19. Body is destiny

"The degree and kind of a man's sexuality reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit." 

Beyond Good and Evil, 75

In this episode, we begin with a plunge into the sacred animality of the body: sensation, desire, and the ecstatic collapse of self into the immediacy of flesh. 

From there, we spiral outward—into vignettes of shame, overcompensation, resentment, and neurosis. Fatness, baldness, shortness, beauty, disability, disease, all the contingencies of anatomy—these are not unimportant surface-level traits; they are our lived reality. They endow power or confiscate it. They elicit pity or admiration. They twist the mind or harden the will.

Are we anything more than our bodies? Nietzsche doubted it—and in this episode, we take him at his word. Exploring how physique and physiology shape identity, quality of life, and destiny. We ask: What does it mean to strive toward Nietzsche’s ideal of “the great health”? Can we come to love fate—even when our fate is written into our very substance?

This is not self-help. It’s the ultimate existential challenge. To embrace your body. To train it. To understand it. To be grateful for it. And above all, to affirm it and the world of which it is a necessary and inextricable component.

Music: Death is Eternal Bliss by ELEH

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Music credit in intro: ViraMillar on Freesound - "Music by UNIVERSFIELD from Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/UNIVERSFIELD"

Transcript

Prologue:

Stop thinking. Stop all thinking. Thinking spoils. In this temple of flesh, don’t you know thinking is a sin? 

The body as actuality, as the only irreducible reality.

The electricity of proximity. The crackle as gaze aligns with gaze. Unmistakable. The intoxication of contact. Pupils expand into pools of depthless obsidian. 

Anger, tenderness. The most intense yearning—the most irresistible enticement. Unquenchable hunger. Force, surrender, danger, madness, ecstasy.

Warmness, softness. Shuddering muscle. Clenched teeth. This roundness. That proportion. The sheer breadth. The odour of bodies, unadulterated. Coursing blood. Hot breath. Dilations. Engorgements. Rolling sweat. Sighs. Langour. Absolutely immediate.

Oh, the great forgetting. Falling now. Tumbling through space.

All is lost. All is lost. 

This most holy sacrament, consecrated by the procession of galaxies and the birth of stars, is the transfiguration of blind matter into the terrible, unstoppable violence of love. 

The universe smiles.

Glib vignettes:

Let's imagine you're very overweight. Food was your mother’s way of showering her children with love and now, an adult, you live in a city that has a high density of inexpensive fast food joints. Over the years, you’ve acquired several painful, weight-related medical conditions. Your doctor’s informed you that you’re clinically obese. You can’t even bear to look at yourself in a state of undress. You avoid public swimming pools and even in the height of summer, you layer up, concealing your unlovely body with baggy clothing at the beach. You don’t feel good about your body—you feel so lonely. You decide—not for the first time—to take action. You’re going to start hitting the gym. you're determined to lose that weight. 

However, you soon discover a problem: you’re too ashamed of your body to enter the gym. Gyms are environments prowled by trim, toned, athletic people. They flock there to pose, to check each other out, to see and be seen. What a ridiculous spectacle you will make by comparison. People might laugh at you—is there anything more ridiculous than a fat person exercising? Some of them might go to the gym only so they can enjoy the feeling of superiority they get from showcasing their physiques alongside body-failures like you. No, the gym is not a welcoming place—not for you. 

The difficulty is, without regular use of the gym or a similar solution, it becomes almost impossible to lose that weight. Then, because of your inability to address the problem, you feel even more despondent and so you eat a lot of fried chicken and ice cream to compensate yourself for these unpleasant feelings. Naturally, you become even more overweight. The gym, and a solution, slips further and further out of reach. Your obesity and the low self-esteem it generates, predestine you to become ever fatter with ever lower self-esteem. The result is a vicious circle and, potentially, a downward spiral.

Then again, let’s say you're a man who has put in the work and achieved that coveted, adonis-like physique. Unfortunately, you're prematurely balding. As a matter of fact, it was your anxiety about your ever-receding hairline that motivated you to become the gym obsessive you now are. Despite this desperate campaign to shore up your confidence in your appearance, you've become increasingly shy over time, your self-esteem shedding with your hair. 

You now wear a bandana with a bold stars and stripes design to mask your shiny pate. You choose a bandana because it is a light head covering you can wear while working out. You choose a stars and stripes design because you live in the USA and you figure that if people criticised your bandana it would be tantamount to criticising the USA and so it can afford you some protection from the spiteful judgments of others. And because only certain kinds of people with certain fashion preferences wear bandanas, you've to make yourself into that kind of person. Now you wear a big gold hoop earring like a pirate. You grow a Jack Sparrow goatee beard. You festoon your skin with tattoos. All this as a defence because of your baldness. Yet, despite your impressive muscles and the edgy persona you try and project, you feel ever more disempowered inside. 

Because of your insecurities, you pass on opportunities to try for a promotion at work; a promotion that might have been yours if you'd hung on to your glossy curls and your self-assurance.

Then again, let’s say you've a luxuriant head of healthy-looking hair but you're of no great height. Because of your shortness you feel you've been overlooked, underestimated and pushed around while you were growing up. you've consequently developed an aggressive and combative adult personality. you're hypersensitive to any perceived slight. You’ve become a serious practitioner of several martial arts. You’re now the kind of jerk who trawls bars looking for fights on a Saturday night—especially, of course, with taller guys. 

You join the military and eventually try-out for an elite unit where your pugnacity is considered an asset. Later, on active service in some dark corner of the earth, you unleash your animus on the unfortunate natives. Yet, if you'd been two inches taller, you would have been a staid clerk working in an office somewhere. 

Then again, let's say you're lithe and fine-featured but plagued with severe facial acne. At school, you were mocked mercilessly about your skin eruptions. As an adult still embarrassed by your appearance, you're insular, introspective, soft-spoken, tending to avoid social gatherings, always hiding yourself away from the world. Too bashful to go out dating, you might never find a partner, never get married, never have kids.

Or you end up with some sub-optimal slob, who knows how to lever your insecurity to keep you under control. Whereas, in one alternative future—one where your skin had behaved itself—you would have been a full-time model, arrogant and entitled, with a string of abandoned marriages to partners who’s high status and wealth could not prevent each of them quickly becoming tiresome to you.

Ah yes—finally we come to the beautiful: the happy few. Sometimes (rarely) a person is born lucky. If you're blessed by exceptional beauty, you're likely to enjoy a wealth of advantages: doors open magically, opportunities fall into your lap, attention is showered on you, strangers buy your drinks, people will fall over themselves to help you, and the world always puts on a smile and sucks in its stomach when you appear. You just can’t understand why so many people grumble and moan that they find life hard. In your opinion, they need to work on their attitudes: give off negativity and the world reflects it back at you, right? 

Naturally, you attribute your charmed existence not just to your appearance, but to your wit, intelligence, and sparkling personality. In your view, your good looks are just an outward manifestation of your own exceptional, inner quality.

Not in the world, of the world

These few vignettes, above, are meant as illustrations. Point being your mind isn’t something independent of your body. Instead it’s truer that your body determines what your mind, your personality, your character, is like. This should be so apparent to each of us that it’s not even worth arguing, yet doggedly our culture maintains that what one’s body is like doesn’t or shouldn’t matter: it’s what’s inside that counts. The truth is that what’s “inside” is solely a product, a reflection, and an expression of the body in its interactions with its environment and nothing else. At least if you abandon any notion of a metaphysical soul, it is. And as we saw in a recent show, when it comes to explaining humanity, the soul is an entirely redundant concept. All your physiological characteristics—your green eyes, your fallen arches, your natural aptitude for crossword puzzles, your dairy intolerance, the hole in your heart—these are the determinants that play their part in shaping your experience of the world—in shaping you—throughout your life. 

More broadly, there are body determinants that are demographic: if you're a target of prejudice because of your ethnicity, you might become distrustful, defensive or indignant in your dealings with what feels like a hostile and unjust world. Similarly, we know that a person’s sex may open up opportunities to them or close them down and this will affect their orientation to the world, perhaps manifesting as bitterness and discouragement or, more helpfully, steely ‘fuck you!’ determination. The same applies to physical disabilities. 

Age too, determines your treatment: older people are often afforded extra respect, with people giving up their seat to them on public transport, for example, but they are also more likely to be the target of muggers, who assume such victims will be too frail to resist. This can result in increased feelings of vulnerability and fear. 

Older people are also more susceptible to getting ill and this too has obvious implications for the mind and the sense of self—but for people of all ages, temporary physical states like illness impact the mind. When your body is sick or injured, you may feel more anxious, pessimistic, and risk averse. How much more so if you're sick all the time, as when suffering from a debilitating, long-term health condition. It’s not just sickness, however, consider the transformation of mind that occurs when people put alcohol in their bodies, or even the irritability of some people when hungry. 

The determinants that shape us are not just about the body, but the body in its relation to its environment. Nietzsche writes that these “trivial” matters, “—diet, locality, climate, and one's mode of recreation, the whole casuistry of self-love—are inconceivably more important than, all that which has hitherto been held in high esteem! It is precisely in this quarter that we must begin to learn afresh.” [EH.Clever,10]. Here Nietzsche uses the world ‘casuistry’ to refer to the nuanced, individualised choices that make up a lifestyle but, of course, most things are not a matter of choice. Where one is born, the climate and geography, the social and political arrangements, the culture and values that dominate, and one’s social and economic class are germane to your life experience and shape your identity. Is your nation at war? Is it time of plague? Is one born into plenty or impoverishment? In a society where high energy food its cheap and overabundant and occupations are overwhelmingly sedentary, the population will be tend to be fat (e.g. the United States). In a society where high energy food is scarce and occupations tend towards arduous manual labour, the population will tend to be wiry and tough (e.g. rural Nepal). 

And let's not overlook the domestic arrangements one is born into: the stability of one’s home life and the character and competence of one’s parents, the quality of nutrition, the opportunities for exercise, recreation, and education—all the facts of the environment play a part in forming a self and a life.

In every set of circumstances, in each unique environmental situation, who a person is and shall be will be different. This can be an unpalatable fact because it seems to make you, your unique self, contingent—little more than an accident. Some of us like to feel we are a little more than that. But are we really? Have you ever, perhaps whilst watching a movie, imagined how outraged and appalled you would have been to be a spectator at the Roman colosseum or at a medieval witch trial? And yet if you'd been there, the likelihood is you would have behaved pretty much as everyone else present did, baying for blood, or spitting on the accused. This is because your values would have been socially constructed in alignment with the society to which you belonged at the time. All your life experiences would have been different. 

Of course, your parents would have been different people too, and thus your genetic inheritance would have been different. Even the matter of which you're comprised would have been different, being constructed out of constituents from that environment at that time. In fact, there is nothing of you that would be the same. Your self, what Nietzsche calls your physio-psychology, is a product of the unique environmental conditions in which you came into being and continue to exist.

The import of this is in the understanding that you're a situated being: historically-situated in a specific era of time, socially-situated in the culture and values of your society, morphologically-situated in terms of your evolved species physiology inherited from your parents, and even materially-situated in a particular geographical place and comprised of matter drawn from the contemporaneous environment—mainly through eating, drinking, and respiring. 

Can you see how this makes you a part of your environment? you're not in the world, you're of the world. Our poor human so often feels alienated and alone but, in truth, and there may be no greater truth than this: right here, right now, you belong. You belong to the world and the world belongs to you - can you see now why Nietzsche implores us to remain faithful to the earth? To not denigrate it in favour of some mythical afterlife. When you disparage the world, you disparage yourself.

As Nietzsche writes in TI, the four great errors: “One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole – there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, condemn the whole … But nothing exists apart from the whole!”

To affirm the world just as it is, because it could not be otherwise, is the experience of Amor Fati - the love of fate. Sure, that seems like a tall order. The world is frequently a place of horror and pain. But Nietzsche is not demanding that we love fate; he is instead positing Amor Fati as the litmus test for true health. Not just the health of the body per se, but the health of your entirety—your physio-psychology. This he calls “the great health”. 

To understand the great health, consider the counter-example: imagine a creature born into the world that hates its world; that thinks its world evil and unjust; that even hates itself and feels ashamed of itself; that consoles itself with the thought of a cloud cuckoo land wherein it can take repose after death—a place where it will no longer have to struggle. Does this creature seem familiar? It should be easily recognisable to all of us.

Now, imagine its opposite.

This week’s music choice is Death is eternal bliss by ELEH. This is subtle, enigmatic stuff. Its music as meditation. It’s a droning, immersive, serene yet ambiguous experience. I invite you to give it a careful contemplative listen and see what feelings it elicits for you.

Links as always in the show’s description.

The body compromised:

The honed body enjoys greater presence, not least because people who are proud of their bodies naturally stand more erect. They adopt more assertive postures and interact with greater self-assurance. These individuals are less likely to be overlooked in social situations and are less likely to attract bullies of every stripe, who have an eye for weaknesses in others. People who lack pride in their bodies, on the other hand, are more likely to be ignored, patronised, or even to become victims to stigmatisation and discrimination. 

The idealised human body is the supreme symbol of harmony and happiness; it personifies admirable qualities that blur the distinction between the aesthetic and the ethical. It symbolises virtues like competence, discipline, courage, tenacity, independence, work, passion, creativity, optimism, and earned reward. Conversely, however unjustly, its opposite—the weak, neglected, unhealthy body—symbolises the countervailing vices: incompetence, indulgence, timidity, exhaustion, dependence, apathy, idleness, stagnation, sterility, hopelessness, and deserved failure.

In response to such prejudicial preconceptions, an obvious challenge might be raised: that there are people whose bodies are far from strong, healthy, or indeed beautiful but who have great intellectual or artistic power; people with extraordinary minds who do not seem to let their body’s imperfections curtail their destiny. 

A first class example is furnished by the case of the theoretical physicist and cosmologist, the late Stephen Hawking. For decades Hawking suffered from a profoundly debilitating, degenerative neurological condition, one which eventually killed him. It was impossible for him to cultivate a stronger, healthier, more beautiful body in any meaningful way and yet, despite being profoundly disabled, almost completely paralysed, and confined to a wheelchair, he was among the foremost scientists of modern times. Surely here we have proof that the state of the body can be an irrelevance, and is no impediment to psychological power, intellectual achievement, and worldly success? 

In response to this, let's be clear that our claim is that a strong, healthy body is highly advantageous for the best life, not that it is absolutely necessary. Certainly, we should acknowledge that Hawking did manage to cultivate an exceptional life despite his physical condition, but do you imagine that an alternative Hawking. in a parallel universe, with a body as exceptional as his mind would be more or less great? Isn’t it the case that Hawking’s greatness could only be magnified by the pairing of his exceptional intellectual achievements with the physical appearance and capabilities of, say, an elite athlete as well? Surely, that would be far preferable. 

If you find yourself reluctant to concede this, consider what Hawking himself would likely have chosen he had been given that choice: a great mind or a great mind coupled with a great body. Consider what you would choose if you were in his place.

But then it might argued that Hawking’s greatness is inextricable from his disability. The greater the trial, the greater the triumph—and so, firstly, we might consider whether the overcoming of his physical limitations was one of the things that made his intellectual achievements so impressive. It’s not just where you're in life that can be a measure of your success, but how far you've come—how much you’ve had to overcome. True, but let's take nothing away from the man: his contributions as a scientist would have been notable even without the context of his significant health challenges. Yet, let’s also acknowledge that the state of his body was not inconsequential in the world’s esteem of him. We have a soft spot for the underdog. They show us that seemingly insurmountable barriers can indeed be surmounted. Sometimes.

There’s a further consideration—a not insignificant one. Might it be the case that without his catastrophic diagnosis, Hawking would not have achieved what he did in his lifetime? Presumably, he was born with the necessary intellectual potential but, as we have discussed in a previous show, Nietzsche believed genius is far more common than is generally acknowledged, only, the right conditions are necessary in order to activate that latent potential: “the awakening call, that chance event which gives ‘permission’ to act” [BGE.274]. On this view, it is the catalysing opportunity rather than the ability that is most rare. In Hawking’s case, perhaps his diagnosis provided that catalyst—as Nietzsche writes, “being sick can even become an energetic stimulus for life, for living more.” [EH.I,2]. 

Indeed, Hawking has intimated something like this, describing his time in academia before his diagnosis as aimless and unmotivated. The news that his life was likely to be cut short, stirred him, after a period of severe depression, to use the time he had left to try and make his mark, and so he set his mind to tackling the biggest questions in his field with an unprecedented urgency. Many who knew him observed a marked shift in his dedication and productivity in that period.

It is a strange irony that a significant disadvantage can sometimes engender extraordinary determination, as in the cases of individuals who respond to, say, a life-changing disability with a new and unprecedented dedication to some discipline or other. Consider the case of many paralympians. Sometimes the prize-fighter has to be defeated in the first round in order to find his fighting form. Sometimes a populace has to suffer an excess of deprivation and oppression before the threshold is breached that triggers the violent revolution. Sometimes we need to feel we are losing in order to discover our motivation for winning. 

Nietzsche claimed that sickness was sometimes an indispensable ingredient in the development of greatness. Rhetorically, he asks if, “we could do without sickness for the development of our virtue, and whether our thirst for knowledge and self-knowledge would not especially need the sickly soul as well as the sound one” [GS.120]. With regard to his own suite of crippling ailments, Nietzsche sees their necessity and their value:

“I have often asked myself whether I am not much more deeply indebted to the hardest years of my life than to any others. […] And as to my prolonged illness, do I not owe much more to it than I owe to my health? To it I owe a higher kind of health, a sort of health which grows stronger under everything that does not actually kill it!—To it, I owe even my philosophy....” [NCW.Epilogue,1]

Nietzsche is sure: “I doubt whether such suffering improves a man; but I know that it makes him deeper….” In sickness sometimes there occurs a gainful expansion of experience, a questioning of what was formerly considered given, a shaking-out of complacency and apathy: “Trust in life has vanished; life itself has become a problem.” 

Returning to Hawking, perhaps his drive to succeed was as an expression of desperation, frustration, even fury at the injustice of his situation—his work an act of defiance in the face of his terrible affliction. Anger is energy. Then again, perhaps it was love of life and a desire to make a contribution to the human project. Of course, we can only speculate. Only Hawking knew what feelings really drove him, and perhaps not even he did with certainty. The more interesting question is, if he had not been afflicted with his condition, would he have achieved as much as he did? Perhaps so, perhaps not. We can never know. 

It is not impossible to live well without honing your body, but the honed body will profoundly increase your chances of living well. The pursuit of health is a natural healthy disposition; the neglect of health is pathology, by definition. This cannot be denied: it is healthy to strive to be healthy. Therefore, if you've the opportunity to make your body stronger and healthier, why wouldn’t you seize it during this one precious life that you have? 

Movement:

Everyone needs a routine of sufficiently intense regular exercise to achieve an optimal level of physical fitness. The human body did not evolve for sitting in a cubicle under strip lighting, fiddling with a mouse and keyboard for eight hours a day. Find any comfortable position, sitting, lying, or standing, and try to stay stock still for 30 minutes. Very soon it becomes uncomfortable. Later, it becomes nothing short of excruciating. Even the slumbering human has to change positions occasionally, and can do so without waking up. 

Stasis is dangerous. A person in a coma is at risk of pneumonia from the liquid slowly collecting in their lungs. If they are in a coma for a long time, their muscles atrophy, their tendons contract and stiffen, blood clots can form in their veins, and even the digestive system can slow down and get horribly backed up. Just as the world is dynamic, not static, so is the human body. This machine is designed for movement. Move more.

An exercise routine can comprise a variety of physical activities, sports, formal exercises, and resistance training—it is a question of individual preference and need. Each must decide for themselves what engages and motivates them. Some are suited to team activities, others prefer solitary disciplines. The end is more important than the means but, as a general rule, it is best to get a balance of activity that includes cardio (aerobic), strength (anaerobic), balance, and flexibility in a proportion that suits you. 

There is one further recommendation: try and get in touch with your animal nature. Though most of us now live in safe, civilised societies, it is surely still important that we can run, jump, climb, crawl, lift, push, pull, throw, swim and even fight when we have to. We might also mention, with all due discretion and reverence, that other fundamental animal gymnastic: sex. All these activities are the essential, primal life-skills that have shaped the evolution of the human body, enabling us, in prehistoric times, to chase game for food, scramble into the safety of a tree to evade predators, build shelters, cross rivers, prevail in battles against hostile neighbours, and propagate ourselves. Rarely, do most modern adults get the opportunity to engage in such a breadth of sports, but children can barely repress their instincts to do so (with the exception of sex, naturally). We call it ‘play’. let's say then, that the human animal is built for play. So play.

Any kind of activity that makes you sweat and gets your heart and lungs pumping is good, but running, climbing, scrambling, swimming, callisthenics, and any kind of unarmed martial art are especially pure. In short, if it is a physical activity that you could do naked and completely unequipped, it probably meets this criterion. Sure, we generally make use of shoes to run, rope to climb, goggles to swim and gloves to box but these appurtenances are not essential to the activities. These animal activities have a pure, natural utility to them—other animals don’t play with footballs; other animals don’t ride bicycles. Embrace whatever takes your fancy to help you get fit and strong but the non-animal activities might be considered supplemental. Consider these additional benefits too: running, climbing, scrambling, swimming, and fighting can save your life. Tennis won’t. 

There is an another human activity, natural and primal, that constitutes a perfect form of exercise: dancing. I recommended the practice of dancing as an exercise in one of the early shows. That form of solitary dancing is extremely valuable, but for optimising your health and fitness you can add a more social dancing practice to your exercise routine. Dancing of just about any kind, formal or informal, is a wonderful addition and isn’t just good for your physiology—dancing is inherently erotic; it cultivates grace and confidence.

Needless to say, in addition to plenty of physical activity, good health requires a balanced diet too. Plenty of good advice is widely available. Vegetables should be at the centre of your meals. Overeating, which most of us in affluent countries do all the time, treating every meal like a Tudor banquet, must be controlled and it can be controlled. The same can be said for the consumption of alcohol. 

Most of us know we need more exercise and a healthier diet and many of us want these things. However, it can be incredibly difficult to incorporate such changes into our lives. If knowing and wanting was enough to get people to make that positive change, the world would be full of fit, healthy people. you're probably aware that this is not the case. Why is it, then, that we are so often unable to do what we want ourselves to do? And it’s not just exercise and diet: we struggle and fail to make a whole range of changes that would improve our lives. On the surface, this doesn’t make any sense. We all have a choice, right? Is it just that we are too disorganised? Too weak-willed? Too lazy? You know what you want to do; why won’t you just do what you want you to do? Here we encounter a tangle of frustrating contradictions, but for the time being, let's be forgiving of our lack of total self control. There are evidence-based techniques that have been proven to increase chances of successful behaviour change. We shall look at some of these in the next show. 

Our goal is health, but more than this, our goal is the great health. In the Joyous Science 382, Nietzsche writes:

“The Great Healthiness We, the new, the nameless, the poorly understood, we firstlings of an as yet uncertain future – for new ends we require new means, namely a new healthiness, a stronger, shrewder, tougher, bolder and merrier healthiness than any hitherto possessed.” 

Will you achieve this great health? Are you prepared to strive for it? Can you, in the end, affirm the world and love fate?