“A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!” (Richard III, Act 5, Sc 4, William Shakespeare)
The man who said, “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” did not, in fact, survive what broke him.
At forty-four years of age, Friedrich Nietzsche, reportedly, collapsed in a street in Turin. A horse was being whipped, and Nietzsche ran toward it; so one believes. He wrapped his arms around its neck and, apparently, the world’s most dangerous philosopher began sobbing.
We’ve all replayed that supposed image in our minds time and again in various forms and shapes. “I understand you,” he kept telling the horse, as if consoling an organ of his own that had just been amputated.
And that was the end. After that moment, as it is often said, Nietzsche never wrote another coherent sentence.
Now, a quick factual note here. Nietzsche’s embrace of the horse is actually messier on the ground of reality than in the postcard. Eyewitness reports diverge. Some say he collapsed against the animal. Others say that he merely reached out, and later tellings smooth the scene into a single theatrical gesture. So the neat picture of Nietzsche hugging the horse is probably an embellishment. Still, the myth stuck because it captures something about the scale of the break that Nietzsche underwent.
So before we turn Nietzsche into yet another meme, before we quote him on gym-wall hustle posters, and before we shout that oft-repeated slogan, “God is dead,” like it’s a mic drop, we need to ask a much harder and much more serious question:
How did the philosopher of such rebellious strength come to live such a fragile life?
Now, for a start, let’s get his name right. It’s not “Neetchi,” it’s not “Nitch.” It’s Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche was born in 1844 in a small German village. His father was a Lutheran pastor, so God was literally in the house. Then, when Nietzsche was only five, his father died. It was a slow, humiliating death from brain disease. One year later, his younger brother died too.
So before Nietzsche ever rejected Christianity, it was Christianity that failed him.
And that matters. Because, Nietzsche didn’t just suddenly wake up one day and decide to be brutal and ruthless after watching some podcast on Machiavelli. Nietzsche wasn’t rebelling against God or society. He was grieving the passing away of God. His rebellion began inside grief. He was not merely a provocateur. He was someone who had learned that faith can very easily betray the faithful.
Now, we all know that Nietzsche was devastatingly intelligent. By his mid-twenties, he became a professor at the University of Basel, the oldest university in Switzerland, and he was the youngest ever to be appointed there. He was highly proficient in ancient Greek, Latin, and philology. He was supposed to have a perfect academic life.
But there was one problem. He absolutely hated it.
He hated the other professors. He hated the bureaucracy. And he hated how scholarship dissected ideas instead of living them.
So what did he do?
Nietzsche quit. He walked away from prestige, salary, security, and perhaps even his own well-being. He moved to the mountains—Sils Maria, in the Swiss Alps. It was a place of cold air, long walks, and endless pain for Nietzsche. But that’s where most of his books were written—not in a library like those of Karl Marx, but quite literally on the footpaths.
And here is something most people ignore while reading Nietzsche. He was very, very sick. Constantly, so!
Severe migraines blinded him. He suffered stomach pain so severe that he vomited daily. He endured nerve pain and insomnia. He lived alone in rented rooms, often unable to eat, but writing continuously through the agony.
And it was this man who wrote amor fati—love your fate.
Think about that. This wasn’t a gym-going influencer on Instagram saying, “Embrace the struggle.” This was a man writing philosophy between bouts of vomiting. So when Nietzsche spoke about strength, he was not talking about domination. He was talking about endurance.
Now, like it or not, Nietzsche believed something extremely shocking.
He believed that envy was not evil. We are taught to suppress it, to confess it, to repent it. But Nietzsche flouted such rules. He said envy was information. When someone irritates you with their success, it may be because they are living a life you secretly want. That successful businessman, that eminent writer, that confident speaker, that fearless creator—your envy is a map.
Nietzsche didn’t say you’ll get whatever you want. He said something harsher: you must fight honestly for what you desire. And if you fail, own your failure with dignity. No excuses. No moral cover stories. That, to Nietzsche, was self-respect.
Now, Nietzsche’s attacks on Christianity sound outrageous. For example, he once wrote the virtually terrifying line: “In the New Testament, only Pilate is worth respecting.”
And who was Pilate? Pontius Pilate was the official who presided over the trial of Jesus and ultimately ordered his crucifixion.
But this wasn’t teenage rebellion. Nietzsche believed Christianity had done something dangerous: it had turned weakness into a virtue.
He argued that people who couldn’t get what they wanted—power, love, creativity, influence—created a moral system that condemned those very things instead. Nietzsche called this “slave morality.” Within its codes, ambition became pride, strength became sin, and the incapacity to retaliate became forgiveness.
This was not holiness. It was resentment dressed up as virtue. Nietzsche wasn’t attacking compassion. He was attacking what he saw as institutional dishonesty.
There’s something else we rarely talk about. Nietzsche drank lots of water. He sometimes drank milk, too—but no alcohol.
Why? Because he believed Europe had two great narcotics: Christianity and alcohol. Both numbed pain. Both told us everything would be fine. And both stopped transformation.
Nietzsche believed growth was painful. Anything that removed pain too easily removed the potential for change.
“Live dangerously,” he wrote. “Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius.”
This wasn’t recklessness. It was intensity. A refusal to sleepwalk through life.
And finally, we come to the most misunderstood statement in continental philosophy: “God is dead.”
Nietzsche was not celebrating the death of God. He was panicking. He believed religion was false—but useful. It gave meaning, structure, and psychological stability. Without it, he feared nihilism.
Belief had died not because of malice, but because of truthfulness and critique. When people began to see moral claims as human creations, the metaphysical props collapsed. The world felt emptied. Universal values seemed to lose their weight.
And Nietzsche was left with an interior silence that sounded like a graveyard. So he asked: If God is dead, what replaces Him? His answer wasn’t science, politics, New Age spirituality, or psychedelics. It was culture—art, philosophy, music, literature—not as entertainment, but as therapy.
Then came his most dangerous idea: the Übermensch.
It was not a superhero. Not a superior race. It was the ideal self—a version of you that has faced fear and accepted suffering, that has stopped lying about desire, that creates values instead of inheriting them.
You never fully reach it. That’s the whole point. The struggle itself gives meaning. Nietzsche called this “self-overcoming”—becoming who you are meant to be by outgrowing who you were.
And then came Turin. The horse. The embrace. The philosopher of strength undone by compassion.
Many historians caution that the embrace may be symbolic rather than literal. Whether he held the horse or simply collapsed near it matters to scholars, but not to the meaning the scene has taken on.
The legend crystallized because it made sense of a collapse. Some call it irony. Others call it tragedy. But maybe it’s something else. Maybe Nietzsche proved his own philosophy—that to live intensely is to risk breaking.
Nietzsche died believing he had failed. His books didn’t sell. He was mocked and ignored. But today, his ideas shape psychology, art, culture, rock concerts, T-shirt logos, university syllabi, and a whole paraphernalia of stuff he would never have foreseen.
Yet the real lesson isn’t domination or arrogance. It’s this. This life hurts. Meaning is not handed down seamlessly. Pretending otherwise is the real weakness.
Nietzsche didn’t tell us what to believe. He dared us to live honestly. And maybe that’s why he still unsettles us. Because Nietzsche did not ask for our agreement. All he asked for was our courage.
Arup K. Chatterjee 