Reflection
Most of us would not think of ourselves as cruel - I certainly don’t see myself that way. Generally, we feel a sting of compassion, and a desire to help, when faced with suffering. The boy in this photo - in a flower market in India - elicited this response for me when I saw him, and when I look at this photo I feel it again.
But reading Nietzsche - and trying to absorb his striking and often counter-intuitive descriptions of human life and interaction - has made me wonder.
Of course, I am not cruel in an obvious sense. I don’t delight in causing people harm or hurting animals.
But if you were to really strip back the layers of my motivations - get behind the easy interpretations, the ones the fit neatly with what I think is good and right and ethical - you might begin to wonder too. Are there subtler, more refined forms of cruelty lurking in my soul?
Probably.
The obvious candidate for this refined cruelty is, at least according to Nietzsche, compassio…
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