Esteemed Fire Philosophers,

We recently published Dale’s fictional essay about an encounter between Nietzsche and the Buddhist logician Nagarjuna.

And while we all love Zarathustra’s dense and archaic language, I thought the essay could be made more relatable — less imposingly and potentially overwhelmingly prophetic — with a few aides to help visualize the encounter. I garner much of this intuition based on what my own students tell me, they of the youtube generation who have learned to think and read with multiple modalities and find “mere” text daunting. So in some ways, this is a purely rhetorical problem I’m sensitive to. Dale, meanwhile, is summoning all his Grace and forbearance by allowing me to share the video enhanced version of his essay; he’s skeptical as to whether the visuals will aide or distract from the serious issues the three characters discuss. Therefore please consider the video above as an experiment in form. This is my — Krzysztof’s — first effort at making a video-essay like this, so please also forgive all the stupendously clunky mistakes you will see and hear — I promise I’ll get better in future video-essay iterations (should there be any demand for them). Therefore feedback from you would be immensely valuable — both on the narrative itself and the new accompanying visuals. Was this experiment a failure or should I continue to try to develop my video-essay chops? Among the three versions — text only, audio, audio-visual — which of the three was most accessible and clear to you?

And who among the three characters makes the best argument? With whom do you most relate? That’s what we most want to hear about!

Thank you for your continued support as we continue to probe the question How to Live from inside the belly of the beast.