Nietzsche’s Love of Fate and Life’s Eternal Recurrence

  From The Philosopher CXIIII No. 1 Spring 2026

The Norns, painting by Alois Delug

(Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto)

By Keith Tidman


“Love of fate”—or amor fati, as Frederich Nietzsche referred to it in The Gay Science (1882) and later books such as Ecce Homo (Behold the Man, 1888)—means not just tolerating but full-on embracing all that happens in your life. The good and the bad alike, and everything in-between, with no exceptions. The ultimate test being that, as a powerful gesture of unconditional affirmation, you would happily sign on the dotted line to repeat the whole thing again, and not once but eternally. Nietzsche referred to this notion as “eternal recurrence,” further developing and rebranding the imagery in his magnum opus Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85) as the “ring of recurrence.” And so, to set the stage, Nietzsche’s metaphysical thought experiment features a hypothetical demon who asks if you would accept living the same life over and over again, unchanged into the past or going all the way forward, for eternity. 

Serving as the central pillar of Nietzsche’s thinking on love of fate and life’s eternal recurrence, the demon’s provocative challenge is worth noting more fully: 

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence….’ ”

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or … would you have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine?’” (The Gay Science, in an aphorism tellingly titled “The Greatest Weight”). 

The gauntlet was thus thrown down, for anyone who dares to pick it up. The idea being that if you would accept such recurrence, and to do so with unconditional fondness and anticipation, it demonstrates that your love of fate is indeed authentic. But, the tough act of getting to such heightened authenticity calls on us to attain the existential ideal of what Nietzsche called the Übermensch, interpreted as overman or superman (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). Transitioning to this overman status requires overcoming human shortcomings and developing ever closer to the archetype of a person, unreservedly willing and able to face down drawbacks without wilting. This entails welcoming destiny on its terms, resisting impulses, and channeling self-mastery, echoing such Stoic thinkers as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. 

Nietzsche’s Übermensch is thus an evolved, transcendent form of humanity that eagerly takes on life’s challenges, viewing adversity as an essential catalyst for harnessing purposefulness. The intended target is those who lazily take comfort in naïve mythological promises of an afterlife. To these, Nietzsche urges, “I entreat you my brethren, remain true to the Earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of supra-terrestrial hopes.” This entreaty being part and parcel of Nietzsche introducing the Übermensch to us, laying down this succinct aspirational marker: “Man is something to be overcome.” 

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche went further on this matter of turning one’s back on otherworldly spirituality, having a fictional “madman” proclaim, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” A pronouncement that has echoed through the ensuing one and a half centuries, for some people leading to indignant consternation. 

The declaration regarding God’s death was, however, less an endorsement of atheism and more about signalling that humanity should move beyond the traditional role of Judeo-Christian prescriptions. Nietzsche’s announcement is made in the context of the onset of the era of Enlightenment, which was bringing to the fore the natural sciences, mathematics, and philosophical rationalism as means to acquire knowledge and understanding. And in so doing, replacing religions’ historical hold on truth and reality. In short, there was a gaping hole in knowledge that needed to be filled through inquiry and inventiveness, a vacuum that required a call for a new dominant authority.

A further aspect of the bold “God is dead” claim was the ascendancy of the Übermensch as the “poet of his life” and “master of his own fate,” a world in which the creator and the created are united, where individuals fashion their own values rather than accepting those already chiseled in stone by religious (in particular, Judeo-Christian) society. Love of fate and life’s recurrence thus become intertwined in hopeful attainment of this ideal, part of Nietzsche’s “formula for greatness in a human being.” A “revaluation of values,” as he tersely framed the task at hand, necessary to avoid descent into apathy, cynicism, despair, and meaninglessness. 

It is a mark of Nietzsche’s influence on the intellectual community worldwide that the poet W.B. Yeats was swayed by his thinking on reality and human behavior. Yeats even wrote a poem entitled ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ in 1933 that echoed the Nietschean bond between the eternal recurrence of one’s life, ecstasies and anguishes alike, and a temperament rooted in amor fati. It runs: 

“I am content to live it all again and yet again. I am content to follow to its source every event in action or in thought…. When such as I cast out remorse so great a sweetness flows into the breast…. We are blessed by everything, everything we look upon is blessed.” 

An absolutely Nietzschean affirmation of a life lived, to be freely welcomed back to the existential stage over and over to no end.

Love of fate is the instrument by which someone might push back against nihilistic instincts that can otherwise emerge from the frenzied, disordered world in which we might find ourselves immersed. Where hydra-headed purposelessness might gnaw at one’s thinking from time to time. A meaninglessness and even absurdism that seem to have haunted Nietzsche himself, such as the traumatic death of his father and younger brother very early in his life; chronic physical conditions, including crushing migraines, insomnia, and eye ailments that severely impaired his vision (making it impossible to continue his university teaching position); intense feelings of isolation, worsened by rejection by a paramour; bare monetary endowments, living off a slim pension; absence in his lifetime of academic or professional recognition, his books manifesting low popularity; and spending the last decade of his life in a mental asylum, fighting very real psychological demons.

It was in the midst of these physical and psychological challenges that Nietzsche chose to advocate a higher order, which he called the “will-to-power,” a concept he developed across his writings, convinced that it was this inspirational force that fueled all change in the universe and shaped human behavior. Nietzsche was heavily influenced in this by the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles, who described a cyclic universe necessarily defined by divergently interacting forces, where one force unites things and one rips them asunder. The world that Empedocles envisioned best functions in the presence of struggles, fundamentally conceptually inspiring Nietzsche’s will-to-power. The will-to-power is, accordingly, a force that leads people to seek to do more than just survive, but rather to thrive and grow through active struggle, driven by the “desire for the overcoming of resistance,” advancing self-mastery, fashioning values, being creative, and becoming stronger. That is, Nietzsche’s version of it is as the flourishing of life and the overcoming of obstacles and not mere aggression. Based on this will-to-live, the challenge of amor fati, from the standpoint of mindset adopted from the get-go, is one of intentionality—to move beyond merely indifferent acceptance to the animated rejoicing of all good and bad events that would fill a cyclically recurring life. 

That being said, although Nietzsche viewed the will-to-power as foundational to all human behavior—a force for creativity and self-empowerment—he believed that people’s instinct to achieve such power often becomes “masked”, as he puts it. That is, the will-to-power is not uncommonly hidden, disguised by the pretense of virtues claimed to be supposedly higher on the pecking order. Things like altruism, compassion, asceticism, love, modesty, and selflessness. This fallback to the act of ranking virtues requires people to peel off the shell of formal moral creeds to uncover the real motivating drivers of human decisions and deeds, exposing the resort to these putative virtues as weaknesses, and even duplicitous means for the more vulnerable, weaker ‘herd’ to reach out for power to its own advantage, through the likes of guilt and shame. 

However, it is important to remember that although the heritage of the concepts embedded in amor fati is rooted in ancient Greco-Roman Stoicism, the actual Latin phrase was popularised by Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. Specifically, the first aphorism of book four of The Gay Science in part has Nietzsche declaring this: “Amor fati: Let that be my love henceforth!” The foundational philosophical threads associated with the phrase accordingly appeared many centuries earlier, embracing everything that happens as necessary, reflecting what they considered the rational, divinely guided order of the universe, contributing to the good of the whole. Two examples of Stoic thinking on the love of fate follow, mirroring the strata of society: one of an emperor privileged by his position’s trappings, and one of a crippled slave. In their own ways, both are challenged to grow, to avoid wilting in the same state of ignorance of life’s meaning as they were born into. 

Some 1,700 years before Nietzsche, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius captured the concept of love of fate in his own metaphorical way, meditating in his journal: “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.” Here, the blazing fire represents a determined, strongly engaged mind; the flame and brightness represent understanding, durability, and self-mastery; and the fuel thrown into the fire is adversity and hindrances. The second example of Stoic thinking comes via the crippled slave Epectitus. Who, despite his forbidding life of adversity, declared: 

“Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.” 

A defiance of the unconvincing, implausible pretense that life’s pain and suffering did not hurt. 

Despite such examples and observations, Nietzsche censured the Stoic positions as a “slave morality” that stymies people’s energy and creative instincts; despairingly blunting one’s feelings and natural appetites; and primacy of moral righteousness over exhilaration. Examining these ethical and metaphysical issues under a microscope, Nietzsche rejected what he saw as an over-conformance to an uncaring, forbidding nature (“living according to nature,” something that Nietzsche labeled “tyranny”) as a substitute for human ideals. And pointed disapprovingly to what he regarded as misplaced trust in divine destiny. In fact, he went so far as to reproach the “Stoic way of life [as] petrification.” Yet, even in the face of this biting Nietzschean criticism of their beliefs, I think that Stoics, such as Epictetus, still fully lived the concept of amor fati, by not just tolerating but self-affirmingly treasuring what happens in life. What one might regard as positive fatalism. 

Nietzsche instead granted the Epicureans his (at least qualified) endorsement, for their espousal of life’s gratifications and rejection of an ordered, purposeful, designed world rooted in teleology. As well as agreement with their rejection of a transcendental, spiritual otherworldliness and of supernaturalism. He also shared their rejection of ethical standards based in religious (especially Judeo-Chrisitan) doctrine; and similar rejection of overarching nihilism. Whereas he admired their ability to maintain a blissful disposition even in the face of discomfort. Both Nietzsche and the Epicureans cherished personal comradeship and simple indulgences over conceit, pride, and immoderate gratification. To this extent, Nietzsche approved the idealisation of the metaphorical Garden of Epicurus, a community for the “heroic-idyllic” withdrawal of like-minded colleagues. Where they could embrace serenity, sloughing off the addling upheaval of daily politics and leaving behind what Nietzsche called the “desert” of nihilism, and focus instead on the study and sharing of philosophical ideas through conversation with nonconforming freethinkers. 

In both these Stoic and Epicurean stories, there is a hard-to-overlook element at the center of amor fati that allows space for causal determinism. That is, present and future events and states are seen as contingent on the coral-like accumulation of prior events and states, from the cosmic origins up to the present. Our not knowing which, from among literally innumerable paths, the initial conditions traverse, causing this and causing that to happen next and next. Today, we would add to that churning broth of cause-and-effect antecedent events the irresistible, uninterruptable laws of nature that both describe and govern the universe, to account for what happens now and into the indefinite future. However, both schools nonetheless looked upon fate and providence as compatible with still holding people morally and legally responsible for their decisions and behaviors, essential for society to avoid the disorderliness and disharmony that rendering libertarian choice as illusory would lead us.

So, to complete the circle, if the events or states in our lives are determined by fate—such that if any action transpired, it is impossible it could not have happened; nor could it have happened differently than it did—Nietzsche’s amor fati is perhaps the wisest recourse. It instructs that we ought to embrace rather than lament or resist fate, and not to bother with damning the demon. And by sincerely loving what providence hands us, even in a world that might leach questions challenging life’s meaning and purpose, our relationship with life is strengthened. The latter being what constitutes real freedom. We are thereby empowered to reject the prickly shards of uncertainty or of dampening weariness, and instead to clasp onto life as it happens: to love fate unconditionally and experience life as an infinitely recurrent loop of goings-on stamped indelibly onto life’s fabric.