Showing Results for "fatalist"

See Also:

• a variation of fatalistic.

fatalist

American  

[feyt-l-ist] / ˈfeɪt l ɪst /

noun

1. a person who believes that all events are inevitable, so one’s choices and actions make no difference.

   Protest or not, the odds seem stacked against the likelihood of change, so should we be fatalists and go off to the beach instead?

2. Philosophy. a person who advances the idea that all events are naturally predetermined or subject to fate.

   Despite his teaching that class conflict is inevitable, observers contend that Marx was not a fatalist about historical change.

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adjective

1. Rare. fatalistic.

Etymology

Origin of fatalist

First recorded in 1640–50; fatal(ism) ( def. ) + -ist ( def. )

Explanation

A fatalist is someone who feels that no matter what he or she does, the outcome will be the same because it's predetermined. Fatalists share a sense of being powerless to change the world. In philosophy, a fatalist is someone who holds specific beliefs about life, destiny, and the future. Fatalists share the certainty that fate has already been laid out in front of them, and that they have no real control over what will happen. Sometimes fatalists have a flat or unemotional reaction even to frightening circumstances because of these beliefs. The Latin root is fatalis, "ordained by fate or destined."

Example Sentences

She cites Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” and Denis Diderot’s “Jacques the Fatalist and His Master” as “books that discuss how difficult it is to tell a story and yet intensify the desire to do it.”

From New York Times • Mar. 15, 2022

Something of the same richness can be found in Lyn Hejinian's Come October, it's the lake not the border, an extract from the long poem The Fatalist.

From The Guardian • Oct. 5, 2012

He is far too sensible a man," I thought, "to have become a Fatalist.

From Sylvie and Bruno by Carroll, Lewis

But, for all that, your highness is a Necessitarian, yet no Fatalist.

From Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II by Melville, Herman

It points a pretty little moral," said the Fatalist, "for it certainly proves that do what we will, we cannot get away from our natures.

From Violets and Other Tales by Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Moore