It is impossible to understand Nietzsche’s attitude toward pity if you don’t understand his counter-ideal: joying-with.It is tempting to interpret all of Nietzsche’s affirmations of aggression, hostility, and devil’s advocacy as Nietzsche’s affirmations of his own highest ideals – as a complement to his own pitilessness. I see his presentation of evil as both necessary and, from a certain altitude, as a form of good (or from a certain depth, pre-good) as “justice with open eyes”, a redemption of evil. His renunciation of pity is not indifference to the pain of others, but rather a refusal to indulge in the expedient of keeping another company in misery, and increasing the amount of misery in the world.Some passages:

Fellow rejoicing, not fellow suffering, makes the friend.

*

The first thought of the day. – The best way to begin each day well is to think upon awakening whether we could not give at least one person pleasure on this day. If this practice could be accepted as a substitute for the religious habit of prayer, our fellow men would benefit by this change.

*

The serpent that stings us means to hurt us and rejoices as it does so; the lowest animal can imagine the pain of others. But to imagine the joy of others and to rejoice at it is the highest privilege of the highest animals, and among them it is accessible only to the choicest exemplars: thus a rare humanum: so that there have been philosophers who have denied the existence of joying with.

*

… And, although I will keep quiet here about some things, I do not wish to keep quiet about my morality, which tells me: Live in seclusion so that you are able to live for yourself! Live in ignorance of what seems most important to your age! Lay at least the skin of three hundred years between you and today! And let the clamour of today, the noise of war and revolutions, be but a murmur to you. You will also want to help but only those whose distress you properly understand because they share with you one suffering and one hope – your friends – and only in the way you help yourself. I want to make them braver, more persevering, simpler, more full of gaiety. I want to teach them what is today understood by so few least of all by these preachers of compassion: to share not pain, but joy!

Nietzsche is one of the most benevolent and morally expansive men who ever lived, and if you read him with that understanding, he reads very differently. The experience will persuade and change you.