Compassion towards animals - Nietzsche wept

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Compassion towards animals - Nietzsche wept

http://www.consciouschoice.com/issues/cc1412/fatigue1412.html

Nietzsche has been damned by his association with the Nazis, by the fact

that Hitler's elite used Nietzsche as justification for genocide, for world

conquest, for the cynically dishonest manipulation of their own people. Yet

in the end Nietzsche exposed his true feelings to world.

 

On a cold winter day in Turin, not long before being confined to the mental

institutions where he would spend the rest of his life, Friedrich Nietzsche

witnessed a man beating his donkey. An ass, a beast of burden, the lowest of

the low. A master punishing a piece of property, a thing that happened to be

alive and capable of feeling pain -- a scene that has been played out a

million times in the history of the world. Nietzsche's response was

immediate and dramatic: he rushed forward and embraced the ass, shielding it

from its master's blows, weeping and sobbing uncontrollably in a paroxysm of

spiritual agony.

 

The father of the Superman, in one of his last " sane " acts, gave way to

uncontrollable compassion and pity for the helpless and suffering creatures

of the world, embodied in this lowly donkey. In the end, the most

influential moral philosopher of modern times reaffirmed the value of

compassion: Nietzsche wept.

 

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Nietzsche was born in the Prussian province of Saxony on October 15th, 1844.

His father, a Lutheran minister, died a mere five years later. He spent his

childhood days surrounded by his mother, his sister, and two maiden aunts.

After attending a first rate boarding school (Schulpforta), he went on to

study classical philology at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. At 24

years of age, he earned a professorship at Basel, which is where his

brilliance came to be more widely noticed.

 

Nietzsche taught at Basel from 1869 to 1879, excluding a brief time in the

military. During this time, Nietzsche was the younger colleague of Jacob

Burckhardt and Franz Overbeck. His relationship with Overbeck solidified

with the two becoming lifelong friends and associates. Nietzsche's first

great work, The Birth of Tragedy, came in 1872, and was followed other works

.... most notably Human, All too Human in 1878. His brief military service

came during the Franco-Prussian war when Nietzsche left Basel and

volunteered as a medical orderly on active duty. His time in the military

was short and he returned to Basel in a state of shattered health. In 1879

he resigned from Basel, but instead of waiting to heal, he pushed headlong

into a more fervent schedule of writing than ever before.

 

While Nietzsche continuously kept in contact with his former colleagues, His

most productive years were after he left Basel, with the culmination of his

work (not to mention notoriety) coming with the writing of Thus Spoke

Zarathustra. For many years, Nietzsche had been closely associated with the

German composer, Richard Wagner. The extent of their relationship is

speculation at best, but at some point around 1887-1888, there was a deep

rift wedged between the two men. In 1889, less than two weeks after the

completion of Nietzsche contra Wagner, he broke down, insane. Accounts tell

of a frail Nietzsche draping himself around the neck of an old horse which

was being brutally beaten in the street. There are numerous possible

explanations for his madness, perhaps the most logical of which is that it

was a condition brought on by an advancing case of syphilis. Others have

postulated that the sheer weight of his thought and the gravity by which he

saw reality ultimately uncoiled even his most tightly wrapped intellect.

 

Most of his final years were spent in his sister Elisabeth's care. During

this time, Elisabeth grew more and more involved in the burgeoning

anti-semitic movements in Germany. While he wasted away, she collected and

edited many of his scattered notes and tailored them to suit her own

political agenda. The fruition of this was Nietzsche's altered works and

philosophy being a cornerstone in the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler's personal

mantra. In 1900, he died ... in 1901, Elisabeth published The Will to Power.