Friedrich Nietzsche put forward a piece of ludicrous nonsense in his On the Genealogy of Morals when he wrote: “I have no doubt that the combined suffering of all the animals ever subjected to the knife for scientific ends is utterly negligible compared with one painful night of a single hysterical bluestocking.” (A bluestocking was an educated woman who frequented intellectual clubs or salon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.) What did Nietzsche, a man, know about animal pain? What did he know about the distress of a bluestocking, for that matter? When it comes to Nietzsche we should recall that on January 3, 1889, he suffered a complete mental collapse when he saw a horse being flogged by a coachman in the city of Turin. He embraced the neck of the horse and wept uncontrollably. That moment of lucid insight into animal torment marked the end of his sanity.
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 11:57:49 +0000
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