Anyone who’s been filthy enough will tell you: to be clean after a shower is an amazing thing. The sensation doesn’t last, though. Even in the most temperate of climates dust latches onto our skin, and we begin again the slow journey towards becoming absolutely, intolerably, filthy. Considering this, it is no coincidence that we refer to our sins and moral wrongdoings as ‘dirt’. After all, the condition of being physically dirty parallels the condition of being morally or spiritually ‘dirty’.
To Nietzsche, this matter of uncleanness was illusory, a mental construct. He argued that if humanity collectively stopped looking to God and started coming to terms with the evils of the world, human society would be propelled towards a truly transcendent understanding of what is good and ‘life-affirming’.