Amor Fati…the absurdity of an enthusiastic embrace of necessity, as if one had a choice!..the contradiction, and thus the affirmation of what one is; a contradiction…becoming what you are.
nietzschecircle.com/Nietzsches_Amor_fati.pdf
This article, my friends, is absolutely brilliant.
Ok I may be off-topic, but what’s so cool about affirmating life?
If there’s some flesh-eating bacteria, that’s still life, but I’m not going to want to affirm it. I’ll want to suppress it, deny it, avoid it, and whatever else. That’s often what people do when they refute life-in-part, and to accept it all would be not be selection.
Regret and good plans, are all a part of the cognitive range of selection.
To affirm or deny, either is done via selection.
I suppose I’m agreeing with you, and the whole post.
But I’ve seen affirmation without integrity, a weak and silly yes to crap,
So I suppose I just wanted to try to post something about being selective with one’s acceptance and with one’s tolerance.
I think one must take Nietzsche in his historical context to properly understand why affirmation was important to him, and in doing so, we can find why it is important to us.
That is, he is writing at what he believed to be the beginning of the end of a 2,000 year rule of particular values…Christian values, and the philosophic prejudices spawned from it…The belief that ultimate reality rests outside of the domain of man, that meaning and value lies outside of this world and in another. Weather it be the world of God, or the world of an independent reason/rationality is of no importance, they have the same effect upon us. It usurps our right to value and give meaning, and instead places both outside of us and many times devalues what is of true importance. What really matters to us is deemed unworthy…The earth and our passions are slandered and we are made to betray both, we were led to believe for the past 2,000 years that life without the absolute meaning/value God provides is both unworthy of the slightest consideration and unendurable. And then, after all of this, we learned that God does not exist. What are we left with? A world devoid of meaning, and an existence devoid of value.
The eternal becoming, the flux, the uncertainty, the lack of any goal for us or existence as a whole. These are terrible ideas to someone that just learned that absolute value is a farce, terrible to someone that still works using Christian notions of meaning and value. This radical shift in value, this deflation of the god hypothesis, is the impetus behind all of Nietzsche’s work. He read Schopenhauer, and saw the future - the outcome of the deflation of the god hypothesis. Philosophies that not only don’t value reality, but also lose the God that previously gave value. Absolute asceticism becomes the only way out. It is an unnecessary denial of life, but one that is implicit within human psychology at the death of god, and one that would be disastrous for humanity.
The organic affirmation of the Dionysian is barred from human psychology by this radical shift in value. I suspect that the question “why affirmation” was never considered by the Dionysian’s, it was organic and natural. But for us, this is not possible, and so the question must be posed in an intellectual manor.
Anyway, I think the bacteria misses the point…it’s not so much about avoiding or disliking things in the world, as it is seeing that one bacteria ought to be granted more consideration than the whole of the god argument.
I… a lack of an absolute value or absolute goal, means that any type of goal can be made, any direction taken. That seemed to be blatantly obvious to me, even when I was quite young, that there was no universal monism.
I think that my mom has nothing to look forward to other than her religious ideas. She believes in the eventual resurrection of the dead, in a loving creator god of justice, and an unstoppably near perfection aswel as peace heading towards the whole world.
Without her hope she may have committed suicide, even though she is not particularily suicidal, I think she would have done so anyways. When people start to believe that the universe has a sort of justice behind it all, and that the future has something good in store for them, that life wont end, they start to have more hope in everything. Life does not seem as futile, and then they feel inspired to make changes in their life. I’ve seen many christians whom set a firm faith and then changed their life. They would stop smoking, stop drinking, clean up their act, be allot more happy, responsible, and whatever else.
I find this to be indescribably sad…!
On a more inter-galactic scale, human forms have a history of tragedy, and they’re fairly low on the food-chain aswel as having an intrinsic need for a higher author. They can only possably live on a sort of faith in nature or in something else like it, barely getting by.
At first I was mad, mad at the sickness that made such a weakness, aswel as anger at the sick.
It’s pretty frustrating to meet a species that literally can’t improve itself on some fundamental level.
It’s so annoying to die that slowly.
Every human joy, it’s like… a heavenly chior at church hundreds of years ago, and then one cannot help but remember the boy’s balls were cut off somehow in relation to the song. It’s not beautiful to me, or impressive. I mean, on the surface, a being that small and that poor would probably find little strange things as amazing. It’s like a chimp would find pac-man to be quite a complicated videogame to master. But from any higher place, it’s still pittiful, simple, frail, futile, temporary, really…
Talking about this doesn’t do anything. People have already said everything there is to say, and their words didn’t change the real situation of what they are, under it all. I probably normally would never talk about it, either. The real situation of the whole process, is fairly ineffable.
You’d probably affirm it to get by, affirm the whole mess and appreciate it, whilst earlier affirming and appreciating faith and heaven. Either way, it’s probably the same psychological process, of living by means of little human reasons and feelings.
If one were to look at what western society has done since Nietzsche declared the death of god, to find out what psychological reaction it has had to Darwin’s theory, one would find A thoroughly scientific world-view.
To attempt to describe the entirety of existence in terms of mathematics and abstract forces is just about the most absurd thing that could occur. That is not to say that science does not have it’s place, or that it isn’t useful, and it is not to say that we need metaphysical wordviews…it is simply to say that a human experiences existence as essentially unscientific. By way of analogue, consider reducing a piece of music to it’s mathematical parts…consider someone that could only understand music through the notes mathematical relations to each other. Such a person would be ridiculous, perhaps autistic, perhaps not even human. Yet, this is what society, or the halfway intelligent part of society has done…but to all of existence.
That is, there has been a mad dash to erase value and meaning from human world view, to erase the way humans experience, or at least degrade it to a secondary characteristic . I have heard many many people respond to the question “what is happiness”, with “a chemical reaction in the brain”. No, you delusional twat, happiness is nothing of the sort. It is a feeling for fucks sake, a apprehension in your mind. It may supervene on the brain, but it certainly is not simply a chemical anymore than a thought is a rock.
We see where this leads, to a petty society whose only concern is the latest fashion, or the recent cunt-shot of celebrity-X. Value and meaning still comes from outside, only this time it’s not from god, but from genius add campaigns and catchy tunes. Everyone has become consumer trash rather than Christian rabble, and the absurd way we all interpret scientific discoveries is atleast partly to blame.
“Life is war”, this seems to be the general consensus of interpretation regarding Nietzsche among the people that I bother to read on this forum and others.
I agree, Nietzsche does hold that life is war, but I don’t think this is his important message. This was not his discovery, this was Schopenhauer’s, and I think one misses far more than one has understood if one stops at this understanding. The main question, the current running throughout, the theme that I walk away with time and time again after reading Nietzsche is, “Life is war, isn’t that great?” This is his beginning point by which he builds everything else.
Does “god is dead” mean anything other than “life is war”? Only the history is missed, only the cause of the psychology that holds “If life is war, then life is shit” is lacking. “Life is war, and the legacy of humanity makes it so that you are not equipped to fight it. Here’s what I think you need to do if you are going to manage”…Not only manage but thrive, affirm, and embrace. Life is war and you must embrace it in all it’s glorious contradiction or be irrelevant and wretched.
Life is war, but that is not an excuse to hide from it, that is an invitation to dominate and thrive. When you discover this you are radically free…free from all outside goals and meaning, free to structure the chaos as you see fit and thus “fight the war” on your own terms. Don’t be mistaken though, “life is war” is a metaphor, an anthropomorphism, the very beginning of the structuring of the chaos. Amor Fati - life is war and free of goals, and this is both your freedom and your necessity.