This economic and psychopolitical constellation saw the reappearance of the Roman goddess of luck within the horizon of European interests, as she was capable as no other figure in the ancient pantheon of making a pact with the surge of entrepreneurial religiosity among merchants and seafarers. The return of Fortuna corresponded to the world feeling of chance ontology, embodied in the opportunism of Machiavelli, the essayism of Montaigne and the experimentalism of Bacon. The neo-fatalism of late Shakespeare likewise belongs to the characteristic self-utterances of the age that, in its gloomier moments, perceives humans as competition-infected, jealousy-blinded, failure-scarred risk-takers; here the actors on the world stage appear as balls with which illusory powers, malign genies, money spirits and greed demons play their games.
Fortuna appears everywhere as the goddess of globalization par excellence: she not only produces herself as the eternally ironic equilibrist perched on her orb, but also teaches humans to consider life as a whole a game of chance in which the winners have no cause for boasting and the losers no cause for complaint. Boethius, who laid the foundations for medieval speculations about Fortuna in the sixth century in his book The Consolation of Philosophy, and was still a source of inspiration for the philosophies of happiness in the Renaissance, already let his goddess reveal the premises for existence on the wheel:
The power that I wield comes naturally to me; this is my perennial sport. I turn my wheel on its whirling course, and take delight in switching the base to the summit, and the summit to the base. So mount upward, if you will, but on condition that you do not regard yourself as ill-treated if you plummet down when my humour so demands and takes its course.1
This was mostly taken by stability-infatuated Middle Ages as a vanitas warning; thus they saw the temperamental goddess as a demon of harmful changeability, while the incipient Modern Age suspected that in the image of the revolving wheel of fate lay a metaphysics of chance which largely corresponded to its own motives. In the four basic positions of the wheel of fortune – ascending/sitting enthroned/sinking/lying – the new era recognized not only the basic risks of the vita activa, but also the typical stages of entrepreneurial fortune.
Fortuna was no longer only depicted with her wheel, however, but equally with maritime emblems such as the swelling sail and especially the rudder, which was her oldest attribute along with the orb; it shows that luck is not only coincidental, but also due to individual diligence. Antiquity had already associated luck with seafaring, and the Modern Age could not help reinforcing this connection. One maritime symbol it did add was that of the dice, whose falling – cadentia – generated the concept of risk-taking, and thus one of the key concepts of the modern world: chance. The falling dice are in play whenever the likelihood of success or failure is reckoned. One can go so far as to identify, in the refreshed Fortuna idea of the Renaissance, the approaching philosophical success of proto-liberalism, in which the positions of the wheel of fortune would correspond directly to the ordeals of the market. In success, selection by coincidence comes before all subjectivity of control or method. What is liberalism in philosophical terms if not the emancipation of the accidental? And what is the new entrepreneurship if not a practice for correcting one's luck?
It is one of the more profound thoughts of the sixteenth century that alongside the hereditary nobility, which had been on top since mythical times, and the nobility of officials, which had begun to make itself indispensable in the service of early Modern Age states, it already conferred the necessary qualifications on the anarchic nobility of the future, the nobility of luck; this alone emerged from the womb of Fortuna as the true child of the Modern Age. This chance nobility would prove the recruiting ground for the prominent figures of the globalization age – a society of individuals who had become rich, famous and favoured in their sleep, and who never quite understood what had carried them upwards. The airy children of Wotan, from Fortunatus to Felix Krull, are, alongside the entrepreneurs and artists, the most legitimate offspring of the luck-blessed Modern Age. This was not only the age in which the wretched attempted, with varying success, to work their way up from their misery; it was also the great time of fortunate natures who sit with light heads and light hands with the sibyls and queens, devoting themselves to integral consumption, including the flight of birds and the lands of the stars. What else should they do, the effortless winners, but dine without remorse at the ‘table d’hôte of chance’?2
It was Nietzsche who would go on to coin the formula for this release of the accidental: ‘ “Lord Chance” – that is the oldest nobility in the world.’3 The gesture of counting oneself among this nobility and wearing the die on one's coat of arms brings forth a new justification for life that Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, called aesthetic theodicy. In the Modern Age, emancipated luck gazes up at a sky unknown to the neediness of old. ‘Over all things stands the Heaven Accident’4 – a post-metaphysically enlightened elite audience is supposed to hear this as the improved Good News. The concern was a sky that vaulted a liberated immanence, far removed from any retribution in the hereafter. The sky of the Modern Age was the playing field for chance's throws of the dice. Would Nietzsche have resented a reminder that in imperial Rome, Fortuna was primarily the goddess of slaves and unemployed plebeians who depended entirely on chance alms and the generous moods of the rich?