#philosophy
Compassion vs Cruelty.
On a fateful day in Turin, Italy, in 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed a horse being brutally beaten by its owner.
The philosopher was overcome with compassion as he watched the horse’s eyes plead for mercy. Nietzsche embraced the horse, tears streaming down his face, and whispered words of comfort into its ear.
The horse’s anguished eyes seemed to hold a mirror to the philosopher’s own soul, reflecting the darkest depths of human cruelty. As he embraced the horse, Nietzsche’s mind shattered under the weight of that reflection, plunging him into madness from which he never recovered.
We are all complicit in such instances of cruelty, where victims and perpetrators, observers and observed, are trapped in a vicious cycle of pain and indifference.
The horse’s fate hangs precariously between the abyss of cruelty and the abyss of our own apathy, a gut-wrenching testament to the boundless destruction we inflict on each other.
Thus, we are summoned to confront the shadow within, to embrace the very compassion that shattered Nietzsche’s heart, and to transcend the cruelty that has haunted humanity since the dawn of time.
( adapted)
