What is that here? an ear
What is that here? a nose
What is that here? hands¹Nietzsche, October 3, 1895, as recorded by his mother. Sander L. Gilman (ed.): Conversations with Nietzsche. A Life in the Words of his Contemporaries (translated by D.J. Parent), Oxford University Press, New York / Oxford (1987), p. 235.

René Descartes is sitting in his thinking chair by the fire. He is wearing a comfortable winter dressing-gown and, quill and paper in hand, has just embarked on the radical experiment of hyperbolic doubt that will result in his vastly influential Meditations.²René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy. With Selections from the Objections and Replies (translated by J. Cottingham), Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1996). For Descartes’ description of himself sitting by the fire, see p. 13. Until he finds absolute proof, he will assume that everything his senses tell him is “utterly false and imaginary”.³Descartes: Meditations, p. 15. This includes his own body: “Suppose then that I am dreaming,” he speculates, “and that these particulars—that my eyes are open, that I am moving my head and stretching out my hands—are not true. Perhaps, indeed, I do not even have such hands or such a body at all.”⁴Descartes: Meditations, p. 13. Settled deep in his chair and in his rational mind, he is confident that the physical world is safely set aside and under control: “I know that no danger or error will result from my plan, and that I cannot possibly go too far in my distrustful attitude. This is because the task now in hand does not involve action but merely the acquisition of knowledge.”⁵Descartes: Meditations, p. 15.

Then, suddenly, the philosopher stirs from his reflections to find himself no longer sitting down: prompted by a “clear and distinct”⁶Descartes: Meditations, passim. urge he could no longer ignore, he has jumped to his feet and is presently hurrying towards his chamber pot.

By the time he returns to his place by the fire, Descartes’ thoughts have taken a very different direction. The book he will go on to write, the Meditations on Number One Philosophy, will change the course of philosophical history by establishing once and for all that mind and body are not two separate things, that to suppose the latter can be ignored without consequence is “silly talk”,⁷Sic. and that we are primarily and undeniably physical beings.

*record scratch sound*

Alas: that is not the timeline we are on, and those are not the Meditations we know. In the Meditations on First Philosophy we got instead, it isn’t until the sixth and final meditation that Descartes concedes, on the basis of rational proof, that things exist outside of his mind and that he does, in fact, have a body. During the five preceding evenings, we are led to believe, he has persisted in the assumption that every sign of presence from his body was an illusion that could safely be ignored.

Could it be that none of those signs were urgent enough?

The Meditations on First Philosophy contain a surprising amount of references to the author’s immediate surroundings (the fireplace, the chair), the experience of his own body (“I shake my head […] I stretch out and feel my hand”) and the passage of time (“yesterday’s meditation”, “during these past few days”).⁸Descartes: Meditations, pp. 16, 13 and 37 respectively. This makes it all the more remarkable that there is no mention of the body at its most compelling and impatient. Descartes contends that it may all be an illusion: “How often, asleep at night, am I convinced of just such familiar events—that I am here in my dressing-gown, sitting by the fire—when in fact I am lying undressed in bed!”⁹Descartes: Meditations, p. 13. But that is just the thing: even a toilet dream is rooted in reality; toilet dreams are the body’s way of reaching into our dream state, whether it be sleep or philosophical reverie, and alerting us to a very real urge to be alleviated in the here and now.

Would an explicit reference to the “base” bodily functions have made the text even more controversial than the suspicion of atheism already did? Not necessarily: 17th-century Europe was much less prudish in these matters than we tend to think (perhaps less than our own age); with François Rabelais, scatology had an illustrious patron in renaissance France; Descartes himself was far from squeamish in his mechanistic Treatise on Man and his Description of the Human Body and All (!) Its Functions.

One obvious explanation for the lack of toilet breaks in the Meditations is the fact that the spatio-temporal setting of the essay as “six consecutive evenings by the fireplace” is a fiction, no more than a stylistic device—the text was actually composed over a much longer period, from 1638 to 1640.¹⁰Descartes: Meditations, p. xliii. But still, in light of Descartes’ ambition to start with a clean slate and an open mind, it is somewhat disappointing that the intrusive realities of the body, which surely must have presented themselves to him during the writing of the essay, have not earned a place in his argument. Perhaps he prudently made sure to go to the bathroom before each of his late-night meditation sessions; perhaps that is what he meant when he wrote in the opening paragraph: “So today I have expressly rid my mind of all worries and arranged for myself a clear stretch of free time.”¹¹Descartes: Meditations, p. 12.

Or perhaps Descartes did occasionally have to interrupt his meditations to use his chamber pot, but it didn’t occur to him that these moments, too, had their own significance and reality. Likewise, in film and literature, characters rarely use the bathroom (unless it somehow serves the plot), and readers and viewers accept this peculiarity without question. I suspect we do not even perceive our own brief moments spent there as a part of our real existence, but rather as a glitch, a blink of an eye, a brief dreamless night, a conversation interrupted and seamlessly resumed, an absence, a blackout. Perhaps movie characters do it furtively between shots, behind the scenes, or in those dark milliseconds, invisible to the naked eye, between the discrete film frames that, projected at 24 images a second, create the illusion of continuous movement.

This editing out from reality of one of our most basic functions is unfortunate because, in a way, the act of micturition is among the most real experiences the everyday has to offer. It is a friendly reminder from our body of its compelling presence. It is our Urintellekt (pardon the pun), our primordial understanding of the ineluctable link between a physical urge and the alleviation of that urge; it is our most intimate call of nature. We can tinkle before we can even think. And yet we have long refused to give that faculty a real place in our thinking.

Whatever the reason, Descartes inaugurated a long era of mind-body dualism in western philosophy, based on the conviction that we are first and foremost a thinking consciousness, which only in the second instance discovers (to its incredulous dismay) that it is hooked up to a fleshy, leaky, awkward and frail physical extension.

It wasn’t until the late 19th century that one German philosopher dispersed this lopsided image for good. That philosopher was Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s body certainly did interfere with his mental life: it refused to be ignored or referred to second place. Piercing headaches, a severe eye ailment and recurring stomach problems frequently made it impossible for him to think clearly, let alone function as a professor of classical philology. And yet, more than any other philosopher, he wrote about his own, individual body with a sense of wonder and love quite contrary to the bitter “prison of the soul” sentiment that had prevailed in Western philosophy since Socrates. If Descartes wanted to abstract the body into a theoretical idea to be granted reality as the intellect pleases, Nietzsche devoted pages and pages to rendering it as concrete as he could; he even wrote a few meditations on “the Will to Urinate”¹²“Wille zum Uriniren”: see NF-1880,4[309], NF-1880,5[5], NF-1880,6[398] before turning his attention to the Will to Power.

Unfortunately, after years of headaches and crippling fits of nausea, his body was not done with him yet. At the age of 44, Nietzsche suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown that, although many have been tempted to interpret it in light of his philosophical notions from the years prior, was in fact entirely physical in nature. “If a foot or arm or any other part of the body is cut off”, Descartes argued in the sixth meditation, “nothing has thereby been taken away from the mind”; the French rationalist concluded that “the mind is completely different from the body”.¹³Descartes: Meditations, p. 59. But when the brain is slowly being consumed by a tertiary stage syphilitic infection, as Nietzsche’s presumably was by 1889, the mental faculties certainly do suffer. The philosopher Nietzsche died on the 6th of January of that year—he neither said nor wrote anything of much significance after that fateful day—but he was survived by his damaged body by a good ten years.

On this website, I will discuss various parts of the physical man Nietzsche with regards to their significance in his philosophy and personal life—his slow-beating heart, his exceptionally small ears, his iconic mustache and battle-scarred nose, all of which he himself described in loving detail and regarded as deeply meaningful. This will allow me to touch upon a variety of aspects of his work—each body part will, in effect, be the subject of a small standalone essay on such wide-ranging subjects as the muscle-toning effect of Greek tragedy; the social implications of different facial hairstyles in 19th-century Germany; masks, dancing, and the music of Richard Wagner. As a whole, who knows? This collection may even grow into something like an idiosyncratic introduction to Nietzsche’s philosophy.

I have spent years researching Nietzsche for my PhD in philosophy (VUB, 2011) but have long since left academia. Nietzsche’s Body is a work in progress and a labor of love.

Notes

• 1
  Nietzsche, October 3, 1895, as recorded by his mother. Sander L. Gilman (ed.): Conversations with Nietzsche. A Life in the Words of his Contemporaries (translated by D.J. Parent), Oxford University Press, New York / Oxford (1987), p. 235.
• 2
  René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy. With Selections from the Objections and Replies (translated by J. Cottingham), Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1996). For Descartes’ description of himself sitting by the fire, see p. 13.
• 3
  Descartes: Meditations, p. 15.
• 4
  Descartes: Meditations, p. 13.
• 5
  Descartes: Meditations, p. 15.
• 6
  Descartes: Meditations, passim.
• 7
  Sic.
• 8
  Descartes: Meditations, pp. 16, 13 and 37 respectively.
• 9
  Descartes: Meditations, p. 13.
• 10
  Descartes: Meditations, p. xliii.
• 11
  Descartes: Meditations, p. 12.
• 12
  “Wille zum Uriniren”: see NF-1880,4[309], NF-1880,5[5], NF-1880,6[398]
• 13
  Descartes: Meditations, p. 59.