The Turin Horse: Continued Review (1) — Aydin Areta

Nietzsche believed that the duality we carry in our minds—the idea that life is one thing, while moral values that prescribe how life ought to be lived are something separate from and higher than life—is a false dualism from which we should free ourselves. No value exists apart from life, and every virtue becomes meaningless where life itself has disappeared. This is perhaps something each of us has experienced at some point. When catastrophe strikes at the centre and foundation of life, we feel that nothing retains its former meaning. Imagine suddenly discovering that all those you love have been lost in an accident, that you yourself have no more than a week to live, or that in two weeks the Earth will be emptied of life by an asteroid impact. In the destruction of all life, what meaning would the values we constantly speak of still have for us? Would writing these lines in order to understand the hidden meaning of a film, or to understand Nietzsche's philosophy, have any meaning at all?

Nietzsche believed that precisely for this reason life itself is the highest value, and that all moral systems such as Christianity—which, in his view, reduce the human struggle in this world to a struggle against sin and, by promising another world, make death greater than life—deny this highest value: life.

In The Turin Horse, we encounter symbolically a catastrophe that strikes at the centre of life itself. Everything has been devastated, and the storm does not stop for a moment. The old man and his daughter struggle to continue living in an effort that at times appears futile and meaningless. Throughout the film, the old man appears almost devoid of human feeling. He establishes no meaningful emotional relationship with the horse; his relationship with it is meaningful only within the framework of a will to power and an attempt to dominate it, while the horse, in an admirable resistance, tries to escape this domination. The horse itself does not seek mastery. It refuses to eat, but it never attacks, nor does it flee through the door that remains open before it. On the fourth day, when it is tied behind the cart rather than in front of it, it follows without resistance.

The old man's relationship with his daughter is likewise little more than the imposition of his will. No meaningful emotional relationship develops between them. He is interested in nothing. He dismisses the neighbour's meaningful and philosophical conversation as nonsense and cuts him off. He refuses water to the Gypsies and drives them away. He sees the horse merely as an object whose task is to carry him and his heavy cart, and he never questions the tedious repetition of his own meaningless life. His only advice to his daughter is to continue living at any cost.

He is one of them: one of those who stripped everything of value in order to master it, and who press forward mercilessly in pursuit of a final victory. It is not even clear where the old man intends to take the horse. The neighbour says that the town, too, has been destroyed by the storm. Even when the old man finally takes the horse and his daughter out of the house and harnesses the daughter to the cart in place of the horse, he returns home without accomplishing anything, only to witness the final destruction.

His self-satisfied, purposeless and tyrannical cruelty places before us the question: what is the purpose of life? Are life and its continuation equivalent in meaning to moral value?

Nietzsche remained a critic of Plato and the Platonic philosophical tradition throughout his life. Plato holds that virtue has an existence beyond life itself, to the extent that even if every human being who tried to understand the meaning of justice were to vanish from the world, the concept of justice would still exist as an eternal truth independent of human life.

As catastrophe attacks the foundations of life in The Turin Horse, the film again confronts us with the question of whether life alone is the only value and the sole measure of all values; and whether human victory and conquest, as expressions of the will to power, constitute the fundamental meaning of life.

Perhaps on that day when Nietzsche saw cruelty and injustice fall like a whip upon the noble and magnificent being of the horse, he encountered something greater than what everyone else saw. Before his eyes he saw that great and noble being whose very existence would disappear with the collapse of everything good and transcendent. And his Übermensch can rise beyond the Last Man—the ape struggling merely to conquer the world—only if greatness and nobility themselves have meaning.