Examining Nietzsche the Man

Byline: Steve Good, THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The incident is now famous in the annals of philosophy. During the Christmas season of 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche suddenly embraced a horse he saw being harshly beaten on the streets of Turin, Italy, and wouldn't let go. The philosopher whose works denounced compassion and pity as unhealthy and undesirable expressions of weakness had succumbed to those very feelings to save an old nag pulling a cart from the wrath of its master.

Nietzsche's sanity never returned. He was taken back to his rooms. When a friend came down from Switzerland to see what he might do, he found the philosopher - who had turned 44 the previous October - stark naked and frenzedly dancing in the privacy of his bedroom.

When Nietzsche went mad, his major works - "The Joyous Science," "Thus Spake Zarathrustra" and "Beyond Good and Evil," among others - were hardly known in Europe. But by the time he died, in 1900, a little over a decade later, he had become famous and his books widely discussed.

That fame would increase steadily. His notion of the "Superman" - the man who allows no moral or religious constraints …

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Publication information: Article title: Examining Nietzsche the Man. Contributors: Not available. Newspaper title: The Washington Times (Washington, DC). Publication date: March 20, 2005. Page number: B06. © 2009 The Washington Times LLC. COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group.

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