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That becomes clear if we look at what he writes in an unpublished note from late 1883: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