It sounds like a rhetorical question, but astrologists would answer yes. The precise time and place of your nativity carries at least as much weight as whether your parents were smokers, there was mental illness in the family history, or you lived below the poverty line. The configuration of the planets on that day can sweep aside such earthly factors. And after all, some people do deviate from the predicted path, be it transcending their humble beginnings, or dropping out of the aristocracy. Despite your empirical origins, your star can rise or fall.
So astrology conjures an alternative future, unconstrained by social, economic or medical determinism. Typically, following horoscopes gets written off as superstition, but you could argue it’s about dreaming, optimism and a sense of the miraculous in the face of the leaden default of real life. It’s a love of chance and of that crack in the world where the stars shine through and cast you in their silver light.
It’s also a love of fate: Nietzsche dubbed it ‘amor fati’ and threw his arms around it. For all his raging scepticism, he strove to arrive at a point where he could say yes to everything that fate would fling at him. But Nietzsche was a special case, and this acquiescence in fate harbours danger. Believing the stars will transform your life in the future can make you dangerously tolerant of suffering in the present. Belief and vulnerability go together. To the stars you outsource your destiny, and that’s not just abjuring responsibility for your life: it’s also placing you in an exceptionally passive position that raises your threshold of pain while you wait for things to improve, and for the horoscope’s predictions of wonder to come true.
In other words, the flipside of every dreamer is the sufferer, and reading horoscopes means enlarging your capacity for disappointment. What’s the alternative? To write your own horoscope for the week, and then do your best to make it come true.
Robert Rowland Smith’s ‘Breakfast with Socrates: the Philosophy of Everyday Life’ is published by Profile Books.
