Nietzsche introduces amor fati, a notion commonly taken to mean ‘the love of fate.’ Yet this seemingly simple formulation conceals at least two serious paradoxes. First, fate includes suffering, loss, negativity, even events we would rather not remember. Can such a fate genuinely be loved—the problem of what might be called unlovable fate? Second, if loving fate requires seeing it as beautiful or making it beautiful, does this not risk loving a beautification rather than fate itself—a kind of ‘distorted fantasy’?
This paper takes these paradoxes as its point of departure and raises a more fundamental issue: the gap between will and love. Engaging critically with Béatrice Han-Pile, Tom Stern, and Guy Elgat, Heewon argues that amor fati cannot be reduced either to a voluntary resolution or to a form of divine love (agape). Instead, it must be reconsidered in relation to Nietzsche’s concept of error.
Focusing primarily on The Gay Science, Heewon begins from the premise that human cognition operates under essentially erroneous conditions. The more pressing question is how, within these unavoidable distortions, life might nevertheless become affirmable. This paper reinterprets amor fati not as self-deceptive beautification, but as an aesthetic–ontological stance that renders life beautiful and affirmable under the erroneous conditions of existence. In this sense, if amor fati is not to collapse into self-deception, it must presuppose the courage to face reality, the capacity for discernment, and what Nietzsche calls an intellectual conscience.
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About the Speaker:
Heewon Seo is a Ph.D. researcher in Philosophy and Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London. Her research examines the question, “What makes humans human in the digital age?” and seeks to answer it through explorations of paradoxes, focusing primarily on the works of Levinas, Derrida and Nietzsche. Her recent work engages women philosophers and writers such as Donna Haraway, Anne Carson, and Simone Weil, bringing their ideas into dialogue through her ongoing work on paradox.