Personal accounts of Nietzsche represent him as a considerate man, someone who frequently displayed kindness to others. In fact, the immediate trigger for his insanity was to witness a horse being cruelly flogged.
Checkmate! I was literally moments away from asking you about this episode in his life. I had been pondering how to phrase the question, just when I read your remarks above concerning it.
Nietzsche seems to have been much more of a soft-hearted guy than his literary works let on, although glimmers of this humanitarian side to his character do show through on occasion in his writings, for instance
The Gay Science, 13: "
Certainly the state in which we hurt others is rarely as agreeable, in an unadulterated way, as that in which we benefit others; it is a sign that we are still lacking power, or it shows a sense of frustration in the face of this poverty." One notable scholar, after criticizing Nietzsche's philosophy of power, called the man himself a "
genius of the heart"—referring to the compassionate conduct of his life "
Pity," Nietzsche had wrote in one of his private letters, "
has always been the major source of problems in my life," and he went on to admit and grieve over "
a soft spot that would have made any magnanimous Greek burst into laughter."
Nietzsche recognized that "
benefiting and [also] hurting others are [each] ways of exercising one’s power upon others". In other words, a true '
master' who has found the way to self-actualization knows that it is a sign of true power to be able to benefit rather than hurt other people. Simply put, Nietzsche was not the forefather of Social Darwinism, evidently, because he advocated non-harm as the higher path to power. Why do we get into the habit of being magnanimous or courteous to others? Because it
feels good, it literally
fills-us-up. Nietzsche argues that this is what it means to feel empowered, to be truly powerful. What about harmful acts? Nietzsche explains that the way of harm and cruelty
“is a sign that we are still lacking power, or it shows a sense of frustration in the face of this poverty.” We cause pain to other people when we feel that we have a
lack of power. This is what it means to be a petty tyrant, a Putin or Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot.
I really appreciate his insightful analysis in this respect.
Nevertheless, there is still a strange mismatch between his more extreme ethical positions in lieu of '
master morality,' and the way he actually conducted himself in his private life, which as you note is striking for his personal gentleness and aversion to cruelty. And yet, he came away with a few rather chilling statements like the following, which suggest the opposite. From the Kaufmann translation of
The Antichrist ss.2 (I'm being careful with this now!):
"What is good? - All that heightens the feeling of power, power itself in man. What is bad - All that proceeds from weakness. What is Happiness? - The feeling that power increases - that a resistance is overcome. Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency (Virtuoso). The weak and ill-constituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy. And we shall help them do so. What is more harmful than any vice? - Active sympathy for the ill-constituted and weak - Christianity..."
This was not, contrary to appearances, philosophical sanction for Nazi-style involuntary euthanasia - 'mercy killing' - of so-called 'degenerate' people, before it became a thing at the dawn of the 20th century. He wasn't saying that the sick and weak should be gassed or lined up and shot.
However we cannot excuse this kind of reproachable talk, because he is very clear here that we should not have sympathy for these people or spend resources on them, rather we should leave them to die. In other words, don't
actively exterminate them (like Hitler later would) but don't
actively help them either (like a charity or social welfare system would) because that would be detrimental to the strong and healthy. It is hard not to view this as unacceptably callous and quite hypocritical, given that Nietzsche did not himself actually follow this code of conduct in his episode with the flogged horse.
But it was his attempt to revive the Graeco-Roman elitism. In his
Republic (375 B.C.), even Plato (in the guise of his mentor Socrates) had proclaimed that the government should care for the health of the strong, while the weak should be left to die and those with little intelligence should be killed
Socrates:[9] These two practices [legal and medical] will treat the bodies and minds of those of your citizens who are naturally well endowed in these respects; as for the rest, those with a poor physical constitution will be allowed to die, and those with irredeemably rotten minds will be put to death. Right?
Glaucon: Yes, we’ve shown that this is the best course for those at the receiving end of the treatment as well as for the community. (409e-410a)
Now, Nietzsche was explicitly reacting against Jesus's "
active sympathy for the unhealthy and weak" and in favour of this earlier mindset i.e.
‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35 for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me...Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.' (Matthew 25:31-46)
12 Then Jesus said to his host, "When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. 13 But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, 14 and you will be blessed because they cannot repay you". (Luke 14:12-24)
In
Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes of this that:
“… they [Christians] are likewise united in their religion of sympathy for whatever feels, lives, suffers (down to the animal, up to God — the excessive notion of ‘pity for God’ belongs in a democratic Age), they are all united in the cries and impatience of pity, in deadly hatred against all suffering. In general, in the almost feminine inability to sit watching, to let suffering happen… they are United in their faith of the morality of communal pity, as if it were morality itself, the height, the Achieved height of humanity, the sole hope for the future, the solace of the present, the great Redemption of all guilt from the past: — they are all united in their faith in the community as Redeemer, which is to say, in the herd, in themselves…” (BGE #202)
Yet when he saw the weak, powerless horse being abused...was his response to this more akin to his attitude in
Antichrist: "
The weak and ill-constituted shall perish And we shall help them do so," or to Jesus in the synoptic gospels, with regards to actively showing solidarity with the weak in their suffering? Did he not succumb to that "
almost feminine inability to sit watching, to let suffering happen" which he had so vehemently condemned in Christians?
I read somewhere, can't (unfortunately) recall quite where, that Nietzsche's slide into absence of mind and psychological deterioration following the sight of that horse being badly abused, might have had something to do with a belated existential crisis over the fundamental disconnect between his 'master morality' and his own conscience, which was still (basically) informed by Christian clemency for the weak.
I think this literally drove him to a mental breakdown, because he realized in that moment that he couldn't live by the 'Plato-like', ancient Greek elitist values he had espoused. He was living a lie, essentially. He didn't want to "
help" the poor horse to "
perish" by refraining from standing in solidarity with it. He exhibited the Christ-like response to seeing the weak oppressed by the powerful, not the Antichrist one.
Nietzsche had proclaimed that modern ideas "
of equality and sympathy for all that suffers" (
Beyond Good and Evil 44) were but the latest manifestation of Christian ethical values, originating in a slave rebellion in morality that the modern world, after the death of god, had to reject in favour of the master, noble morality of the aristocratic Graeco-Roman elites whom the early Christians had objected to.
But when it came to the bit, Nietzsche felt overwhelming sympathy for the suffering horse. He was really at heart, instinctively, still a believer in the values of Jesus he'd longed railed against, and that realization destroyed him, because if he couldn't live by his own project then how could he possibly expect anyone else to do so?
His solution for the post-death of God world, to stave off nihilism with a revival of aristocratic values to fill the vacuum left behind by Christ's ethics, was dealt a body blow on a personal level to him and he therefore lost the will to go on. He had failed to protect the Turin horse from its abuser, despite trying with his arms around it, and so he was tipped over the edge of madness (he must have had health or other issues already predisposing him, like syphilis) and started declaring himself to be Jesus Christ, Buddha, Napoleon and other famous figures. And so he was sent to the asylum for the rest of his days.
It was a pitiful end.
We'll never know for sure if the horse story circulated far-and-wide soon after his death was the whole truth or not, but it sure does give food for thought and has a certain irony and poetic justice to it.
