Shitty Creatures With Great Ambitions

Florian Maiwald

25 November 2024

Only through lack do we become what we are: Shitty creatures with extraordinary ambitions.

In recent days, as I’ve been absorbing the news, a peculiar thought struck me about the grim state of the world we currently face. I kept returning to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s words in Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486)—the great Renaissance philosopher’s hymn of praise to human dignity. According to Pico's almost existentialist argument, human beings are the only creatures being created by the divine Creator who are capable of escaping any form of teleological purpose. In other words: in contrast to animals, plants and other metaphysical manifestations created by God, the central purpose according to Pico is not to have a fixed purpose. One could also formulate it like this, following Sartre: It is entirely within the mode of existence of humans themselves, based on freedom, to bring forth their own essence.

It cannot be the aim of such a short article like this to pursue an exact interpretation of Pico's remarks. What is much more interesting is why the thoroughly pessimistic world situation led me to think of Pico's poem. My first assumption is that Pico—a central lesson that psychoanalytic research provides—fails to recognize the fundamental antagonism (or the fundamental unease) that characterizes human existence.

Here, it is worth returning to Ernest Becker's thesis that humans are nothing more than gods with an anus—a fact that Quique Autrey aptly points out in an article. Here is Becker's line of thought:

Man's body is a problem to him that has to be explained. Not only his body is strange, but also its inner landscape, the memories and dreams. Man's very insides - his self - are foreign to him. He doesn't know who he is, why he was born, what he is doing on the planet, what he is supposed to do, what he can expect. His own existence is incomprehensible to him, a miracle just like the rest of creation, closer to him, right near his pounding heart, but for that reason all the more strange. Each thing is a problem, and man can shut out nothing. As Maslow has well said, "It is precisely the godlike in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This is one aspect of the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods." There it is again: gods with anuses.

With regard to the terminology used by Becker, one may quickly come to the conclusion that this is not more than a humorous provocation—but nothing could be further from the truth. Becker seems to gain an immediate sense of the naivety of Pico's romantic view of human nature when Pico writes in an unmistakably romanticizing manner that God...

took up man, a work of indeterminate form; and, placing him at the midpoint of the world, He spoke to him as follows: "We have given to thee, Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy very own, no gift peculiarly thine, that thou mayest feel as thine own, have as thine own, possess as thine own the seat, the form, the gifts which thou thyself shalt desire..."

However, what Becker recognizes with great precision—of course, these thoughts can also be found in Freud in a slightly similar manner—is that God has presented man with an impossible choice. At this point, one could even extend the argument so far that Pico's thesis that the indeterminacy of man is a gift from God has almost cynical implications. This can be illustrated not least by the fact—assuming one is willing to read between the lines in Pico's work—that Pico assumes that man is capable of finding the destiny that he himself desires. In short: Pico underestimates the human capacity for self-sabotage in an exorbitant way. Becker emphasizes in an almost clairvoyant way that the lack of fixed predestination, which inevitably characterizes human existence, rather confronts people with a helplessness that creates an unmistakable from of despair with regard to their own existence.

At this point, it seems worthwhile to take a closer look at the metaphorical significance of the anus with regard to the basic anthropological assumptions outlined by Becker:

With anal play, the child is already becoming a philosopher of the human condition. But like all philosophers he is still bound by it, and his main task in life becomes the denial of what the anus represents: that in fact, he is nothing but body so far as nature is concerned. Nature's values are bodily values, human values are mental values, and though they take the loftiest flights they are built upon excrement, impossible without it, always brought back to it. As Montaigne put it, on the highest throne in the world man sits on his arse. Usually this epigram makes people laugh because it seems to reclaim the world from artificial pride and snobbery and to bring things back to egalitarian values. But if we push the observation even further and say men sit not only on their arse, but over a warm and fuming pile of their own excrement—that joke is no longer funny. The tragedy of man's dualism, his ludicrous situation, becomes too real. The anus and its incomprehensible, repulsive product represents not only physical determinism and boundness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: decay and death.

In a similar way to the thesis formulated by Freud regarding the ambivalence of the cultural process, Becker assumes that human existence is characterized by an unmistakable form of tension. It is precisely our excrement—understood as the lowest form of bodily functions—that provides a central explanation as to why humans seem to strive to ascend to a god-like being. Becker explicitly warns against interpreting his metaphor as a humorous allegory of human existence (which might subsequently ensure a higher degree of equality among humans, as we are all equal in terms of our excretion process). Rather, human excretion stands for one of the most frightening determinations of human existence that humans are capable of feeling due to the awareness of their own existence: the transience of life itself. According to Becker, it is precisely for this reason that humans continually try to negate and fight the natural coordinates of their own existence:

To say that someone is "anal" means that someone is trying extra-hard to protect himself against the accidents of life and danger of death, trying to use the symbols of culture as a sure means of triumph over natural mystery, trying to pass himself off as anything but an animal. [...] Anality explains why men yearn for freedom from contradictions and ambiguities, why they like their symbols pure, their Truth with a capital "T."

Provocatively reinterpreted, Pico's poem could also be interpreted as an escape from the recognition of the human anus. However, one should not necessarily only focus on Pico's line of thought. Phenomena such as longevity are also based on a negation (or a refusal to acknowledge) human finitude. Furthermore, phenomena such as the ever-advancing climate change or the danger of a third world war being on the horizon suggest that the lowness of human existence—symbolized by the anus—also has an emancipatory potential. In other words: without the determination by our own and natural heteronomy, it is possible that we would not even be able to achieve the form of freedom that is peculiar to human beings, i.e. to acknowledge this heteronomy through our own body and to enter into a critical-reflexive relationship with it (a prerequisite for the emergence of culture and civilization). What seems to characterize the modern economic system—in other words, global capitalism (in its various forms)—is precisely this negation of excrement. If Western industrialized nations think—of course Trump is always the first to come to mind—that too much climate protection or a too equitable distribution of economic resources makes economic progress impossible, they also fail to recognize the fact that we are a transient species that depends on certain ecological and economic conditions to maintain its own existence. Here, I would like to expressly agree with Autrey that this realization—even if Becker does not explicate this view in this form—holds an unmistakable egalitarian potential. Autrey notes:

I may wholeheartedly disagree with my neighbors on the political right, but I refuse to refer to them as pieces of shit. This is not because I am worried about coming across as politically incorrect. When my clients refer to others as pieces of shit, I hear them saying they are immune from the atrocious beliefs and behaviors they accuse their enemies of. I am opposed to any fantasy that creates a category of people substantially separate from others. I refuse to call anyone this because to do so would be to imply that I am not a subject who shits. I do not believe that I am exempt from the anxiety and fear that fuels the atrocious positions of my political opponents. Common humanity is an important element of the left. My argument is that common humanity should be interpreted less as a shared positive trait (e.g., reason or cooperation) and more as a lack that we tarry with.

In order to be able to postulate a true form of equality, it seems appropriate to focus on the lack that unites all people. A lack without which any form of social progress would be unthinkable—because in order to be able to progress normatively towards something positive, one must first move away from something that is perceived as deficient—without denying this lack itself.

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