I started a new “Amor Fati” theme in my wiki, and was struck again with the idea that Martin Buber could have saved Nietzsche’s life.

This, however, does not mean that Buber could have told Nietzsche something that Nietzsche did not already know. It means that Buber could have gone to him… entered and shared Nietzsche’s world with him. He could have liberated Nietzsche from the plain-sight solitary confinement that finally crushed him, which Nietzsche always knew was fated to crush him, which he chose as his fate. Nietzsche would not abandon his cell:, the exit was sealed, but the entrance was open.

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The moral thrust of Nietzsche’s philosophy:

Following his liberation by skepticism, and subsequently his liberation from skepticism, newly freed to affirm and to will, a philosopher “goes under”: he immersively, forgetfully, participates in everyday life for the sake of learning.

The purpose of his learning at first appears to be to elevate himself as an individual to ever-new visions of life, but soon (and too late) the philosopher’s philosophy brings him to the realization that the substance and purpose of his vision extends far beyond the individual and individualism. However, this overcoming of individualism is, above all, not a retreat to contemporary collectivism. He finds another vision of both the individual and the collective that radically transfigures the meaning of both. That vision, from which the world is seen – both as a whole and in part – in a very new and better way, is height.

(A note on depth and height: The dimension of philosophical depth is existential and transcendental. It has to do with being, and being is outside the domain of memory. We cannot remember a state of being, per se, essentially; we only recall it. We call the state back to mind through recollecting the images in which the being was originally reflected. To know being, one must actually be there. “Going under” means being under, and being under means forgetting, no longer being at the height, no longer seeing from the height. All one can take with him is the mere surface fact of the height, a conceptual image of the height that at best serves to orient our movement, like a map, driving directions, or snapshots of landmarks.)

So, in going under, essential height is sacrificed for a time for the sake of comprehensive knowledge, which includes most of all knowledge of the “inward experience” of every “elsewhere”, of limitation and error. The pursuit of knowledge of the inward experience of “elsewhere” is sublimated justice: the capacity to experience all things as necessary, innocent and ultimately beautiful, which is what is meant by Amor Fati. The fully-seen, fully-affirmed inner-elsewhere is the knowledge acquired in the depths and carried back to the height. The learning of many kinds of being and many kinds of overcoming is the purpose of the forgetful participation in the everyday, but this is also another stage; the overcoming points to an eventual enduring overcoming: a stabilization of height.

Nietzsche said repeatedly that his own greatest danger was pity. Knowing solitude and the experience of suffering alone, he found it excruciating to know someone was suffering, much less suffering in solitude and he was overwhelmed by the desire to relieve that suffering.

His self-prescription, after several personal catastophes, was finally to go under only with his mind, but to keep his heart bound to the height. What does this mean, practically? It means that one must overcome the notion that the ideal of pity – of “suffering-with” – is the highest ideal, and to recognize a higher compassion, which Nietzsche called “joying-with“: “Fellow rejoicing, not fellow suffering, makes the friend.”

Joying-with can appear to be a form of detachment, but it is a detachment only from a reflexive emotional response that undermines the long-term good. It is the opposite of indifference.