Friedrich Nietzsche wept and starred in one of the most moving scenes in the history of Western thinkers. It was 1889 and the philosopher lived in a house on Carlo Alberto Street in Turin, Italy. It was morning and Nietzsche was heading downtown when, suddenly, he came across a scene that changed his life forever.
He saw a coachman hitting his horse hard because the animal didn’t want to walk, the horse was completely exhausted. I didn’t have any strength left, despite this, the owner hit the animal with a whip to make it work, despite its fatigue.
- “Anyone who fights monsters must be careful.
- Because in doing so.
- They can also become a monster.
- When you look at an abyss for a long time.
- Will the abyss look at you too?”-Friedrich Nietzsche-.
Nietzsche was terrified by what he saw. After censuring the behavior of the driver, he approached the collapsed horse and hugged it, then she began to cry. Witnesses testified that Nietzsche whispered words that no one had heard in the horse’s ear. They say that the last words of the philosopher were: “Mother, I am an idiot. ” Then he lost consciousness and his mind collapsed.
Nietzsche’s dementia is a subject that has long intrigued many doctors and intellectuals, all kinds of speculations have been made about it, there are at least three versions of what actually happened that morning in Turin, the only truth is that the philosopher was never the same again.
Nietzsche remained speechless for 10 years until his death, has never been able to return to his rational life since the episode with the horse, police have been informed of the incident. The philosopher was arrested for disturbing public order, soon after he was taken to a psychiatric hospital, where he wrote letters with inconsistent phrases to two of his friends.
One of his former acquaintances took him to a hospice in Basel, Switzerland, where he remained for several years, one of the most lucid and intelligent men of the nineteenth century ended up trusting his mother and sister for almost everything. our knowledge has once again established direct contact with reality.
Has the company determined Nietzsche’s stock? Hug the horse and cry with him?However, the philosopher had been behaving surprisingly for a long time, the head of the house where he lived, for example, had said that he had heard him speak alone. He also said he sometimes danced naked in his room.
Some time ago he had become very carefree with his appearance and personal hygiene, those who knew him realized that his proud walk had been replaced by a careless march, he was no longer the same fluent thinker as before, spoke in a broken way and went from one subject to another.
At the psychiatric hospital he was losing his cognitive abilities, especially linguistics, sometimes aggressive and beating some of his peers, a few years earlier he had written several books that would highlight him as one of the best philosophers in history.
While many people see the horse episode as a mere manifestation of irrationality, the product of mental illness, there are also those who see a less random, deeper and more conscious meaning. Milan Kundera, in “The unbearable lightness of being”, takes up the scene of Nietzsche kissing the horse and crying next to him.
For Kundera, the words Nietzsche whispered in the animal’s ear were a request for forgiveness, in his opinion he did so in the name of all mankind, because of the cruelty with which human beings treat other living beings, because we have become his enemies. and we put you at our service.
Nietzsche has never been characterized by being an animal advocate or having a special sensitivity to nature, however, no doubt the episode of abuse had a great impact on the philosopher, this horse was the last being with which he had real and effective contact. More than with the animal itself, it was in his suffering that he found identification that went far beyond the immediate, ultimately, an identification with life.
Nietzsche was not well known to the general public of the time, although he was a master of excellent reputation, his last years were fundamentally miserable, his sister distorted several of his texts to coincide with the ideas of German Nazism, Nietzsche could not do anything about it. He plunged into a deep sleep from which he did not wake up until his death in 1900.