Regardless of the transformations within mountaineering itself, it seems obvious that the “nakedness,” that is both proposed and searched after therein, has come to be an expression of broader cultural trends which define anew what is human. The direction of this search is well illustrated by a statement by Desmond Morris: “[…] in becoming so erudite, Homo sapiens has remained a naked ape nevertheless; in acquiring lofty new motives, he has lost none of the earthy old ones” (1967: 9). This is by no means about the biologisation of humanist discourse, but rather the notion that “nakedness,” broadly conceived, is the key to understanding human beings. The Enlightenment question of the Nature of Man, independent of his culture, still reverberates here, but it returns in a slightly different guise.
The New Clothes
The aforementioned intertwining of nature and culture is ironically found in Thomas Carlyle’s novel Sartor Resartus, an apologia for the imaginary Philosophy of Dress. Here, the narrator points out that while man is by nature a Naked Animal, he is tacitly recognised as a Clothed Animal, and clothing as his distinguishing feature. It is worth quoting a longer passage at this point, which shows in a distorted mirror the discourse sketched above and the accompanying ideas about the human being:
How, then, comes it, may the reflective mind repeat, that the grand Tissue of all Tissues, the only real Tissue, should have been quite overlooked by Science,—the vestural Tissue, namely, of woollen or other cloth; which Man’s Soul wears as its outmost wrappage and overall; wherein his whole other Tissues are included and screened, his whole Faculties work, his whole Self lives, moves, and has its being? For if, now and then, some straggling brokenwinged thinker has cast an owl’s glance into this obscure region, the most have soared over it altogether heedless; regarding Clothes as a property, not an accident, as quite natural and spontaneous, like the leaves of trees, like the plumage of birds. In all speculations they have tacitly figured man as a Clothed Animal; whereas he is by nature a Naked Animal; and only in certain circumstances, by purpose and device, masks himself in Clothes. (Carlyle 1902: 2).