A Horse Is Being Beaten: On Nietzsche’s “Equinimity”

These are the introductory titles at the beginning of Béla Tarr’s film, which picks up the narrative immediately after these events. The film is a meticulous, monotonous, mesmerizing depiction of the life of the driver of the cart — not actually a hansom cab, in fact — his daughter, and (to a lesser degree) the horse (fig. 1). We can only speculate what it was that triggered this event (and of course the debate continues concerning the extent to which it really happened or is purely apocryphal). In any case, this story has become such a primal scene for Western philoso-phy because it rests on a fatal or poetic irony: Nietz sche, the great Zarathustrian warrior of the right and mighty, is undone by a tsunami of pity inspired by a single beast. (Had not the same man, in a book called Genealogy of Morals, warned against such tender sympathies as a Trojan Horse, bearing yet more moralistic slaves into the city?2) How to read this anomolous moment of empathy and compassion in the light of his un-Sa-maritan perspective on ethics?