (KSB 6: 233). That fate takes the form of Lou is the key to most of these remarks. What Nietzsche has in mind are the events that had led to that relationship. A visit to Messina had been cut short by the scirocco wind, and then the coincidental presence of Lou Salomé in Rome led to an involvement that seemed an opportunity to acquire a pupil and disciple who could share in his mission and even carry it on after him.

Finally, to Franz Overbeck, Nietzsche is, as usual, more candid and personal. He writes: ‘Apart from that I am in a fatalistic “submission to God” – I call it amor fati – that I would leap into a lion’s jaws, not to mention – ’ (KSB 6: 236). This specifies that amor fati and fatalistische ‘Gottergebenheit’ are the same thing. But what can we make of the ending? Nietzsche is describing what he takes to follow from amor fati – that is, Emerson’s ‘fatal courage’, or in his own words, ‘to live dangerously’ (GS 283). What could be even more dangerous than a lion’s jaws? If Overbeck is expected to guess, this probably relies on conversations during Nietzsche’s recent visit to Basel. The main topic had been Lou Salomé. According to some writers, Nietzsche proposed marriage to her a day or two after writing this letter. That might well count as reckless behaviour, but evidence for the proposal is slight. It is more likely that what he had in mind was for Lou to take him as her guide and teacher. The separate letter to Ida Overbeck is clearly about that idea, which it implies she knows about, again from recent conversations.

To sum up: the five mentions of ‘submission to God’ in these letters (four preceded by ‘fatalistic’) all refer to a state of mind, and this is specified as a feeling that everything ‘turns out for the best’. Although amor fati is mentioned, there is no sense of loving fate here, rather a feeling of general optimism that events are going in the right direction, despite a few detours. This mood may have been a determining factor in the coming crisis in Nietzsche’s life, since he chose to remain in Leipzig, doing nothing much while Lou and Rée travelled together to Berlin. There had been talk of moving to Paris, but on finding Berlin a good place for study and writing, they settled there and allowed the Paris idea to lapse, to Nietzsche’s distress. His overconfidence was replaced by wounded feelings and a retreat into solitude on the Italian Riviera (Small Reference Small2005, pp. 148–149).

So, what are we to make of Gottergebenheit? It is apparently a feeling that even people who do not believe in God can have, although they will not interpret it as related to God (hence, the use of inverted commas). The case is echoed at the start of Ecce Homo. Writing on his forty-fourth birthday, Nietzsche reports a day of perfect autumn weather, then describes his recent writings as ‘all gifts of this year, indeed of its last quarter’. Finally he asks: ‘How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?’ (EH Epigraph). This is evidently a feeling, and one that comes with some force. Whereas a thought may seem to strike us from outside, an emotion comes from within. A feeling of gratitude would usually be directed towards a person from whom one has received some benefit, yet here that aspect is lacking: Nietzsche is grateful for something, but in this case not to anyone.Footnote ²⁴ The reference to ‘my whole life’ seems to be there merely because the grammar of gratitude calls for an intentional object. Here again, then, we find Nietzsche reporting an experience that lies outside familiar categories, as he does to more purpose with the concept of amor fati.

3.3 Fate and Providence

GS 276, which is essentially on amor fati, is followed by GS 277, a sharply worded polemic against what it calls ‘personal providence’. Now, ‘providence’ is not a Nietzschean word. Apart from here, he uses it nowhere in print.Footnote ²⁵ What it stands for is not one of his concerns. Hence, it is surprising that he not only rejects the idea but also describes it as ‘the hardest test’ we may confront in our lives. Where does that claim to a unique status come from? The answer is linked with the theme of fate. For much of the history of Western thought, fate has been linked with providence. This is seen in the Stoic school, which teaches that providence and fate are essentially the same thing, but seen in different contexts. While the writings of Chrysippus are lost, the later commentator Calcidius reports his teaching along these lines:

This view enters into the Christian tradition by way of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius 1999). According to Boethius, providence is the cosmic plan as it exists in the mind of God, whereas fate is its ongoing realisation in the human world. He explains that

Whatever legitimacy the concept of fate has for later Christian thinkers comes from its relation to providence. If we take Thomas Aquinas as our guide, the doctrine that fate and providence are in essence the same thing is perfectly orthodox, if startling at first sight. Citing Boethius, Aquinas argues that the two terms refer to God’s plan as it appears in the present world and in the divine mind. However, he adds that the word ‘fate’ has come into disrepute, owing to its misuse by ‘those who have held a wrong opinion about fate, by subjecting all things to the necessitation of the stars’ (Aquinas Reference Aquinas1975, p. 50). For that reason, we should avoid the word and confine our talk to ‘providence’. Given such authoritative advice, later Christian thinkers retained providence as orthodox doctrine but discarded fate, leaving it to be associated with fortune telling and superstition.Footnote ²⁶

Nietzsche’s view is consistent with this consensus but, rather confusingly, he uses the word ‘providence’ for the idea being rejected. He begins by postulating a ‘high point in life’, defined not by any outward event but as a mood or feeling, in which ‘the idea of a personal providence confronts us with the most penetrating force, and the best advocate, the evidence of our eyes, speaks for it – now that we can see how palpably always everything that happens to us turns out for the best’ (GS 277). How are we to understand such experiences? Even if one recognises the ‘chaos of existence’, there is a sense that all the accidental events in one’s life have contributed to this outcome and so have been for the best. Here we are motivated to give up the idea of the Epicurean gods who, serene and distant, are unconcerned with human welfare, in favour of a belief in personal providence – a higher power that takes an interest in our well-being and sets about arranging things so that we will benefit from the course of events.

Yet for a non-believer there can be no such thing as providence, since it assumes a God who concerns himself with the trivial details of human existence and employs helpers to attend to business. What Nietzsche finds especially objectionable about this notion is its reliance on clumsy interventions by guardian spirits. That may look like an unfair parody, but Boethius does say that fate carries out the purpose of providence by means of ‘divine spirits’ operating within the human world. So Nietzsche is right in speaking of ‘genies who are ready to serve us’, even if what he calls ‘providence’ in this passage is what Boethius calls ‘fate’ – that is, the hands-on management of things in this world to achieve the ends of a divine design.

But if we cannot believe in a personal providence, how is the feeling that Nietzsche describes to be accounted for? His answer is that ‘Our practical and theoretical skill in interpreting and arranging events has reached its high point’ (GS 277). And yet, adding a further turn to his argument, this dexterity of ours is informed by chance. ‘Indeed, now and then someone plays with us – good old chance: now and then chance guides our hand, and the wisest providence could not think up a more beautiful music than that which our foolish hand produces then’ (GS 277). The last sentence grants what might seem to have been taken away by the argument: the music is beautiful, even if it is largely due to chance.Footnote ²⁷ If what is beautiful is just semblance, such explanations are irrelevant to its beauty.

Now, GS 276 and 277 are closely related. Each identifies what it claims is a problem and points towards a solution, which implies a task for those who are aware of the problem. In GS 276 the task is to see what is necessary in things as beautiful rather than as dreadful. In GS 277 the task is to understand what is beautiful as due to chance rather than purpose. GS 277 begins by describing an impression that it claims people have at special moments: that the course of events is being guided by a power directed towards a goal: the well-being of an individual person. It is hard to doubt that Nietzsche is speaking from personal experience, given his talk of Gottergebenheit in the letters of 1882. Even if that word is not to be taken literally, the mood is an actual one. To categorise it as an illusion is to suggest an opportunity to learn something by explaining how it occurs. Optical illusions are instructive in the same way: they contribute to our understanding of vision. They even have a kind of objectivity, occurring necessarily and predictably in given situations. They are not false beliefs because they are still experienced by those who are not misled.

So: what is to be learned from an impression of ‘personal providence’? Nietzsche says that it reveals ‘our own practical and theoretical skill in interpreting and arranging events’. That description sounds like praise, not criticism. All scientific knowledge depends on precisely those skills. Further, they are most effective when directed by general rules or guidelines. That brings us back to the theme underpinning Schopenhauer’s ‘transcendent’ concept of fate: the Kantian notion of ‘regulative’ principles. The concept of the organic is one example. When we observe living things, we get a strong sense of design, although natural science has scrapped this concept and adopted a simpler explanation – evolution by means of natural selection – that accounts for what is observed. Still, a Kantian may argue that this principle remains useful, even indispensable, for research into living things. So: what function does the idea of personal providence have? It is not just an illusion explained by our perceptual apparatus, but has a source in a powerful impulse within human beings: the drive to find meaning and purpose in the world, by seeing the course of events on the model of human behaviour. If this sometimes leads us into error, that does not mean we would be better off without it. We may still use it, but with awareness of its status.

Taking GS 277 as a whole, it is true to say that ‘Nietzsche completely dismisses the notion of providence in this aphorism’ (Gaasterland Reference Gaasterland2017, p. 41). He does, but by making a show of rejecting a debased version of the concept, he diverts attention from its affinities with his own thought of amor fati. It is striking that he claims the illusory experience to be uniquely powerful, and hence, ‘our hardest test’. Schopenhauer, in contrast, thinks it is merely like seeing human figures in the markings on a wall – a fleeting impression at best (Schopenhauer Reference Schopenhauer1974, vol. 1, p. 206). Why does Nietzsche make such a strong claim, rather undermined by the briskness and brevity of his own rebutting argument? Perhaps he is concerned to excuse and explain away his own recent statements in letters: after all, the assurance that ‘everything turns out for the best’ is just what any believer in providence would claim. At any rate, these affinities go unmentioned from then on, and when amor fati returns to Nietzsche’s vocabulary, it is put to other uses, as we shall see.

3.4 Amor Fati in 1888

After 1882 the formula ‘amor fati’ disappears from Nietzsche’s writing until the very end of his career. When he again uses the expression in his last year of writing, in two book-length works and in a notebook entry, there are intriguing shifts in its meaning and application. It is unclear which of these passages was written first, but the two that were intended for public view are more clearly linked with the earlier use of the formula, so I will begin with them.

Amor fati turns up in an ‘Epilogue’ to Nietzsche’s 1888 compilation of his earlier writings on Richard Wagner, entitled Nietzsche Contra Wagner. This added text has not much to do with Wagner, but gives a review of his own life and career and returns to an old theme, the advantages gained from seeming bad luck. Here the bad luck is not a single event but a long period of fragile health, including spells of incapacitating illness.

As before, Nietzsche credits himself with gaining advantages from seeming misfortunes. He comes close to repeating a line that has become well established in popular culture since it provided the opening motto of the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian: ‘What does not kill me makes me stronger’ (TI ‘Maxims’ 8). In EH this lengthy history of illness is presented as the source of his mature thought: ‘I turned my will to health, to life, into a philosophy’ (EH ‘Wise’ 2). To some extent, this recalls the claim made to Ida Overbeck that ‘basically fate always strikes me for my benefit and at least for the benefit of wisdom’. But it has gained new significance in several ways. First, it is identified with his ‘innermost nature’ – the ‘granite of fate’ that underlies individual personality. (The same point is made in EH ‘Books’ CW 4.) Secondly, it is credited with making possible his philosophical achievement over the intervening period. Amor fati is characterised in the Epilogue to NCW by two features. One is not wanting everything to be different, a trait that recalls Nietzsche’s earlier hope that ‘Looking away shall be my only negation!’ The other is more positive: the person who achieves amor fati does not merely bear what is necessary, but loves it, a contrast that recalls the Stoic maxim: ‘Fate guides the willing and compels the unwilling.’ But the link with his own philosophical activity shows that amor fati is more than a feeling or state of mind: it has come to imply a creative and productive force.

Turning now to Ecce Homo, written about the same time, we find a use of amor fati that has a closer connection with GS 276. ‘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 – all idealism is mendaciousness in the face if what is necessary – but love it’ (EH ‘Clever’ 10).

This is a retrieval of the idea’s original role as an ideal that one might hope to attain. The reference to ‘greatness’ introduces a concept of the kind of person who would match this ideal. The theme of ‘greatness’ as a value that imposes definitions, determines valuations and makes demands runs through his thinking at all stages. In Basel, Nietzsche had attended Jacob Burckhardt’s lecture series ‘The Great Men of History’ (KSB 3: 107; see Burckhardt Reference Burckhardt1979, pp. 172–203). While not as dismissive of the claims of rulers and conquerors, he shares Burckhardt’s admiration for the creative artists whose irreplaceability is undeniable. For Nietzsche, greatness is primarily individual. As he puts it, ‘A people is the detour of nature to get to six or seven great men. – Yes: and then to get around them’ (BGE 126). But greatness is a dangerous concept for him, a temptation as much as an inspiring ideal. That is evident in his friendship with Wagner, marked by an unquestioning loyalty and an aftermath of disillusionment. In the first period, he complains that ‘culture passes by the great suffering man with callous coldness’ (SE 6). In the second period Zarathustra says, ‘I never believed the people when they spoke of great men’ (Z II: ‘On Redemption’). Yet Nietzsche never loses a belief in greatness, as BGE 126 shows. Amor fati is now a mark of greatness, and a confirming example would be the ‘joyous and trusting fatalism’ that is attributed to Goethe, who stands for Nietzsche as a paradigm case of human greatness (TI ‘Skirmishes’ 49).

Amor fati appears again in an 1888 notebook entry that presents Nietzsche’s outlook in this late period. He now sees the theme of nihilism as a key to understanding not only the social and political condition of Europe but also the state of the individual faced with the implications of the death of God. The word corresponds to the dramatic imagery used by the ‘madman’ who announces that ‘tremendous’ event: ‘Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?’ (GS 125). Elsewhere, however, Nietzsche sketches out an outlook that accepts the inevitability of nihilism, but does not stop at the negation of previous beliefs and values revealed by the ‘madman’.

Once again, amor fati is an ideal state that one may aspire to reach, but Nietzsche is more forthcoming about the route that leads to this goal and makes a connection with nihilism. Amor fati is an unqualified affirmation, or saying ‘Yes’ to the world, but that becomes possible only with the completion of a wholly destructive task: the negation of everything that has been valued in the past. Nietzsche calls all this an ‘experimental philosophy’, a label that probably implies a willingness to take risks – in this case, the risk that the full realisation of nihilism may be unendurable for the individual and even for humanity. His hope, however, is that it will open the way for a new affirmation which is just as all-inclusive (‘without subtraction, exception, or selection’) as the preceding negation. Only then is he willing to envisage amor fati as a possibility.

We have seen that amor fati undergoes shifts over the years. The formula’s minimal and slightly cryptic character is an advantage for Nietzsche, since it does not commit him to a fixed philosophical position. It begins as a wish to see what is necessary as beautiful, appears in a letter as a kind of trust in providence – or at least, a belief that everything will turn out well – and finally becomes a thought for a ‘new philosopher’, an affirmation of a world of Dionysian becoming. Whereas in GS 276 it has been added to a text that would make as much sense without it, its several 1888 appearances are all integrated with their surroundings. That is progress, and yet amor fati remained an alluring formula awaiting an extended application. If the Dionysian ‘philosopher of the future’ who appears in the 1888 writings had been developed fully in the ambitious Hauptwerk that now provides a topic for speculation amongst scholars, that might have become a different story.

4.1 Introduction

If amor fati is a formula that attracts attention, the same is true of the call to ‘become who you are’. Occurring briefly in GS 270 and 335, it acquires prominence as the subtitle of EH: ‘How one becomes what one is.’Footnote ²⁸ In effect, Nietzsche has written a book on the theme. The formula is not novel: the poet Pindar is an ancient source. However, Nietzsche takes it over for his own purposes. Unlike amor fati, its connection with fate is not immediately obvious. Yet a link is made when Zarathustra’s animals say: ‘For your animals know well, O Zarathustra, who you are and must become: behold, you are the teacher of eternal return – that is now your destiny!’ (Z III: ‘The Convalescent’).Footnote ²⁹ Thus, Zarathustra’s fate is to become who he is. And who is he? The teacher of eternal return, they assert. Yet he is never seen teaching the eternal return in TSZ. It might be objected that he does, in some sense, pass on the doctrine in Z III: ‘On the Vision and Riddle.’ But I think that is wrong. His encounter with the ‘spirit of gravity’ is a contest of wits, not a lesson, and his aim is simply to defeat his opponent. Even at the end of the book, he is yet to become the person that his animals have identified. Still, the animals have made a prediction: his fate is to become what he is. Conversely, it is by becoming what he is that he will realise his fate.

Here a parallel suggests itself: if amor fati is what you think and feel about your fate, ‘becoming what you are’ is what you do about it. As we will see, ‘becoming what you are’ raises many of the same issues as amor fati. They have a common feature: a joining together of elements that seem to be incompatible. Hence, there is an air of paradox about them. Yet they are not simply contradictions or oxymorons, like Wagner’s phrase ‘endless melody’.Footnote ³⁰ Their problematical character is more subtle, even if it is readily perceived. The relation between becoming and being is an old problem for philosophy. Often it is framed as a rivalry between two systems of thought: a metaphysical belief in a ‘real world’ beyond that of experience and an affirmation of the changing world of appearance that we live in. Hence, joining becoming and being together in a formula forces us to do some hard thinking. Can the same content (whether a ‘who’ or a ‘what’) belong to both? If so, is one somehow derived from the other?

One way of dealing with the call to ‘become what you are’ is what might be called a common-sense reading, identifying ‘what you are’ with the innate qualities and talents that we might set about developing and applying. On that view, Nietzsche is advising us to be true to ourselves, like Shakespeare’s Polonius. In this discussion, however, I want to stay with the tension. It emerges within Nietzsche scholarship in other forms: for example, as the common contrast between ‘cosmological’ and ‘ethical’ interpretations of the eternal return (which in turn trades on a standard convention, the disjunction of ‘is’ and ‘ought’). Closely related issues arise wherever Nietzsche’s concept of fate is in question. We saw this with the idea of amor fati, and will see it again with ‘becoming what you are’.

The first occurrence comes at the beginning of Nietzsche’s ‘free spirit period’. While spending time with Paul Rée in Switzerland, he began to make notes that combined aphoristic ideas with themes intended for his new book Human, All Too Human. Amongst these we find: ‘“Become the person that you are”: that is a call which is always allowed to only a few people, but is superfluous for the fewest of those few’ (KSA 8, 19 [40]). The Pindar idea is there, but with a qualification: this call is for a few people only. Further, a very few do not need to be told to become who they are. Those points are not present when the formula appears in print six years later, at the end of this period in Nietzsche’s work – that is, in The Gay Science.

Succinct though it is, GS 270 requires careful reading, for two reasons. The first is its literary form. Most modern readers are not aware of the template that Nietzsche draws on in the passage that includes the line. It is a genre belonging to that period, designed for views and beliefs that belong to a single person and give insights into individual character. Secondly, the line is given to ‘conscience’. That implies a discourse occurring within the individual person, in which different parts of personality act as speakers. Nietzsche is given to such inner dialogues: they even provide a title for one of his books, The Wanderer and His Shadow. Both Daybreak and The Gay Science contain a dozen or so interchanges between ‘A’ and ‘B’, who may or may not be different persons. There and elsewhere, Nietzsche sets out to explain some aspect of human nature in terms of interactions occurring within the individual person. Often the ‘parts’ take on an active role, with attitudes and preferences of their own, and even distinct voices. A case in point is an often cited aphorism: ‘“I have done that,” says my memory. “I cannot have done that” – says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually – memory gives in’ (BGE 68). These inner dialogues are the background to the call of conscience in GS 270.

Whether becoming who you are and becoming what you are amount to the same thing is perhaps not important. Both the ‘who’ and the ‘what’ versions raise the issue of personality or character. The statement attributed to Heraclitus ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων is usually translated as ‘a man’s character is his fate’ (Kirk and Raven Reference Kirk and Raven1957, p. 213). The Greek word translated as ‘fate’ is daimon, standing for the guiding spirit who represents the power of fate. Nietzsche is well aware of the line and quotes it in his lectures on the pre-Platonic philosophers (PPP, p. 73). It is consistent with many of his ideas, and so the second part of this section will address the relation between character and fate, and the idea that becoming who you are is also a realisation of your personal fate.

Finally, I will look into Nietzsche’s further use of the formula ‘becoming what you are’ in Ecce Homo, where it provides the subtitle: ‘How One Becomes What One Is.’ Nietzsche often uses subtitles to alert readers to a book’s character and purpose, and here – as with TI, subtitled ‘How One Philosophises With a Hammer’ – his point is that this is a teaching by demonstration, showing how something is done by setting an example. Yet imitation can hardly be the way one learns to become what one is. If any of Nietzsche’s illustrations are instructive for someone living in today’s world, it will be with a fair amount of adaptation. Further, there is a philosophical problem in seeing ‘becoming what you are’ as a goal in its own right, as distinct from an outcome that arises out of the achievement of other goals. If we take that difficulty seriously, we may end with the conclusion drawn by Brian Leiter in discussing Ecce Homo: ‘We now have the answer to the book’s subtitle: How one becomes what one is. The answer is: by making no special effort directed towards that end, because one becomes what one is necessarily’ (Leiter Reference Leiter and Janaway1998, p. 223).

4.2 ‘Becoming What You Are’ in 1882

Becoming who you are makes its public appearance in The Gay Science: ‘What does your conscience say? You shall become who (Kaufmann has “the person”) you are’ (GS 270). In this work it occurs within a list of eight questions and answers which conclude Book Three with some panache. Nietzsche later refers to this passage as ‘the granite sentences at the end of the third book, with which a destiny for all times expresses itself in formulas for the first time’ (EH ‘Books’ GS). Here are the sections (GS 268–275) that belong together:

• What makes one heroic? – Going out to meet at the same time one’s highest suffering and one’s highest hope.

• In what do you believe? – In this, that the weights of all things must be determined anew.

• What does your conscience say? – “You shall become who you are.”

• Where are your greatest dangers? – In pity.

• What do you love in others? – My hopes.

• Whom do you call bad? – Those who always want to put others to shame.

• What do you consider most humane? – To spare someone shame.

• What is the seal of liberation? – No longer being ashamed in front of oneself.

The passage is undeniably striking, even with some repetition entering in towards the end. Noting the question-and-answer format, scholars often liken it to a religious catechism (e.g., Miner Reference Miner2022, pp. 106–111). However, there is a closer and more convincing model. This is found in the ‘Confessions’ albums that appeared at the time Nietzsche was writing The Gay Science. Originating in mid-Victorian England as a more elaborate version of the autograph album, the genre was popular in Germany in that period (Kohlbecher Reference 67Kohlbecher2007). During his Basel years Nietzsche would have encountered the most widely found of the German albums, a presence in many middle-class households: Friedrich Kirschner’s best-selling Erkenne Dich Selbst! (Kirchner Reference Kirchner1876). As with its English counterparts, each page of this album contains a printed list of questions – ‘Your favourite qualities in man?’, ‘Your main character trait?’, ‘Your favourite occupation?’, ‘Your idea of happiness?’ and others – with spaces for answers to be entered by hand. The questions are wholly unlike those of a catechism in both content and purpose. Orthodoxy is not an agenda: there are no prescribed answers to be memorised and given on demand. The contrasts between different people’s responses to the questions are, in fact, the entire point of the genre. The contributors (typically family and friends) are expected to express their individual beliefs and preferences, adding up to a portrait of their distinctive personality.Footnote ³¹

That is what is happening with GS 268–275. In accordance with the ‘Confessions’ model, the themes are personal: most of the questions are addressed to a single ‘you’ and are questions about that person’s attitudes and feelings. Who is this person? Nietzsche himself? More probably, the ‘free spirit of the present time’ who supplies the voice of the ‘middle period’ works, as an unused preface for HAH explains (KSA 8, 25 [2]). The responses here provide a model or prototype for this new, liberated view of the world. In a later text, Nietzsche comes closer to speaking for himself with a typical entry for a ‘Confessions’ album: ‘The formula of my happiness: A Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal’ (TI ‘Maxims and Arrows’ 44). It would not have escaped him that, taken together, these questions and answers resemble aphoristic formulations. That is why the ending of Book Three of GS looks like a continuation of the preceding sections, although its format is actually different, in that the questions are not added titles but are part of the text itself.

Let us look more closely at this line. The opening is: ‘What does your conscience say?’ My conscience speaks to me, not for me.Footnote ³² Instead of a wish or aspiration, what is heard is a voice that carries authority and confronts me, as hearer, with a task. Conscience is often involved in making judgements on present and past behaviour (hence, it becomes ‘good conscience’ or ‘bad conscience’). Here it is doing something different by making a demand: its Du sollst echoes the Biblical ‘Thou shalt’, and the message is elsewhere described as a ‘call’ (KSA 8, 19 [40]). Nietzsche sees conscience as looking forward rather than back. Freed from service to morality, its role becomes that of a coach rather than a critic.

Becoming what you are appears here as an imperative: this is what ‘conscience’ tells us to do.Footnote ³³ That raises an important point. Commentators have queried whether an advocate of fatalism has any business in issuing an imperative. After all, they ask (rather rhetorically) what difference could it make? According to the fatalist, the person will do (or not do) what is called for anyway. Hence, the imperative is either superfluous, in the first case, or futile, in the other. (Readers may recognise the ‘idle argument’ here.) This objection is raised against the thought of eternal return, which includes a doctrine of necessity that points to fatalism. According to Bernd Magnus, ‘The descriptive version of recurrence appears to embrace a fatalism which defeats the imperative force of the normative rendition’ (Magnus Reference Magnus1978, p. 73).Footnote ³⁴ I take this to mean that the normal purpose of imperatives – that is, getting people to do things – cannot be carried out if what fatalism says is true. In that sense, their ‘force’ or function is lost.

Is that right? Here we need to consider Nietzsche’s attitude towards imperatives. His admiration for Schopenhauer is in part motivated by their shared belief in the pointlessness of moral imperatives. As early as 1868 he writes:

Nietzsche does not identify the source of this criticism, and his defence may be only a pre-emptive tactic. Schopenhauer certainly rejects ethical imperatives out of hand. For one thing, he thinks that they have their unacknowledged source in a theological ethics which ‘is essentially dictatorial’ (Schopenhauer Reference Schopenhauer1996, p. 54). More to the point, his rejection is consistent with a belief that character is innate and unchangeable (Schopenhauer Reference Schopenhauer1969, vol. 1, pp. 293–296). Nietzsche presents Heraclitus in the same light (PTAG 7 and PPP, p. 73). In both cases, the permanence of character is given as a reason for regarding moral imperatives as a waste of time. ‘Who could still demand from such a philosophy an ethics with obligatory imperatives of the “Thou shalt” kind or, worse yet, make their absence an objection to Heraclitus!’ We will return to the question of character in the next part of this section.

Given this model, does Nietzsche also aim at an ethics without imperatives? His writings give a different impression. He seems to be forever giving his readers instructions, either in person or through his Zarathustra – for example, to ‘Live dangerously’ (GS 283), ‘Stay true to the earth’ (Z I: ‘Prologue’) and ‘Become hard’ (Z III: ‘On Old and New Tablets’). In his tellingly named Nietzsche’s Existential Imperative, Bernd Magnus presents the thought of eternal return as a command: ‘Live in such a way that you must wish to live again, he tells us simply’ (Magnus Reference Magnus1978, p. 143). Further, Nietzsche often refers to ‘tasks’ that confront us, especially on gaining insight into ourselves and our situation. Sometimes a ‘task’ is a driving force, for example, ‘But then the almighty power of our task drives us apart again…’ (GS 279). It seems that a task is a demand that arises from within ourselves (unlike a problem, which comes from outside) and addresses us as an imperative. This is consistent with a picture of human personality as a social community of drives and impulses, some exercising power over others and subordinating them to their own aims. If a drive could speak, how would it express itself ? As an imperative, surely. If so, then life is full of imperatives, if only of the kind that Kant called ‘hypothetical’, and Nietzsche is simply reminding us of this fact.

The imperative attributed to conscience, ‘You shall become who you are’, fits into this pattern. It is the expression of an inner drive, asserting itself alongside and even in competition with other drives. It comes from no ‘higher’ source and, in that sense, has no privileged status. Nietzsche gives conscience closer attention in On the Genealogy of Morals. There it appears as the ‘dominating instinct’ of the ‘sovereign individual’ who has the right to make promises because his conscience compels him to fulfil them. Nietzsche says that the sovereign individual who keeps his word does so ‘in the face of accidents, even “in the face of fate”’ (GM II: 2). The word ‘accidents’ here is not Zufälle, meaning chance events in general, but Unfälle: literally, ‘mishaps’. Moreover, ‘in the face of fate’ (gegen das Schicksal ) is in quotation marks, implying some distancing. The wording suggests a speaker who takes chance and necessity to be external powers, hostile to purposeful human action. Nietzsche’s conceptions of accidentality and fate are very different. His sovereign individual does not set out to eliminate contingency by locking in the course of events, or attempt to defeat the power of fate through heroic resistance. Rather, he lives with both contingency and necessity, thus becoming a ‘piece of fate’. So, presumably, does the person who listens to the voice of conscience when it says, ‘You shall become who you are.’

4.3 Character and Fate

The ‘who’ in ‘becoming who you are’ raises questions of its own. In Kaufmann’s translation of GS 270, what conscience says is ‘You shall become the person you are’. That points to the notion of individual personality or, to use an older expression, character. That would be consistent with the later ‘what you are’, since it implies a set of dispositions and traits that remain there through the changing events of a person’s life. Here the element of paradox in the formula emerges strongly because many thinkers have taken character and becoming to be mutually exclusive. That is, they see the character of the individual person as something that is given and unchangeable. This section will look at Nietzsche’s thinking on the subject and its implications for fate and fatalism.

What is Nietzsche’s view of character? We noted his early remark that ‘The thing the philosophers call character is an incurable disease.’ The permanence of character is taken to be a philosophical consensus: ‘Man is necessity down to his last fibre, and totally “unfree”, that is, if one means by freedom the foolish demand to be able to change one’s essentia arbitrarily, like a garment – a demand that every serious philosophy has rejected with the proper scorn’ (PTAG 7). In his Basel lectures Nietzsche glosses the Heraclitean maxim ‘A man’s character is his fate’ as ‘The destiny of the individual is his inborn character’ (PPP 73). The implication is that the necessity of fate within human life has its source and basis in something that does not belong to the world of becoming. Here we have a kind of counterpart to the Christian belief in providence as the eternal plan in the divine mind, with fate as its successive unfolding within the world.

However, Nietzsche has a model closer to hand in Schopenhauer’s view of character. Its source is the Kantian doctrine of freedom, which Schopenhauer calls ‘the greatest of all achievements of the human mind’ (Schopenhauer Reference Schopenhauer1996, p. 111). Here character is intelligible, not in time and therefore not subject to change. On Schopenhauer’s view, upbringing and training can only modify the cognitive contribution to behaviour – for example, by instilling a belief that honesty is a more effective way of achieving one’s aims than dishonesty.Footnote ³⁵ The underlying disposition of the will is not accessible to such influences. Hence, imperatives may be useful within a limited scope, but as the Greek poet Theognis puts it, ‘you will never make the base man noble through teaching’.Footnote ³⁶

Nietzsche begins to develop his own view of character with the change in his thinking that appears in HAH and its sequels. A strong influence is Paul Rée’s The Origin of Moral Sensations, a book written during their period of close collaboration. Rée takes a naturalistic approach to the moral sense, informed by Darwinist biology and associationist psychology. He writes: ‘Moral phenomena can be traced back to natural causes just as much as physical phenomena: moral man stands no closer to the intelligible world than physical man’ (Rée Reference Rée2003, p. 87; cited in HAH 37). While Rée rejects the Kantian doctrine of intelligible character, his account of human behaviour gives a prominent role to character. His basic argument is that every human action is the necessary result of causes and could have been different only if those causes had been different. Once we realise this, we will no longer feel remorse for an action, knowing that ‘it resulted with necessity from the thoughts, sensations and circumstances present at the moment it was committed’ (Rée Reference Rée2003, p. 107). However, he adds, a person may understand all this and still feel remorse for another reason, having to do with character. This person feels guilty ‘not because he had committed the act, although he could have refrained from committing it, rather because he was burdened with a character from which such an action could proceed’ (Rée Reference Rée2003, p. 108). Rée replies that this remorse is just as irrational as the usual kind. Individual character is also the necessary outcome of causes, although its tendencies may be either reinforced or restrained through upbringing and education. He concludes that it is as irrational to feel responsible for one’s character as to feel responsible for particular actions.

Given Rée’s pessimistic outlook, it is understandable that he might take character not to be open to improvement. But why would Nietzsche do so, given his commitment to a ‘historical’ philosophising? He claims that ‘everything has become: there are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths’ (HAH 2). He is aware that this must apply to character, but tries to restrict change to a long time scale: ‘That the character is unalterable is not in the strict sense true; this favourite proposition means rather no more than that, during the brief lifetime of a man, the effective motives are unable to scratch deeply enough to erase the imprinted script of many millennia’ (HAH 41). There is no mention of change in individual character, but that must follow, given Nietzsche’s acceptance of the Lamarckian theory that evolution occurs when traits acquired by the individual are passed on.

In later writings, Nietzsche does allow for change in personality or character, and even posits radical ‘metamorphoses of the spirit’ (Z I: ‘On the Three Metamorphoses’). This implies a need to explain how such changes might come about. One of his favoured themes is the analogy between the self and a social community, an idea that goes back to Plato’s account of the ‘parts’ of the soul (Republic IV.4, 435–441, in Plato 1937, vol. 1, pp. 698–705). Nietzsche pictures personality as a community of drives, interacting and forming stable relations of dominance and subordination which may, however, be disrupted and form a new pattern. At the same time, he continues to insist on an unchangeable element within the individual. Both ideas are present in this statement about character:

The first sentence draws on a book Nietzsche had read by the biologist Wilhelm Roux, in which nutrition is proposed as a factor promoting evolutionary change. Roux argues that the various organs within a living organism are forced to compete for resources – and as with the Darwinian struggle for existence in nature, the outcome is evolutionary change as the strongest survive and prevail. ‘All this happens without the struggle of individuals’, he writes (Roux Reference Roux1881, p. 83, quoted in KSA 10, 7 [98]). Nietzsche is arguing that the same process occurs in the mind, with ‘learning’ disrupting the configuration of elements within personality, initiating conflict that may result in wholly new relations of power. Yet he still insists on a deeply located ‘granite of spiritual fatum’ – perhaps an echo of Emerson’s ‘floor of granite’.

In one late note, Nietzsche contrasts patterns of interaction amongst the forces within personality. One is a situation in which a single drive gains power over others, co-ordinating them in the service of its own aims. This, he observes, is ‘almost the definition of health’. Contrasted to it is the unhealthy personality in which the passions are locked in continual struggle, like the ‘democratic’ personality described by Plato, pushed this way and that as one impulse after another gains temporary ascendancy (Republic VIII.12, 558–562, in Plato 1937, vol. 1, pp. 816–821). The outcome may be a general disintegration – or the emergence of one as a ‘ruling passion’. There, personality is dominated by a single outstanding ability, subordinating everything else to its own purpose and, by doing so, providing an exemplary model of becoming what one is.

Nietzsche makes this contrast elsewhere, but here he adds a third possible case: a peaceful coexistence of diverse tendencies, in which impulses exist alongside one another without conflict or co-operation.

The changes that ‘chameleons’ undergo are, literally, only on their surface. There, one trait or another is on display, in response to the social environment rather than in consequence of processes within personality. What does all this say about the character of such individuals? Hardly anything, even if they are ‘interesting’ – a word that with Nietzsche tends to come with an unspoken addition, ‘but not important’.Footnote ³⁷ They may be content with their lives but as Nietzsche puts it, ‘they change, they do not become’. He seems to imply ‘they do not become who they are’. That is what these people miss out on. Being happy and secure is not so bad as a consolation prize, it is true. Still, it does look as if Nietzsche has described a psychological model of not becoming what you are – perhaps something of a best case, and yet a missed chance to achieve something higher.

This throws light on those who do become what they are. Talk of a ‘granite of fate’ now looks like a gesture towards a model of character that has been replaced by a more dynamic and changing concept. ‘Becoming’ in this sense implies conflict, whether within the individual person, or between persons or groups of persons. Any inner conflict will undermine the maintenance of a stable and enduring self. But Nietzsche writes, ‘Only those who change remain related to me’ (BGE ‘Aftersong’).Footnote ³⁸ He welcomes the emergence of new virtues, even if that requires conflict and suffering. The beginning may be an outbreak of antagonism between drives that, as it seems, have taken little or no notice of one another until then. A powerful thought (such as the death of God or the eternal return) can be the catalyst that sets off this course of events. Where does such a thought come from? A philosopher, Nietzsche remarks, is someone ‘who is struck by his own thoughts as from outside, as from above and below, as by his type of experiences and lightning bolts’ (BGE 292). A lightning bolt is the classic example of a chance event. This seeming unpredictability raises a crucial issue: can we bring about this process of change, or is it outside our control? In other words, is there a way of becoming what you are?

4.4 ‘Becoming What You Are’ in 1888

Ecce Homo – subtitled ‘How One Becomes What One Is’ – is often seen as something unique in Nietzsche’s writing. In fact, it has a predecessor. Richard Wagner in Bayreuth is a close parallel to Ecce Homo, because it is about Wagner’s becoming – or, as Nietzsche puts it (in a line that might serve as a subtitle), about ‘how he became what he is and what he will be’ (RWB 1).Footnote ³⁹ Given that ‘all true music is a piece of fate’ (RWB 8), the book asserts, the realisation of Wagner’s music dramas is proof of the force of destiny. Only this can explain how he overcame so many obstacles – some located in his circumstances and others within his personality, about which Nietzsche is surprisingly candid (see Small Reference Small2005, pp. 17–21). In EH he states that ‘in all psychologically decisive passages I alone am discussed – and one should not hesitate to put down my name or the word “Zarathustra” where the text has the word “Wagner”’ (EH ‘Books’ BT 4). We could try this, but it would be easier to read EH, where Nietzsche may be seen as rewriting RWB, but dropping the pretence that it is about Wagner.Footnote ⁴⁰

EH not only elaborates on the idea of ‘becoming what you are’ but also throws light on its link with the concept of a personal fate. It does this through a detailed case study. The indefinite pronoun ‘one’ hints that by explaining to readers how he has become who he is, Nietzsche provides a model that will help them to answer the call of conscience. However, care is needed in seeing what we are to learn from this model. Nietzsche borrowed ‘becoming what you are’ from Pindar, as he mentions in a letter to Lou Salomé (KSB 6: 239). In doing so, he made a significant omission. As Babette Babich points out, what Pindar refers to is becoming what you know you are (Babich Reference Babich2003, pp. 31–32).Footnote ⁴¹ That implies another demand: to know yourself. Of course, this is one of the most well-known of ancient maxims and is often taken to be an essential aim of philosophy itself. Yet Nietzsche makes several sceptical remarks about the instruction to know yourself (AOM 366, D 40 and BGE 80). More to the point, he explicitly denies that it plays any role in ‘becoming what you are’. Let us look into this puzzling passage.

The chapter of EH headed ‘Why I Am So Clever’ starts by surveying various aspects of Nietzsche’s personal history – his eating habits, preferred locations, recreational pastimes and tastes in literature and music. Having described these at some length, Nietzsche opens the next section with a sudden shift to the topic that underlies them: ‘At this point the real answer to the question, how one becomes what one is, can no longer be avoided.’ Then comes this surprising passage:

Here ‘becoming what you are’ means having a task that is for you alone to fulfil and which goes far beyond everyday examples. Zarathustra’s task is to be the teacher of the eternal return, and this is what becoming what he is will consist in. Nietzsche’s task, as he now explains, is to carry through a revaluation of all values. The previous sections have tried to identify what the factors in his history contributed to his acquiring the capacity to fulfil this destiny. Why then does he now stipulate that ‘to become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is?’ The answer seems to be this: Nietzsche has come to see what his goal is: to complete the revaluation of values. What worries him is that a focus on the ultimate goal will be a distraction, working against finding what Zarathustra calls ‘the path that no one can tread but you’ (Z III: ‘The Wanderer’). Openness to chance is important here, as Nietzsche thinks his own development shows.

All this is consistent with amor fati, which implies an attitude to life quite different from setting out to achieve a goal that one has decided on in advance. It is foreshadowed in Nietzsche’s earlier borrowing of a line from Emerson’s essay ‘Circles’: ‘A man never rises higher than when he does not know whither his path can still lead him’ (SE 1). The message is discouraging for readers of Ecce Homo hoping for guidance from an author who often seems to be drawn to the role of life coach.Footnote ⁴² Despite that tendency, Nietzsche is reluctant to offer a formulation that would determine the general conduct of life. He even gives a rationale for this restraint: ‘One must keep the whole surface of consciousness – consciousness is a surface – clear of any great imperative at all’ (EH ‘Clever’ 9). Similarly with dramatic slogans and poses, he adds: those can only get in the way of the real force that drives personal development.

It might be objected that this view of ‘becoming what you are’ leaves us with nothing to do, apart from staying out of the way of the organising idea as it gets on with its work. However, Nietzsche seems to have fewer objections to a project of what might be called self-cultivation. The metaphor is an ancient one and often turns up in thinking about education, as words like ‘kindergarten’ demonstrate. It is reclaimed by Nietzsche in this passage:

Self-cultivation is not enough for some readers of Nietzsche. They prefer to use a stronger term, self-creation. The idea here is that becoming what you are amounts to creating yourself. In his 1985 book Nietzsche: Life As Literature, Alexander Nehamas writes: ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra is constructed around the idea of creating one’s own self or, what comes to the same thing, the Übermensch’ (Nehamas Reference Nehamas1985, p. 174). The concept of Nietzschean self-creation has been endorsed by prominent philosophers (e.g., Rorty Reference Rorty1989, pp. 96–121 and Nagel Reference Nagel2010, pp. 33–40) and much discussed by later writers (e.g., Leiter Reference Leiter and Janaway1998; Franco Reference Franco2018 and Meyer Reference Meyer2025). The appeal of the idea is evident: it gives more content to ‘becoming what you are’ by drawing on a theme whose many associations may be helpful. Further, its hubristic overtones are not necessarily an objection, given some of Nietzsche’s dramatic claims for his own historical significance.

What is the evidence? Nietzsche does not use the term ‘self-creation’, yet a similar idea is implied when he writes, under the heading ‘Will a Self ’ (the inverted commas are his): ‘Active, successful natures act, not according to the dictum “know thyself”, but as if there hovered before them the commandment: will a self, and then you will become a self ’ (AOM 366). His concept of the ‘sovereign individual’ comes with a promising list of qualities: ‘But we want to be those that we are: the new, the unique, the incomparable, the self-legislating, the self-creating!’ (GS 290). Later in the same work, these persons are said to ‘create themselves’: ‘We, however, want to become those we are – human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give laws to themselves, who create themselves. To that end we must become the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world…’ (GS 335). Someone who is new, unique and incomparable will not fit into a familiar, already existing category. We are told that such individuals ‘give laws to themselves’, and laws are general in nature, but these laws apply to just one individual, the person who makes them and whose uniqueness is therefore their source (see Rutherford Reference Rutherford and Katsafanas2018, p. 204).

The other Nietzschean text relevant to ‘self-creation’ is a comment on Goethe: ‘he disciplined himself for wholeness, he created (schuf ) himself ’ (TI ‘Skirmishes’ 49). Nietzsche may have in mind the Olympian figure portrayed in Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (Eckermann Reference Eckermann2011), which he called ‘the best German book there is’ (AOM 109). But if self-creation is mentioned in these passages, it is alongside other features, belonging with them and even overlapping, rather than having a separate, unique role. In the Goethe passage it looks superfluous, given that the main theme is an achievement of wholeness for a many-sided personality – the cultural ideal of Bildung, a quite different concept. In the end, I think that taking ‘self-creation’ to be one of Nietzsche’s key concepts is misleading. We must agree with the diplomatic words of Brian Leiter: ‘his talk of “creating” the self is merely the employment of a familiar term in an unfamiliar sense’ (Leiter Reference Leiter and Janaway1998, p. 255).

What this leaves is a reading of ‘becoming what you are’ that is very close to the concept of amor fati. That is not surprising, given their common source in the thinking that emerged in The Gay Science and was undergoing new development in Nietzsche’s last year of work. Each is one way of answering the question: how are we to live with fate? Nietzsche is one of the few modern thinkers to address this as a problem. Introducing these two formulae in 1882 was a crucial step forward for his thought. They provided strategies for addressing the problem, by turning it into a task. The issues now are how we are to think and feel about fate, and how the resulting orientation will be realised in the further course of our lives. In both cases, Nietzsche made significant further advances in 1888. We might imagine that if he had been able to develop these ideas for years and even decades, he would have arrived at resolutions for the tensions in his thinking, including the opposition between wilfulness and acquiescence (to borrow Emerson’s wording) as responses to the challenge, or threat, of fatalism. The sides which I have taken Fuller and Carlyle to represent would be reconciled, either in a higher synthesis or at least in an amicable coexistence.

However, there is evidence that points in a different direction. Much of Nietzsche’s writing in this last period opens up a visionary conception of reality as a Heraclitean flux of becoming, consisting of forces perpetually engaged in creative conflict, forming the most complex or beautiful products only to destroy them through renewed conflict, in an endless cycle. This pattern is closely identified with the will to power, an idea that dominates his late thinking. But what about the individual person’s place in such a world? And what about the theme of fate? As we noted earlier, Nietzsche describes the philosopher who affirms this reality as standing ‘in a Dionysian relationship to existence’ and adds: ‘my formula for this is amor fati’ (KSA 13, 16 [32]). The Dionysian vision of the final period encompasses many of the topics covered in this Element, turning them into its own details. In particular, the emphasis on participation in his description of the Dionysian thinker of the future is a further development of both amor fati and the call to ‘become who you are’. This is what Zarathustra envisages when he celebrates ‘the most necessary soul that plunges joyously into chance; the soul that, having being, dives into becoming; the soul that has, but wants to want and will’ (Z III ‘On Old and New Tablets’ 20). To the end, Nietzsche’s thinking is driven by the challenge of fate and, in particular, by the hope of fully realising what it means to see oneself as ‘a piece of fate’.