17. The long war against the body

What if history’s greatest heresy wasn’t the rejection of God—but the rejection of the body?

In today’s show, we follow Nietzsche’s assault on the Christian hatred of the flesh. From medieval monks who saw filth as virtue, to saints who mutilated themselves in pursuit of ‘purity,’ we uncover a disturbing legacy: the systematic degradation of the body in the name of the soul. Christianity didn’t merely neglect the body—it waged war on it.

But this isn’t just religious history—it’s a philosophical reckoning. Nietzsche’s naturalism puts the body back at the centre of life, value, and meaning.

We close with a meditative practice to awaken your awareness of the evolutionary story written into your own anatomy.

The takeaway? Your body is not your prison—it is your potential. And far from being sinful, its impulses are the very stuff of life itself. You don’t have a body. You are one. And it’s time to rediscover its nobility—and restore the honour it is rightfully due.

As we continue this exploration, we’ll see that to affirm the body is to affirm life—and that this affirmation is the precondition of strength, of freedom, of power, and of joy.

Music: Misdirection by Dark Rooms

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

Transcript

Prelude:

The gold envelope is torn open and the master of ceremonies speaks: 'The award for exceptional and outstanding achievement, for making an unparalleled contribution, for being indisputably the greatest of all time, goes to . . .’ A pause, then you hear your name, and on its heels an eruption of applause. You get up from your table and head to the stage, people eagerly jostling each other to pat you on the back as you pass by. You step up in front of the crowd into a storm of flashbulbs and the master of ceremonies welcomes you warmly—and the master of ceremonies is you. 

Not only this, but the multitudes cheering around the auditorium are you too, and the TV crew capturing the ceremony are you, and they are broadcasting live across the globe to a home audience of millions who are also all you. Even the hoards of fans outside, waiting for hours in the rain with their autograph books and their selfie sticks for just one glimpse of their idol are you. 

As master of ceremonies, you present yourself with your award. You survey the crowd and meet the gaze of your adoring lovers, all of whom are seated right at the front. Like you, they are overcome with emotion, and they are you too. You move to the lectern to begin your acceptance speech. A hush of anticipation falls. You speak through tears of joy, a mere few words, but perfect words, perfectly suited to this perfect moment: 'Me.', you say, 'It's all about me!' 

The standing ovation that follows could not be more heartfelt. It really is all about you! Rightly, the world recognises just how special you are and you accept the acclaim you so very richly deserve. That feeling, right there, in that precise moment is one of colossal and unequivocal victory, of a definitive triumphant culmination, of an unshakable conviction in your own exceptional pre-eminence. It represents a love of self so deep, so profound, so naive and self-sufficient, that it does not even have any conception of anything outside of itself. And that supreme moment of joy in apotheosis is frozen eternally. Only that moment exists. That moment is existence itself.

Do you find this vignette of unrestrained self-adoration distasteful—embarrassing even? What kind of spoilt, self-entitled, hubris is this? Who is this insufferable individual? 

Allow me to introduce you to the cosmic pied piper and shameless anti-god, Dionysus. 

[intro]

Welcome folks. 

Hoping you are well. What news from my end? 

Well, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been writing a book on this material for the past 7 years. At the outset, I never envisaged that Nietzschean philosophy could be so vast. The book, accordingly, is huge, and though it would doubtless be streamlined by the editing process, it has long become clear to me that this is more than one book. So, a few months back I wrote the chapter on beauty, sexual attraction, and social status. That ended up being nearly 54,000 words, and that’s only a rough draft. Now a 54,000 word chapter is gargantuan, and in a book with ten chapters, you are talking half a million words potentially, which is insane! That’s longer than the Lord of the Rings trilogy! Think of it as 5-6 volumes of a standard trade paperback. Now obviously my text can and should be distilled down considerably, but even so, it’s a bigger project than a single book, so I’m taking the chapter on sex, relationships, and status and working that up into its own book. Right now I’m putting together the proposal and I’ll finally be submitting to a bunch of publishers in teh next few weeks. Will they go for it? Who knows, but I know for sure that there is no book like this out there, at least that I could find. It will of course be entirely practical—a book that is an aid to enhancing and elevating life. As I’ve mentioned before, Nietzsche writes in UM 3,8:  ‘The only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something, namely trying to see whether one can live in accordance with it, has never been taught at universities: all that has ever been taught is a critique of words by means of other words.’⁠ 

Speaking of universities and academic philosophy generally, I’ll be attending the International Friedrich Nietzsche society conference in Belfast in September. That’s a little out of the purview of this project—but if any of you are attending, it could be a chance to say hi. Message the show if you’re going.

To this week’s topic!

Of late, we’ve been discussing the status of the body in Nietzsche’s philosophy and last week we talked about the soul. Well, we made an attempt to isolate and identify this mysterious entity by uncovering its characteristics and functions. If you followed the meditation, you will have seen that, in my examination at least, the soul has no identifiable characteristics or functions. Every characteristic or function or physical feature or personality trait that you possess can instead be adequately accounted for by your body in the tripartite division, which I put forward as my interpretation of Nietzsche’s physio-psychology: to wit, your anatomy, your innate characteristics that you are born with, and your acquired characteristics, acquired from your body’s interactions with its environment during the course of your life. 

Now, you may have noticed that even this division into three is arbitrary. I mean, can you separate your anatomy from your innate characteristics? That doesn’t really make sense. And can you separate your anatomy and its innate characteristics from the interactions with the environment that produce acquired characteristics? Of course not. They are all of a piece. 

Consider that every part of your being is constructed from elements in your environment; not just the physical substance of your body, but everything you are capable of thinking or doing. Your instincts, feelings, and impulses are an inheritance from the countless generations of ancestors via your parents. Your language, culture, and habits come from outside—from your community which is a fact of the environment. There is nothing of you that is not drawn from the wider world—the empirical world, and, in principal, all of it can be traced and explained. No need for supernatural souls incarnating into the material world from some sort of astral plane then.

As was demonstrated, I hope, if the soul is a thing without any attributes or qualities, it isn’t a thing. It’s a nothing. Let that fiction go. So says Nietzsche.

But why? What harm does belief in souls do? Well, that’s what we will be discussing this week. The history of the denigration of the body—particularly in the west under the influence of Christianity. What history tells us, is that the elevation of the soul has been accompanied by the denigration of the body.

Body:

From antiquity, the metaphysical soul has been a ubiquitous and pivotal religious idea, not only in the Abrahamic traditions of the west—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—but also in Hinduism in the east. In fact, the world over, religions have postulated some kind of transcendental soul or spirit inhering in human beings. The ancient Egyptians believed in an elaborate multitude of souls in every individual, each serving a different function. Plato, not entirely unlike our old friend, Descartes, held that the soul (‘psyche’ in Greek, from which we derive our word ‘psychology’) was more real than the body because it was immortal; an eternal ‘form’ rather than an object of perishable matter like the body.  

The universality of what Nietzsche calls the ‘soul-fiction’ is a testament to the seductive nature of the delusion. As we have already observed, your conscious mind is ever-present to you and so you cannot easily imagine it ceasing to exist—why then should it not be immortal? Your mind seems to be able to travel beyond the confines of your body in dreams or flights of imagination—why then should it not be capable of existing independently of the body? If the mind, as a soul, is merely a temporary tenant in a mortal body, why should it not be capable of reincarnation in other bodies? The immaterial mind cannot be seen and it cannot be touched which suggests it emanates from a different order of reality than the world of objects you experience around you—why then should there not be a transcendent realm where it is most at home? Why should it not be capable of ascension to these ‘higher’ realms of existence after the death of the body? As an intelligent, self-aware being, the fact that you have this extraordinary capability for thought seems to lend your existence a profound significance that no other animal enjoys and so consciousness can surely only be the gift of a divine intelligence.   

In Christianity, the west’s dominant cultural tradition, the soul has always enjoyed exalted status. It is believed to be a thing of eternal, indivisible, spiritual substance. It is absolutely unique but also ‘equal before god’ with every other soul. In contrast the body, when Christianity was at the height of its power, was reviled as filthy, bestial and profane, being an object of changeable, base matter and therefore furthest from the purely spiritual realm of god and his angels. This attitude to the body is well illustrated by the sixteenth century Spanish, Catholic Saint, Ignatius of Loyola: ‘Let me look at the foulness and ugliness of my body. Let me see myself as an ulcerous sore running with every horrible and disgusting poison.’ For Nietzsche, this intense disdain for the body was an appalling side-effect stemming from an excessive veneration of the non-material soul. He went so far as to claim that ‘Christianity, which despised the body, has been the greatest disaster for humanity so far’.⁠1

Christian bodily denigration has inspired some spectacular self-neglect and self-abuse over its two-thousand year history. In the dark ages, simple care of the body, such as washing and bathing, was condemned as sinful vanity. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche refers to the Catholic recapture of Spain from the Muslim Moors in the 15th and 16th centuries when he writes that, in Christianity, ‘hygiene is rejected as sensuousness; the church defends itself even against cleanliness (– the first Christian edict following the expulsion of the Moors was the closure of the public baths – there were some 270 in Córdoba alone)’.⁠2 

Suspicious of any kind of basic bodily self-care, the medieval church also frowned on any concern to meet the necessities of general wellbeing. Voluntary poverty was praised as a virtue. Arduous fasting, long vigils of prayer and other such penitential ordeals were encouraged. Pilgrims would make long journeys to sites of spiritual importance, often perilous itself in an age of widespread banditry. The especially zealous might even walk the whole distance on their knees to demonstrate their piety through the intensification of their suffering. 

Because Jesus had claimed that his kingdom was ‘not of this world’, people abandoned their families and communities in order to remove themselves from the wickedness of temporal, real-world existence. They became monks, nuns, hermits, ascetic anchorites. A handful of remarkable individuals had themselves walled-up for life in tiny stone cells adjoining churches where they could live out their days in prayer. A small aperture allowed food and water to be passed in to them and waste products to be passed out. Others retired to the solitude of the wilderness. In a notable case, the fourth-century hermit, Saint Simeon Stylites (390-459), lived on top of a single column exposed to all the elements for 37 years and, in one account, ate only boiled vegetables until his skin began to crack, after which he agreed to dress his meagre dinner with a little olive oil. Nietzsche wonders whether such radicals, fleeing to the cloister, the cave and the desert, were driven not so much by love of god as by fear of life—the world-denying, world-decrying religionists are, for him, the original nihilists. 

Another favoured mania for religious ascetics was systematically starving themselves and, with contempt for any kind of comfort, wearing only sackcloth or coarse ‘hair-shirts’. They would sleep on freezing floors and scourge themselves with whips. Devices were manufactured, such as belts with inward facing spikes, that could be worn under clothing to keep the wearer in constant pain. These masochistic practices, purportedly in emulation of Christ’s suffering, were intended to edify the soul through the mortification of the flesh. Thanks to our old friend, Saint Augustine, the church taught that all human beings were party to the inborn guilt of original sin inherited from Adam and Eve and so such deprivations were well-deserved punishments as well as spiritually elevating disciplines. An especially distasteful case of the pursuit of absolute self-abnegation is furnished by the sixteenth century Carmelite nun, Maria Maddelena de' Pazzi who is said to have licked the purifying wounds of lepers. As might be expected, the Catholic church sainted her for these extraordinary degradations. Here was precisely the sort or perverse example they could commend to their flocks. 

[Promo]

Nietzsche is infamous for his repudiation of Christianity. As is often the case, things are a little more complicated than they might appear at first glance, but it is absolutely the case that Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for the Christian denigration of the body: ‘imagine how much we can despise a religion that teaches a misunderstanding of the body! that does not want to escape from the superstition of the soul! that makes a ‘merit’ out of poor nutrition! that fights health as a type of enemy, devil, temptation! that talks itself into believing that people can carry around a ‘perfect soul’ in a cadaverous body’.⁠3 The church’s absolute revulsion towards the body is recounted by Nietzsche when he cites the colourful epistle of Pope Innocent the third, issued in 1201 and known as ‘Vergentis in Senium’ (this is from GM 2,7): ‘Man has bred for himself that upset stomach and coated tongue through which not only have the joy and innocence of the animal become repulsive but life itself has become unsavoury:- so that he at times stands before himself holding his nose and, along with Pope Innocent the Third, disapprovingly catalogues his repulsive traits “impure begetting, disgusting nourishment in the womb, vileness of the matter out of which man develops, revolting stench, excretion of saliva, urine, and faeces”.’⁠4

The church condemned natural human appetites as sinful temptations orchestrated by that bogeyman, the devil. Sex especially, being inescapably physical, was denounced as a foul ritual. Its only tolerable function was to permit procreation. This church’s distaste for the body and its natural impulses, especially sex, is encapsulated in the formula ‘if thine eye offenders thee, pluck it out!’, and Nietzsche laments that ‘The Church combats passion by means of excision of all kinds: its practice, its "remedy," is castration. […] In all ages it has laid  the weight of discipline in the process of extirpation […] But to attack the passions at their roots, means attacking life itself at its source: the method of the Church is hostile to life.’⁠5 This reference to castration is not just a metaphor. Tradition has it that the third century church father, Origen, castrated himself so he would be not be tempted by the ‘sins of the flesh’ and an early Christian sect called the Valesians practised self-castration as a prophylactic against lustful acts. It was reported that the Valesians would even forcibly castrate unfortunate visitors and hapless travellers that stumbled across their path! 

In more recent history, and with verifiable records including photographs, a sizeable Russian Christian sect called the Skoptsy practised removal of the penis and testicles for men and removal of the breasts, clitoris and labia for women - sometimes with red hot irons and always without anaesthetic. The reproductive organs were believed to be impure, the ‘mark of Cain’ and the original ‘forbidden fruits’. The Skoptsy doctrine maintained that it was sexual coitus that had actually caused Adam and Eve to be expelled from the garden of Eden. To become sexless was to return to the pristine pre-fall state. The Skoptsy cited Matthew 19:12 as justification: ‘For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.’ Most theologians have interpreted the term ‘eunuch’ here as merely a euphemism for celibate; the Skoptsy were not prepared to take any chances.

We will have much more to say about Nietzsche’s healthier, more pagan view of sex later, but the general tenor of his position can be gleaned from his repudiation of the Christian account of the virgin birth: that through its dogma of the ‘immaculate conception’ Christianity has robbed conception of its immaculateness (A.34). In his view, the church actively set out to make people feel as sinful as possible and it did this by 'labelling the unavoidably natural as bad'.⁠6 This notion is worth some consideration: to feel that one’s sexual impulses are disgusting when one’s sexual impulses are an utterly inalienable part of one’s nature—what kind of fiendish, cynical trap is this? One might as well make it a sin to make a bowel movement. Imagine a dog owner who punished his dog every time it needed to do its business—one would consider it a particularly perverse form of cruelty and call in the authorities. In Nietzsche’s view, this is essentially what the church did, and it did it because it was only by making the individual feel irredeemably sinful that they could be brought under the power of the church, for only the church had the power to absolve and mitigate these inalienable sins. 

For some medieval Christian theologians, matter itself was evil and so the body, being matter, was evil too. The logical endpoint for such a culture of profound self-loathing was a fervent yearning for extinction. Martyrdom to the faith was glorified and provided the principal morally-legitimate means for shedding the detestable body. Many a religious devotee went joyfully to their execution when just a few words of renunciation could have saved their lives. Reportedly, the condemned sometimes sang hymns as the torturer practised his arts or the flames began licking their skin. For the faithful in the early Roman Empire, as well as in later centuries when proselytising to the heathens, martyrdom was an occupational hazard and perhaps also a career opportunity. The church routinely canonised these martyrs for their troubles, thereby seeding a general eagerness to make the ultimate sacrifice. Nietzsche argued that, in fact, Christianity virtually promoted suicide in two forms and ‘invested them with the highest dignity and the highest hopes […] martyrdom and the slow self-annihilation of the ascetic’.⁠7 

But it was not just Christians - half a world away, eastern mystics would neglect, torture and extinguish themselves as a religious observance. Even the Buddha renounced all his possessions, embraced privation and starved himself almost to death. For Nietzsche, ‘Wherever the doctrine of pure spirituality has prevailed […] it taught that the body should be despised, neglected, or tormented, and that, on account of his impulses, man himself should be tortured and regarded with contempt.’⁠8 It is for all these reasons that Nietzsche asks ‘Could any aberration be more dangerous than the contempt of the body?’⁠9

Before continuing, music: Nietzsche is the philosopher of music, of dancing, of art, of the aesthetic, of feeling, and so I recommend a track every week that reflects the moods and emotions of this will to joy project—at least as I experience them.  

I invite you to have your own feeling experience, framed within the project we are exploring, while listening to Misdirection by Dark Rooms. This track obsessed me for a little bit. I generally get up early before it gets light and do a little writing while I drink coffee. This early rising is not a personal discipline by the way, it’s just my body clock. Anyway, I listened to this track a few times in the early hours and it happened to become associated with a breakthrough I had regarding the nature of Nietzsche’s Dionysus. That has stuck with me and I get a intuition of it every time I hear that song. The song itself has an overwhelming climactic feel towards the end and some really intense, emotional singing.

For me, the track evokes night time. Drama. Pain. Intense longing. Light in darkness. A sort of sweet desperation. And a kind of power and a kind of thrill. Anyway, see what it does for you.

Links, as always, in the show’s description. 

Do share your thoughts—someone’s going to one of these days. You can message me right from the link in the show’s description. 

As with the last show, once again might be accused of self indulgence here—mea culpa. Certainly, the vignettes above are the extremes of Christian practice and a more ‘balanced’ assessment could be made. I concede that this may be true, but the point of Nietzsche’s critique is that this is where the Christian cult inevitably tends, it’s logical endpoint—this is Christianity in its hidden yet implicit meaning, that the body, and its natural appetites, and the world of which it is an alienable part, are detestable. And it sets up against them fictions: the nonsense of a pristine, transcendental soul; and the absurdity of a perfect afterworld. Consider Christianity’s symbol, so revealing and yet something to which we are so inured that its horrifying import is completely overlooked: an emaciated corpse, the victim of an ignominious torture execution, nailed-up to a cross. Isn’t Nietzsche right?—Isn’t this the perverse consecration of psychological ill-health?

So what’s the lesson here? Well, that you body isn’t something secondary or unimportant. It is, in every sense, the real you. You don’t live in your body—that’s a mistake—you are your body. And so care of the body, reverence for it, and reverence for all its impulses is a healthy orientation. As that pervert and junkie, Sigmund Freud, wrote ‘anatomy is destiny’ and even he was right some of the time. 

Freud was really only thinking of sex differences when he coined this snappy maxim; Nietzsche thinks the ramifications of the facts of anatomy go much further than this. Why is anatomy destiny then? Anatomy is destiny because your body entirely determines your life experience. To put that in Nietzsche’s terms, your physio-psychology, along with the facts of the environment in which you find yourself, provides a complete naturalistic explanation for all your behaviour and all your experiences. 

Sceptical? Well, join me next time when I will provide compelling proof that Nietzsche was absolutely right: your body is your destiny.

In the meantime, a simple practice for you. 

De Profundis: 

But before we explore the practice, a notice on the De Profundis membership on Patreon. I established that recently for those who want to go farther, deeper, faster into this strange world of Nietzschean philosophy and reap its life-changing rewards. 

So there right now, waiting for the intrepid, is an exclusive podcast recording on the topic of master psychology and slave psychology as it manifests itself in the modern human being. In BGE 212, Nietzsche asks, “is greatness possible today”. Well, the foundation for greatness is to be master of oneself, to have an internal locus of authority, to decide for yourself, to have your own taste, your own rules—a vanishingly rare phenomenon. How rare? Well, sign up and find out. It’s ten dollars a month, which honestly, I think is a pittance for the value that is on offer. It just can’t remain so inexpensive forever. But early adopters will benefit, and early adopters will have my gratitude and so I’ll extend special privileges to my first few members over time as this project progresses. And it will progress. That’s something I no longer have any choice in.

So as well as this exclusive show on the possibility of self-mastery, I’m providing, not one but three practices that will aid the development of self-mastery. There’s a practice called Via Dolorosa, which is Latin for the way of sorrow— that probably doesn’t sound too tempting, but trust me, I can guarantee that you will never have experienced anything like this in you life. There’s an exercise called Beck and Call—I’ll let you use your imagination about that one. And there’s a challenge called, The Madman. 

I’m also going to set a a discord group for Patreon members at some point, where ideas can be exchanged and I can field any questions. I’d going to post something for the De Profundis members at least every month including some of my own reflections on my experiences and progress with the practices from this programme.

If you are intrigued by this, I suggest you sign up. Details as always in the show’s description. Dare to stare into this abyss and be ready for it to stare into you!

To the practice:

PRACTICE. Meditation on anatomical morphology

‘the past continues to flow through us in a hundred channels.’⁠10

In its physio-psychology your body is a remnant, a testament, a culmination, and a waypoint. The human body confides, speaking of the distant past from whence it came and yielding clues as to whither it will go. Take some time now to discern the body’s history written into its flesh.

Barefoot, in a quiet and private space, seat yourself. Outdoors is best. Breathe, relax, and make a careful study of your hands. Note their complexity of form, their dextrousness, their acute sensitivity to touch—pressure, texture, and temperature. See how purposefulness itself seems to be designed-in—those hands are intentionality made corporeal. Such versatility: adept at grabbing, holding, throwing, squeezing, pushing, prying, pulling, picking, pinching, poking, stroking, crushing, crafting, catching, tickling, manipulating, scratching, exploring, and not least for striking—yes, these are weapons as well as tools.

It is important that you do not hurry this examination. Reflect deeply on the millions of years that had to elapse for this precise morphology to develop; for the human hand to be shaped, a process of trial and error—billions of prototypes discarded on the way to this very particular design. Your hand is as perfect a tool for facilitating the natural activities of human life as you could hope for—can you even imagine how the human hand could be improved? What a wonderful piece of biological engineering.

Now, turn your attention to your feet. Compare them with your hands. Note the relative lack of dexterity in your feet. They seem rather lumpen and clumsy by comparison. Their functionality is considerably limited by comparison. And yet consider that, in the remotest past, among your genetic ancestors, the foot had been much more like a primitive hand—almost indistinguishable from one, in fact. Our most ancient forbears, ancestors we share in common with chimpanzees, spent most of their lives in the trees. In that acutely three-dimensional world, grasping feet were inordinately useful, not to say essential. It is only when they ventured down from the trees and adopted a more terrestrial existence, living on a two-dimensional plane, that the foot embarked on its metamorphosis towards the anatomical form you are now inspecting. A new bipedal lifestyle necessitating different physiological solutions; an appendage re-shaped for new functions: walking and running.

With this reflection on the foot’s history of development; its transition from grasping, dextrous hand to its current form—static, stunted, apparently stupid, slab-like, somewhat atrophied—see how utterly malformed that hand has become. Imagine those cloddish feet at the end of your wrists—how impossible life would be. On this view, the foot is a monstrous travesty of a hand. See it. See the deformity of this ‘hand’.

After a few minutes, adjust your view and adopt a different perspective. See the foot’s adaption to a new way of life and a new set of tasks. In place of its old clutching functions, it now perfectly fulfils other duties: supporting the body, providing a firm, dependable foundation, working in concert with the body to enable stability, balance, shock absorption, agility, and speed. Over unimaginable tracts of time, the bones, joints, and tendons of the foot have rearranged themselves; the skin on the soles has thickened to protect the vulnerable flesh beneath; this painstaking process of re-engineering has been under way for thousands upon thousands of generations to reach this remarkable and beautiful form. It is not finished yet. Nothing is ever finished. 

A radical anatomical transformation to meet changing conditions of survival and flourishing—what breathtaking genius is this?

To conclude: What have we learned from this episode?

We’ve seen that the traditional notion of the soul—this supposedly immaterial, eternal essence—collapses under Nietzsche’s naturalistic scrutiny. Once stripped of all attributes, it vanishes like smoke. In its place stands the body—your living, evolving, utterly worldly body—its the true locus of your identity, your experience, your thoughts, your passions, and  power. Nietzsche’s challenge is radical: abandon the fiction of the soul, and with it, abandon the toxic legacy of self-hatred that has haunted Western culture for millennia. What he offers instead is not just a critique, but a reorientation: a reverence for the body, a vindication of its instincts, and a deeper understanding of how our physiology speaks history, purpose, and possibility. 

Your body is not your prison—it is your potential. And far from being sinful, its impulses are the very stuff of life itself. As we continue this exploration, we’ll see that to affirm the body is to affirm life—and that this affirmation is the precondition of strength, of freedom, of power, and of joy.

1 TI.47

2 A.21

3 A.51

4 GM.2,7

5 Portable Nietzsche, pg. 74, note from 1880-1881

6 GM.141

7 GS.131

8 D.39

9 WP.1016

10 Human, All-Too-Human, Part II, 223