With Turin, Brooks considers some of the most pressing philosophical and applied ethical questions about human relations to other species: language and power, attitudinal conundrums about animal sentience, veganism, welfarism versus abolitionism.
JENNIFER ANN McDONNELL:Turin, once briefly the capital of Italy, is famous today for its coffee, delectable hazelnut chocolate, Fiat cars, Juventus FC and the architectural wonder, the Mole Antonelliana. It also happens to be the city of a reportedly epiphanic moment in the life of multi-faceted German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
On January 3 1889, Nietzsche left the home of his hosts in the Italian city to witness a scene which irreversibly influenced him: a horse being brutally whipped by the driver of a carriage. Nietzsche, in a fit of tearfulness, threw himself onto the horse’s neck to defend it from the blows.
This incident, an evidential aporia, hovers between legend and reality. Its disputed status has not, however, prevented historians, biographers, filmmakers and writers attaching momentous significance to the event… The event has become a moment of originary trauma in the story of Nietzsche’s life, marking the beginning of a descent into madness which would last 11 years until his death in 1900.
Turin: Approaching Animals by poet, novelist, short fiction writer and essayist David Brooks takes the Turin horse incident as its reflective starting point… Why, we may well ask, does empathy and grief for an animal victim of human brutality explain Nietzsche’s descent into coma and madness? On the contrary, Brooks asks, might not this story be read as marking “the onset of a kind of deep sanity”?
Just as a horse bookends the sane and insane periods of Nietzsche’s life, the Turin horse rounds out Brooks’s beautifully written and profound series of provocative meditations on human and nonhuman animal relations.
In contrast to the book’s opening section, the final section, simply entitled “Horse”, asks not what Nietzsche said, but “what the horse said to Nietzsche”. Echoing Wittgenstein’s infamous question about whether we could understand a lion if he or she could speak, the question becomes: if the horse could speak in a human language, what might she or he have said to the German philosopher?
What, Brooks asks, if nothing was said but something was exposed, “like the force and intensity of another animal’s being” or “a profound guilt-in-oneself on realizing our complicity in the (ab)use of and mindless cruelty toward that other”?
This thought experiment about what would happen, for better or worse, if we understood what animals were saying points to an ongoing challenge for scholars and writers working at the intersection of animal studies and literary analysis: how to think about animals as animals, rather than as symbols or metaphors to explain primarily human concerns… In this vein of engaged, provocative questioning of human exceptionalism, Turin builds on Brooks’s previous writings about animals, including Animal Dreams (2021), Derrida’s Breakfast (2016) and The Grass Library (2019)…
Turin is not, strictly speaking, a philosophical treatise, scholarly monograph, or even a qualitative auto-ethnography. Rather, Brooks bends genres to consider some of the most pressing philosophical and applied ethical questions about human relations to other species: language and power, attitudinal conundrums about animal sentience, veganism, welfarism versus abolitionism, animal rescue, the horrors of the animal-industrial complex, the madness of individualism, kangaroo culling, fencing in animals, collateral damage in sustainable gardening, and the reason-emotion binary as grounds of judgement in animal advocacy…
Turin is in this manner speculative, part of an ongoing conversation that approaches some of the more difficult questions about human attitudes towards nonhuman animals, while remaining respectful towards its primary subject: animals of all species…
It is informed by an acute recognition that the writer and his readers are language creatures looking out of a human bubble – “the prison house of language”, to appropriate a Nietzschean phrase. That some sections end with ellipses says it all: we may not have definitive answers to our questions about animals, but what matters is to drop our anthropocentric habit of condescension and to “keep thinking”.
Although it is short, I could not read Turin at one sitting. I felt impelled to pause and think about the questions raised in the vignettes, whether about mental states of particular animals – if animals are self-aware, meta-cognisant, capable of emotion or of caring about others of their kind – or about how I might answer rationalist objections to ethical veganism. SOURCE…
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