Philosophy is in the head

Existentialism Is a Healthy Poop

Excerpts from Sartre’s lost “journal de toilette”

Excerpts from a previously unknown journal written by Jean-Paul Sartre found in a hiding space near the toilet of his first apartment. Fascinatingly, these fragments explore an area of existentialist thought that Sartre apparently abandoned.

“Breakthrough today. I have never been able to achieve acceptance of anguish, but today, after two coffees, I was able to have my first healthy poop since University. For a few seconds, I was able to forget my essence and only exist. I was at peace with the anguish. I must tell Simone.”

“Man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only after a healthy poop, defines himself. At first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be — a healthy poop.”

“Motherfucker! Hell is other people knocking on the bathroom door while you are trying to have a healthy poop! Goddammit, people!”

“Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do — except a healthy poop. It’s always a good time for a healthy poop.”

“A crowd of small metamorphoses accumulate in me without my noticing it, and then, one fine day, a veritable revolution takes place, and then I poop.”

“If God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior? Yes, we are. Those behaviors which lead to a healthy poop are legitimate.”

“Smooth and smiling faces everywhere, but ruin in their eyes. Why won’t these people poop!?”

“I had found my religion: nothing seemed more important to me than a healthy poop. I saw the bathroom as a temple. The commode as an altar.”

“Anything, anything would be better than this agony of the colon, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one’s intestines and never hurts quite enough. One can live without healthy poops, but should one?”

Notes for a novel

“She smiled and said with an ecstatic air: ‘It shines like a little diamond.’

‘What does?’

‘This poop. It is round, it hangs in empty space like a little diamond; It is eternal.’”

“He was free, free in every way — he could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him. Whether he had a healthy poop was entirely up to him, and the consequences of an unhealthy poop fell entirely upon him.”

“I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything. Even the quality of your poops.”