"Is he the founder of a new community? Many rise upon hearing his name, but they do not come together since everyone finds a different and only a single star in this blessed night sky as his own..." (Martin Buber on Nietzsche, 1900)
A Word About Nietzsche and the Values of Life, by Martin Buber
There have always existed people who cannot be included in any classification or designated by a group name, because any naming does them violence: we sense that each name fails to express especially what is essential about them. Far too many spheres of life intersect in them, and they are the enunciation and dawn of far too many divergent premonitions and inklings to be locked in one conceptual chamber along many others. They are large and undefinable like life itself, whose apostles they are. They seem to announce a future form of development for the human species. In their essence, they exceed our language. In their longing, they exceed our powers. Friedrich Nietzsche is to be counted among them.
Is he a “philosopher”? He did not create a uniformly constructed system of thought. Is he an artist? He did not create shaped objects. Is he a psychologist? His deepest knowledge is of the future of souls. Is he a poet? Only if and when we think of poets as they are thought to have existed once: “Seers, who tell us something about what might possibly happen,” who “let us feel in advance something of the virtues of the future.” Is he the founder of a new community? Many rise upon hearing his name, but they do not come together since everyone finds a different and only a single star in this blessed night sky as his own, and everyone does not reach general insights of the kind that unite people but instead finds his most authentic strength activated. His deepest intention was not to communicate and propagate his own thoughts, but instead to elicit and transform into moving energy the most personal and productive traits and most hidden treasures of everyone’s individuality. He called the innermost purpose of his work the increase of general fertility.
And yet, he is not one of the advocates, the Socratic individuals, whose very best dimensions are revealed only in the descendants of their thought. He is a creator. Never before in our age have such rich and full words been coined for the most painful secrets and the wildest dreams of thinking people. Ideals that previously had only been able to live in the thin, refined air of the highest mountaintops have entered through him into human interactions and into man’s impoverished language, born of bodily and primitive needs, where they have begun to shine only more wonderfully. Just as a sculptor places his hand, trembling with a certain order to form, on the soft, shapeless sculpting clay, this emissary of life placed his blessed and gifted hand on the longing, searching, and struggling of our time, where it was shaped into something visible.
For he was an emissary of life. An apostle, or perhaps only a baptizer and herald. He did not proclaim his own existence but his longing. His critics have said this often enough (he himself frequently expresses it: “Where our deficiencies are, there our enthusiasm also unfolds”). This golden strength of his desire, which created something real out of what he was not, makes him only more charming for us. The fact that the sick person taught a new form of health (“a stronger, wittier, tougher, bolder, funnier one”), that the quiet thought-poet given over to reflecting on the innermost things, glorified the will to power and the rebirth of the life of the instincts, this seems to us the crystallization of our own tragedy. We learn to love him like a near and far friend in distress, who, like us, needs bread and medicine, and who, like the creative friend, is always ready to give away a completed world.
He arrived in an age of smallness. The relation of people to the world had become small, pathetically small, and man’s relation to himself and to his own becoming had become rotten to its deepest core. He fights with the century’s finest and most noble blade against the reigning metaphysics and morality, because he saw them as tools and symptoms of a life in decline. He uncovered the weak mendacity of our values and truths. But the tip of his raised sword already glowed purple in the sunrise. He found fresh and fertile seeds in ancient royal tombs; from dead cultures he dragged into the light the elements of new formations. In the confused and infertile business of the present, he gathered what is real and capable of procreating. Before our eyes, he erected the statue of the heroic individual who creates himself and beyond himself. In the place of a thin and weak-loined altruism, he placed the egoism of his own development and generous virtue; in the place of pity, the capacity to rejoice alongside and act in concert with others. To the acolytes of the afterworld, he taught the lofty meaning of the earth and of the human body. He confronted the ideals of a comfortable and painless life with a life amid storms and dangers, whose powerful beauty is only intensified by pain. Instead of the happiness of the greatest number, he taught that the purpose of humanity is the production of great men and great works. He presented a great antagonist to the God of the world’s beginning: the becoming God to whose development we can contribute, the hoped-for result of future evolutions.
When he departed, life had become greater and more worthy of living.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Buber
Buber on Nietzsche article: https://archive.ph/fN574