4.1 Christian/Platonic Dynamics

Nietzsche’s meditation regarding the body issues very soon intercepts, as it can be expected, one of the greatest controversy objectives of his philosophy: Christianity. His experience with the Christian religion was already settled in his infancy: he was raised in a very religious family and forced to study in the austere “school-convent” of Pforta; young Nietzsche very soon experiments a sense of disgusts related to the Christian doctrine and to its ritual practices. These juvenile impressions settle in time and turn into sharp attacks that, regardless of frequently generalizing tone and, with the vehemence with which Nietzsche throws them, they touch as in living flesh Christianity.

The body represents one of the fulcrums around which discrepancies rotate towards Christianity, which it was considered by Nietzsche one of the maximum civilization expressions against the body. Their «disdain for the body, has been the greatest disgrace of humankind up to this day» [³, Raids of an out of timer, §47], railing against them in The twilight of the Idols.

In Nietzsche’s analysis, the critics to Christianity goes hand in hand, with the discussion about Plato’s philosophy. To be against Christianity, particularly to Saint Paul’s interpretation, it means for Nietzsche to throw himself directly against Plato, the only one truly accused of this false dualism. It is not by chance that in Preface Foreword of Beyond Good and Evil, Christianity is defined by him as «Platonism for the “people”» [¹⁴, Foreword], as far as it dilutes the philosophical ideas of Plato in order to re-propose them to a vaster public. Saint Paul’s dialectic «flesh-spirit», in fact, reinforces in religious terms the platonic split body-soul, of an Orphic-Pythagorean origin. To a body of flesh opposes a spiritual soul. And as in the Plato’s philosophy the body is the tomb of the soul, thus in the Christian doctrine «flesh lives the guilt». Consequently, for the Christians the body must «sent away», as long as «the flesh acts on the spirit», and the body ends up by disfiguring the soul [¹⁵, 4 (162),4 (164)].

The Christians are for Nietzsche «ill-fated interpreters» of the body. They consider him a «moral-religious phenomenon», improperly raising him and assigning to him features and connotations that really don’t belong to him. Behind this behavior it is settled his great disturbance regarding the body. They are incapable of living in the finiteness: their discomfort towards the sensitive world, makes them to retreat scared in front of their body. They don’t understand this strange being, this «machine with a very unknown coincidence», that escapes their reductive idea of reason, and to which they want by all means possible to find a meaning that will ease them. The Christian in reality cannot accept the body as it is, but they long for always go beyond this world, discrediting as a consequence, all that which is derived from it. They cannot conceive that the purity of their God and their values, be linked to something that «comes from the stomach, the guts, the cardiac beat, from the nerves, from the bile, from the sperm-of all those disturbances, those weaknesses, those over excitements». They must find at all costs a reason behind everything: they are curious to visualize, definitely, if behind this flesh «there is God or the devil, the good or the evil, the salvation or condemnation» [¹⁶, § 86].

4.2 The Logic of Resentment

In the sharp analysis drawn by Nietzsche in The Antichrist, Christianity has set in motion an act of a logic of disassemble the physical world of the body, which spreads out in a double movement. On one hand, the Christians over assess the values of the body, in order to demolish it, and at the same time in parallel they assure the health of the soul. On the other hand, they try by all means available, to put a snappy remedy to such destruction, because they look to build over such diminishing of the physical body condition, a false concept of perfection. It is a double journey with which, Nietzsche wants to show the self-contradiction condition of Christianity: precisely, in the moment itself in which it declares war on the body, the Christian religion seems to, in substance, depend on it more every time.

At the beginning, for Nietzsche, Christianity kills without any half terms, all that bodily, found in its own way. Christians experiment feelings of «rivalry, hatred, disdain, deadly hostility» against all things included in the bodily kingdom: against the «flesh», the earth, the «senses» and, in general, against the «joy» itself. Every particular reality that carries in itself the minimum sign of belonging to the sphere of the physical corporeality, is by them completely rejected. The Christians definitely pretend, «leave the body and want the soul only» [¹⁷, §21].

Well aware of its own weakness and inferiority, the Christian religion uses the insidious weapon of resentment, through which it begins cleverly a radical inversion of values which will end up in a total declining of the corporeality. The «Christians» deny the body, «making of insufficient nutrition a “merit”, they fight in health, a kind of enemy, the devil, the temptation». They «are living condemns, as if health, a well-built body, strength, pride, sense of power, would be in themselves reprehensible things, for which one day they should be bitterly redeemed». In their inverted table of moral values: «it is good whatever makes them sick»; «evil person» on the other hand, «it is the one who proceeds with the fullness, from the overabundance, of power». From this cruel battle, «the body» will come out diminished and bar thisr thisdly abated: Christianity has accomplished to reduce it to a «a corpse», aimed to putrefaction.

After this perverse trans assessment, the Christian religion becomes aware that, while it has gained in detriment of the body, the existence of a spiritual soul, has at the same time irrevocably lost ground in which to make it live. According to Nietzsche, the Christians must then, convince themselves by all possible means to bring along a “perfect soul” in this corpse of a body, by feeling for this, the need to prepare for themselves a new concept of “perfection”, a blood drained condition, unhealthy, fanatic in an idiotic manner, the so called “health”. Being aware of the irreversible damage that they have done to their body, they try to transfer the physical health conditions that used to belong to them, to the new concept of soul. With that, they have tried to create a new model of perfection, that nonetheless finds itself now without a place where to live. All that which remains of the «body» is nothing else than something «impoverished, exhausted, irreversibly deteriorated beyond any cure» [¹⁷, §§ 51-52; ¹⁸, III, § 14; ¹⁹, pp. 15-16].

4.3 Vampire Muralists

Christianity is not alone in its fight against the body, but finds in moral one of its most faithful allies. Also, moral represents, in the eyes of Nietzsche, one of the main responsible for the profound degeneration of the bodily sphere. «Out of the body!», roared in a chorus the moralists. Also for them, as well as for the Christians, the body is something real of which you have to «liberate yourself», and escape as soon as possible. That belongs to the «senses», source of «deceit» and of «illusion»: it is not anything else but a «miserable, shameless and immoral scammer, that hoaxes over the true world, not allowing to perceive things as they are in reality» [³, The Reason in Philosophy, § 1].

In order to express in the most incisive way the logic of the moral, Nietzsche in Ecce homo uses the image of the vampire. An achieved metaphor, which reflects well enough and immediately, the idea of the behavioral way of ethics. Precisely, as the vampires do, ethics harvests its victims «sucking» the blood from the body: it converts this body in an «anemic one» and, in a little time after that, prevents it from «life».

Moral performs these crimes, by inventing a dangerous network of concepts in opposition to the bodily dimension, that after that uses to discredit the existence. According to Nietzsche, the moral preachers have «learned to consider as something impure all that which is the budget of life», «faking the existence of a “soul” and of a “spirit”, in order to ruin the body». The moralists oppose the body through the creation of a spiritual vocabulary, that includes expressions such as «“God”, “afterlife”, “real world”, “soul”, “spirit” and also finally “immortal soul”». These are words of the western philosophical tradition, that for Nietzsche, find their “terrifying unity”, in a coalition against a common enemy, «the body, for the purpose of discrediting and making it sick». With these «concepts, created in opposition to life», the moral preachers «devaluate the only way that exists, and don’t allow any reason to the terrestrial reality». A completely radical inversion of values, that even «health» as ever so linked to the body, will change its name to call itself «the salvation of the soul».

This vampire-like action, is for Nietzsche not only «harmful and evil», but «clever and surreptitious», because it hides in its guts a double «misleading logic». On one hand, ethics hypocritically offers its “vampirism” as the “truth” as a «sacred excuse to “better humankind”». The moralists pretend to be right and, through these unreliable abstractions against the bodily kingdom, they claim for themselves the right to improve all men. They encourage everybody daily to improve themselves, to become more, virtuous, more altruistic, more rational, as if by lacking moral they were less human. On the other hand, this scares Nietzsche even more «the counter nature itself has had the greatest honors moral wise, and it has kept weighing over the humankind under the specie of law, of categorical imperative». All the values twisted by the moralists in their battle against the body, have been immediately been raised to the honors of ethics, impacting on the existence of men, as a truly and proper moral law. What for them should have given a meaning and direction to the human life, is something that, paradoxically, is against the life itself [¹, §§ 7-8].

5.1 Metaphysical/despisers

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche makes to converge all his thoughts and thinking on the issue about corporeality, taking them to a higher critical conscience level, and giving them a new and experimental form. Truly, his narrative and symbolic writing, in a certain way mysterious and almost initiatic, does not help to distinguish in the text a coherent and systematic thought about corporeality. The fact is that the images present in the works, so vivid and stimulating, tell us much more than many words, offering to us suddenly an articulated phenomenology of the human bodies.

In his journey through the city of men, Zarathustra came across those who live in a world behind the world (The Hinterwelter, or else the metaphysical according to the German etymology of the name [²⁰, p. 12; ²¹, p. 133]), and with the despisers of the body. Two encounters told by Nietzsche in the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in a fast sequence: one after the other, a sequence not casual whatsoever. In their commentaries to Zarathustra, Pieper and Gerhardt concur to consider that, in these two chapters, Nietzsche has wanted without any doubt, to highlight the vary close relationship that is going on between the despisers of the body and the metaphysic [²², p. 149; ²³, p. 138]. To live behind the world is equivalent for him to go over the earthly world, and therefore to despise their own body.

Thus Nietzsche declares, regarding to the despisers: «What is the thing that has created the appreciation and the despise, the value and the will? The creating body has created for itself to appreciate and to despise, has created for itself the pleasure and the pain. The creating body has created for itself the spirit, and a hand of its will. Even in the madness of your despise, despisers of the body, you are serving your body» [¹²; ²⁴, pp. 65-66].

And so, Zarathustra comments regarding those that build ultramundane living spaces: «I know, even too well in what thing they believe more than anything. Truly, not in worlds behind the world: but they also believe in the body more than in anything else, and their own body is for them the thing itself. These ungrateful imagine to be abducted of their body, and of this earth. But to whom they owed the spasm and the ecstasies of their abduction? To the body and to this earth» ^[12].

These two anthropological categories seem to be linked to a very thin red thread, a species of common logic that Nietzsche brings to light. Both are united by the impossibility to get rid of, in every thought and in every action, of their own body. Both in the denigration of the body as well as in the creation of ultra-terrestrial worlds, they cannot discard to refer to, even in the despise, their bodily stratus. Such people look each other in the eye and they recognize themselves, as if they would be in front of a mirror. The body despisers live in a retro-world and belong to the metaphysic army. These in turn, see their own image reflected in that of the despisers, for what the metaphysical fantasies in which they diverse, depend unavoidably from the bodily kingdom.

Everything for Nietzsche, is born from the body: from the most fanciful creation, to the mostly acid or mean of the disdains. The meta-physicists and the despisers, live a bizarre situation, from which they cannot come out, and that entraps them in an eternal paradox, forcing them in the end, to involuntarily agree and give the reason to all that they would like to abandon and slander them. Their idiosyncrasy of the bodily dimension, is fatally destined for self-destruction; it puts the Judge in evidence, for it also is derived from the body. The claustrophobia of the body which displaces itself, is based on the fantasy of coming out from something that, in reality, it constitutes its most intimate essence [²⁵, p. 59].

By means of a description of these characters, Nietzsche delivers to us, the image of a spurious metaphysics, not an original, that came out of a subterfuge regarding the body. They have «thrown their illusion beyond the man»: they have duplicated the only existing world, creating the fictitious heaven of metaphysics and filling it in of imaginary «Gods». But even the cleanliness of their language comes from and depends from the bodily: all the speeches about the abstractions of the terrestrial world, and about the purity of the heaven, they are not anything but a projection of the body. «Also, when they are induced to fantasize and poeticize and flutter here and there with broken wings, they speak about the body and they want the body» [¹²; 9, pp. 300-301; ²², p. 132].

5.2 Bodies/Prisons

With the spectacular images of the meta-physicists and the despisers, Nietzsche has drawn the body as the ultimate and indispensable facet of the human dimension. Both, in the creation of the worlds behind the world, as well as in the intolerance towards their own physical person, the men found by Zarathustra cannot separate from the body, and they are forced to totally depend on it. This structural horizon in which they are entrapped, have for Nietzsche a sole totalizing grip over what is human, that ends up into extreme and paradoxical situations, both antithetical as well as dramatic. The first one is the impossibility to get rid of their own sick body, and the second is the lost physicality of this same body.

Thus spoke Zarathustra with respect to the impossibility for men to evade their own bodily condition: «But for them, it is a sickening thing: and with great pleasure, they would like to come out of themselves. Therefore, they listen to the preachers of death, and they preach themselves, the worlds behind the world.

Sick and dying, they were the ones that despised the body and the earth, and invented ^[12].

Nietzsche shows the meta-physicists and the despisers, as carriers of a sick body, fatally aimed to its «twilight». They live in their own skin a desperate condition: they are totally subjugated by a passive nihilistic dimension, which is the cause by which their corporeality has lost its own vital functions, and «it cannot do all that, that above all wishes, that is to say to create above himself». Their body is explained in a self-referred mode above himself: it looks only to himself, incapable as it is of transcending and reinvent himself. A body, that for Nietzsche, does not have anything more to say: it is not capable anymore to reborn, and does not want anything but «retire from life and die».

Incapable of accepting their existence, these characters are well aware of their tragic condition, and they would like at any cost «to say goodbye to their own body». Nevertheless, the dramatic situation is that, while they want more to decay and abandon their bodily dimension, they are more aware of the impossibility of this gesture. They are victims of a vicious circle from which they cannot come out, «becoming angered» and therefore «against life and earth». Full of «envy» and of «disdain», they continuously stare «crooked glances» to this one their «sick body». Their attempt -Casini states- is as desperate as it is fantastic and paradoxical, meant to fall in the vacuum. They have a body from which, maybe, they would like to get rid of it immediately, but from which they are inevitably prisoners. They feel its weight, they become aware of its cumbersome physicality. But they cannot get rid of it once and for all, forced to carry it with them with a mobile prison. [¹²; ⁸, Foreword; ⁹, pp. 300-301; ²⁶, p. 86].

The second declining of the paradox, is individualized by Nietzsche, in the loss of the materiality of the body. The miracles of the meta-physicists and the projections of the despisers, due to an excess of «suffering, incapacity, illusion, tiredness», and, as a consequence, to dematerialize and to lose their own physicality. This body so heavy and cumbersome, in such a way static, as to seem in a certain way already as a corpse, it becomes suddenly immaterial and spiritual.

The pathological condition that now affects such characters is inverted with respect to the preceding one, but as serious as it, and in a certain sense much more distressing. Even in the spiritual world, where they have captured themselves with their own hands, these human beings cannot achieve to feel really free. Nietzsche sees his body trapped in a spiritual jail, ethereal, made of chains and bars not tangible anymore, but equally rigid and crushing. These «sick» and «dying» live in the tremendous nightmare of a «bodiless body»: lacking memory of their bodily origin, they seem continuously denying it, in detriment of the purity of the metaphysics heaven. Their «fingers» become «spiritual», with which «touch the last walls» of reality, to understand at what point «deepen» and go beyond this world. They pierce with the head, the last physical part remaining, the walls of their terrestrial home, in order to «fix it in the sand of the heaven things, at the humanized world and inhumane, a celestial void» [¹²; ²³, pp. 139-140; ²² pp. 140-141].

6.1 The original lie

The review of the history of philosophy performed by Nietzsche in the FIL ROUGE (The red thread) of the body goes directly to the routes of the ancient body-soul dualism. Its revaluation of the corporeality unmasks the logics of the primate: the soul is that vital blow that gives life to the body, with which it is established since always a hegemonic relationship. That assumes the monopoly of life and perfection, facing a body that without it is reduced to a bunch of sensible inert matter.

By means of his historic-genealogical procedure, Nietzsche digs deep in the past of men, in order to unbury the mistake that these have committed by giving consistency and value to «the soul». They have «believed that something must correspond to words» [²⁸, 24 (79)]. A misunderstanding with which the human being unavoidably donates his existence, to realities that only exist through his mind. Nietzsche goes back to the beginning of this distorted dualist vision, assessing the original blame to Plato, who «has completely separated the senses of reason, as if it would happen to be two completely different features». By doing this, not only «they had destroyed the mind as such» but also «have stimulated that by all means mistaken separation between spirit and body». A disastrous heritage that weighs over all those who have come «after him»: the original sin that «engraves as a curse over all the philosophy» [¹¹, § 10; ²⁷, pp. 7-9].

Such dynamics about the supremacy of the spiritual has represented through centuries a real totalitarian system of their own, of which it has been impossible to get out. Nietzsche does not hide the fact that how «the soul» has always represented «such a mysterious thought as well as attracting, of which reasonably, the philosophers have separated themselves from it, against their will». After all, it was not easy «to switch» the purity of a purity soul, with the uncertainty of a body made of flesh and of human impurity [⁶, 36 (35)].

Nietzsche finds this way to understand the relationship soul/ body in the words of the «tightrope walker» of the foreword or Zarathustra. The acrobat shows himself on a rope to the eyes of the plaza’s multitude, when suddenly «he loses his balance» and «crashes on the floor». «His body badly injured and in pieces, but not dead yet» falls precisely close to Zarathustra, who feels questioned by the unfortunate tightrope walker with these words: «I knew since long time ago that the devil had tripped me. Now, he takes to hell». Zarathustra then, cynically answers to him: «The things you are talking about do not exist. Your soul will be dead before your body» [¹², foreword, § 6]. The tightrope walker, represents that who does not achieve to go beyond the traditional beliefs. It looks like he is still too closely linked to that dualism «false and popular», which «separates and puts against each other body and soul». It is a way to think about what is human that has for Nietzsche, an antiphilosophic coarseness [²⁹, §21].

6.2 The price of the primate

Again, in the Foreword of Thus spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche argues against all those philosophies of Platonic-Christian and Cartesian origin, that claim a primate of the soul over the body. Currents that translate into daily practices of asceticism, preaching and tiny moralism. He accuses fully to those preachers and moralists of having promoted a net supremacy of the soul over the body. They have even achieve to invert the platonic logic of the body as a prison of the soul: now, the real prisoner is the body, kidnapped by the soul which has assumed the role of a jail keeper.

In this undisputed predominance of the soul over the body, Nietzsche sees in action a hypocritical logic. This primate is not original, if it is not based on the reaction, and on the denigration its own rival. «The soul» lives at the back of its own enemy, «the body», obtaining the priority because «it looks at it with despise». The soul tortures it, «it wants it badly bitten, horrible, and hungry». «Believes it can escape from him» in order to look for the confirmation of its own purity and transparency: it seems like if, in order to achieve to reaffirm its own identity, it should always have the need to discredit all that which is not spiritual.

For Nietzsche however, this violent and furtive ascetic despise becomes against the soul itself, making it to assume, in the end, the same characteristics of that she wants to fight: «this soul is also badly bitten, horrible and hungry». An ironic joke of destiny which will give life to a soul of «cruel voluptuousness», which wants at all costs to remain young and pure, without realizing that, behind her own appearance, it’s becoming in reality each time, older and putrid.

The price to pay, in order to comply with the primate’s covenant, is very high not only for the soul, but also for the body. It is precisely this last one, who will have to «manifest» the signs of the «soul»: a horrible and decaying body, a mirror for the soul wrapped in «poverty, scum and miserable wellbeing» [¹², Foreword, §3]. The macabre logic of the spirituality, doesn’t leave any escape for the body: where «the spirituality has dominates, it has destroyed with its aberrations» everything that is bodily, it has «despised the body and all of its instincts» it has «neglected and tormented it». This pathological asceticism «has created dark souls, loaded with tension and oppressed». Furthermore, it has put an illusion on them with «the belief of knowing the cause of their servility sense, and or maybe being able to eliminate them», indicating precisely «in the body» the goal over which to jump in with brutal violence. Behaving like this, has ended up by «tormenting and despising the man himself».

In essence, concludes Nietzsche, the cause of the sole’s degradation could not «reside» in any other place but in this «body», pointed out with envy for being «every time more, too blooming», and therefore deserving of all kinds of flogging. A body that is made to shout each time it dares, with its physicality and with «its pains», raise, even it for only and instant its voice, «raising protest over protest against this continuous derision» [¹⁶, § 39; ⁹, p. 299; ³⁰, p. 8].