Theoscatology in Nietzsche and Lawrence

Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence Skibidi Toilet style [1]

  

 

I. 

 

Philosophers, eh? The shit that sometimes comes out of their mouths!

 

Take Nietzsche, for example; did he really say that men must defecate in order to become divine?

 

Sort of. 

 

Only he wasn't talking about the discharging of faeces from the body, so much as the elimination of sin - i.e., spiritual rather than biological waste; the toxic consequence of bad conscience rather than the semi-solid remains of last night's dinner.  

 

That becomes clear if we look at what he writes in an unpublished note from late 1883:

 

Many things about man are not very godly: whenever a person excretes faeces, how can he be a god then? But it is even worse regarding the other faeces we call sin: man still surely wants to retain this, and not excrete it. Now however, I must believe it: a person can be a god and still excrete faeces. Thus I teach you, excrete your faeces and become gods. [2]

 

 

II.

 

Like Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence is also concerned in his theoscatological musings with the elimination of certain adverse emotions. Our great task, he says, is to liberate the mind from its "fear of the body and the bodies potencies" [3], before we fall ever further into madness [4].

 

Both authors, in other words, are concerned with the collapse of the primary instincts and the way in which internalised cruelty produces a moral subject [5]. And both wish for man to elevate himself by accepting those things which make us ashamed: 

 

"If we are ashamed, instead of covering the shame with a veil, let us accept the thing which makes us ashamed, understand it and be at one with it. If we shrink from some sickening issue of ourselves, instead of recoiling [...] let us go down into ourselves, enter the hell of corruption and putresence, and rise again, not fouled, but fulfilled and free." [6] 

 

This may involve an act of anal sex [7], or it may simply involve building a less hysterical relationship with language - particularly the so-called obscene words that cause us embarrassment; i.e., all the old words "that belong to the body below the navel" [8].

   

Lawrence continues:

 

"Myself, I am mystified at this horror over a mere word, a plain simple word that stands for a plain simple thing. 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God and the Word was with God.' If that is true, then we are very far from the beginning. [...] Because today, if you suggest that the word arse was in the beginning and was God and was with God, you will just be put in prison at once. [...] Now that sort of thing is idiotic and humiliating. Whoever the god was that made us, he made us complete. He didn't stop at the navel, and leave the rest to the devil. [...] If the Word is God [...] then you can't suddenly say that all the words which belong below the navel are obscene. The word arse is as much god as the word face. It must be so, otherwise you cut your god off at the waist." [9] 

  

Notes

 

[1] Skibidi Toilet is a machinima web series created by Alexey Gerasimov in 2023 and released via his YouTube channel, DaFuq!?Boom! Featuring toilet bowls with human heads emerging, it has become hugely popular amongst the kids of Generation Alpha.

 

[2] See The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche Volume 14: Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Summer 1882–Winter 1883/84), trans. Paul S. Loeb and David F. Tinsley, ed. Alan D. Schrift and Duncan Large (Stanford University Press, 2019). 

      Or, if one wishes to check the original German text, see KSA 10:635-37:23. 

      Richard Perkins discusses this fragment in his essay 'An Innocent Little Story: Nietzsche and Jesus in Allegorical Conjunction', Nietzsche Studien Volume 26, Issue 1 (1997), pp. 361-383. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 309. 

 

[4] Lawrence famously attacks Swift for making his mistress Celia feel terrible about her own natural functions, including defecating. See the post entitled 'Celia Shits! Notes on Jonathan Swift's The Lady's Dressing Room and (Alleged) Coprophobia (2 April 2024): click here.  

 

[5] Nietzsche famously discuss this in the second essay of the Genealogy (1887). 

 

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace', Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 35. 

 

[7] I have published several posts dealing with the subject of anal sex in Lawrence's work: click here.  

 

[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Pansies', Appendix 6 in The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 664. 

 

[9] Ibid.  

      Of course, there are some - like Sir Clifford Chatterley, for example, who delight in this idea of cutting God off at the waist; see chapter XVI of Lady Chatterley's Lover, where he reads to Connie from one of the 'latest scientific-religious books' - Whitehead's Religion in the Making (1926) - about the manner in which the universe is physically wasting and spiritually ascending. 

      Connie has no time for such nonsense, but Clifford insists that "'whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being'" (see p. 235 of the 1993 CUP edition, ed. Michael Squires).   

 

Fish Out of Water (Notes on Evolution and Cruelty)

According to a report in the New Scientist, blenny fish - fed-up with the predatory behaviour of their aquatic neighbours - are abandoning life beneath the waves of the South Pacific Ocean and gradually relocating to dry land. It's 400 million years after others of their kind first made the move and kick-started an evolutionary process that eventually produced us. But still, better late than never and I wish 'em the best of British.

The case is interesting because scientists have never been entirely certain why fish first chose to exit the sea and crawl gasping onto terra firma. After studying several species of blenny, however, researchers at the University of New South Wales have concluded that it's most likely an attempt to avoid being eaten by bigger fish, such as flounders. This desire to escape is an understandably strong impetus.

Of course, it's not all sweetness and light up here on land and there are still dangers awaiting for the blennies as they shuffle around the rocks - such as bird attacks. But predation risk is significantly less, however, than it is underwater. In fact, once they pick up their piscine courage and make the full transition - developing stronger tail fins so as to be able to leap about more successfully - their chances of being eaten drop by about two-thirds (66%).

Further, moving onto land has additional benefits for blennies; holes in the rocks, for example, provide conveniently sheltered spaces for laying eggs. So it's really a move worth considering seriously if you're a small fish. In fact, one is surprised that it hasn't been tried more often and by more types of fish other than the estimated 30-odd families that have made the crossing between worlds. 

That said, Nietzsche reminds us in the Genealogy that it is never easy for any creature to make such a fundamental change. For fish, becoming land animals was as difficult, as painful, and as terrifying as it was for the animal man to become a creature capable of making promises; a creature restrained by a morality of custom and subject to an internalisation of cruelty; a creature made regular and predictable and weighed down by bad conscience; a creature, in short, made human, all too human.    

Like us, the blenny fish is the result of millions of years of evolution. But only man has shaped himself through thousands of years of self-torture; indeed, this is what we have had the longest practice doing and wherein our genius as a species lies.    


See:

Alice Klein, 'These fish are evolving right now to become land-dwellers', New Scientist (16 March 2017): click here to read.

Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, (Cambridge University Press, 1994), particularly the Second Essay. 

La tyrannie de la pénitence

Princeton University Press (2010)

Described by Douglas Murray as one of the landmark books of our time, Pascal Bruckner's The Tyranny of Guilt develops a line of argument that he first advanced two decades earlier in The Tears of the White Man. Namely, that the Western world has spent the last sixty years so consumed by remorse for its own history that it is now on the verge of apologizing itself out of existence.    

Our self-hatred and self-contempt is matched only by our sentimental insistence on the innocence and innate moral goodness of those peoples upon whom we once imposed our imperial values and the evils of slavery, racism, and genocide; evils which, mistakenly, the West now believes it invented and have a monopoly on.

Nietzsche describes this pathology of guilt, shame, and self-division as bad conscience and whilst Bruckner doesn't refer directly to the second essay of the Genealogy, he acknowledges that Nietzsche understood better than most how the internalization of cruelty, practiced so remorselessly within Judeo-Christian culture, was continuing within secular liberal society; intensifying the pain and creating a duty of repentance.       

Bruckner seeks to understand this phenomenon and how it unfolds in the world today. And, importantly, he attempts to counter it by offering us some theoretical tools of opposition. Of course, to his enemies - and he has many - this attempt at a revaluation of values within the West is seen as reactionary and ethnocentric. He is accused in France of neo-conservatism and Islamophobia due to his opposition to multiculturalism, his staunch defence of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and his admiration for the United States. 

But accusations such as this are as tiresome and as trite as they are predictable. Bruckner may not get everything right, but he deserves to be read and taken seriously. The Tyranny of Guilt is a brave, lucid, and provocative text that challenges readers not only to think - but to care and be concerned about the world in which they live. 

 
Note: Pascal Bruckner studied under Roland Barthes and belongs to that generation of French intellectuals who emerged during the 1970s known as les nouveaux philosophes. He is the award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction, including the novel Lunes de fiel (1981), which was made into a little remembered film, Bitter Moon (1992), directed by Roman Polanski, starring Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas.