On Dance, and Nietzsche

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I still have a great deal to learn from Friedrich who, over the years, has been my mentor and guide.

The greatest difficulty in reading Nietzsche seems to be people’s inability to read him literally; scholars especially tend to over-interpret his works. Nietzsche himself was well aware of this – indeed it is one of the many things he finds to laugh about, namely that truth is the kind of thing that you can’t simply say – or if you do, people will hear something different. Specifically they will hear the lie that they prefer to believe, no matter how plainly you express yourself. You cannot ‘undress’ truth – whatever you do, people will see it in the clothes they like to picture.

How funny is that? The very people who imagine they are looking for truth are the least equipped to see it when it stands naked before them – precisely because that is why they are philosophers, to escape from reality!

So sometimes he tells it straight – knowing that it will be taken for allegory – other times he plays with allegory since, after all, exactly the same thing is achieved.

Why? He’s quite explicit on this point: truth is toxic. It’s the kind of thing we weren’t designed to handle. There’s no value in truth – life depends on our ability to construct, and value, a lie. At a psychological level this is merely a statement of fact: a galaxy of biases and delusions keep us afloat. It’s only how much truth you can bear that is in question.

Take this statement, for example – one of my favourites: ‘we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once’ (Thus Spake Zarathustra) Can you bear to take that literally? What did you think was worthwhile in your life? The contribution you make to progress? Your charitable deeds? Your legacy?

No. The most significant thing you will accomplish in your life, is to dance once in a while. Dance is an unconditional affirmation. A way of saying 'I don't have to lie, to make life ok.' This is what his ‘revaluation of values’ means – stripping away some of the assumptions on which your sense of purpose is built, all the way back to ground zero. You will literally live your life in exactly the same way for all eternity; dance is absolutely the most meaningful thing you can do (or you can just content yourself with a bunch of delusions, if that’s what you need to get by).

At the opening to Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche asks us ‘what if truth be a woman?’; not metaphorically a woman – literally a woman. He is asking us whether the entire history of philosophy is no more than birdsong – an attempt to attract a mate. And so he cautions us to listen out for resentment in the philosophical ‘truths’ offered by our philosophers – after all, we stop singing when we succeed. Philosophy is just the sound of one kind of failure or another. Philosophy - no more than "unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman".

Of course, he loves the idea of a ‘song of success’ – a philosophy which is the sound made by someone who can bear the weight of truth and accept it. And he’s been listening out for it – he’s just never heard it. He foretells a new kind of philosopher – a healthy philosopher, a dancing philosopher, an ‘Ubermench’ whose affirmation of life is expressed in dance - not fleetingly on a drunken night, but perpetually in his/her thoughts and deeds.

How does Friedrich know so much about sick philosophy and healthy philosophy? He tells us himself: it’s because he’s sick. More precisely, he bounces back and forth between unbearable sickness and an exuberant sense of health that comes with relapse – and he’s noticed how these physical states influence his thinking. He can see what sickness does to a philosophy, so he can recognise it in others. He sees, for example, the hallmark of misery in all those philosophies that offer another ‘better’ world – whether that be Plato’s world of forms, or the Christian heaven. ‘You deserve better’ they whisper ‘this world isn’t fair’ – our philosophy offers The Way.  He cautions us not to succumb to this desire to turn our backs on reality, but instead to embrace it to the extent we are able. But who will hear this call? Certainly not the idiot philosophers reading philosophy books! So he laughs, and writes ‘for everyone and no-one’.

Time and time again he reminds us to see philosophy as no more than the grumbling that results from a poor diet, sickness, or trouble with the opposite sex – but we can’t take that view seriously, because we need to take ourselves so terribly seriously. We have no time to dance. We are working on something or other important.

For my part it has taken me decades to unravel his statement that ‘thoughts are merely the shadows of emotions’ (The Gay Science). By ‘unravel’ I mean to rid myself of all the Platonic resentment that made humankind believe they were somehow any different from other creatures – to see us for what we are: merely creatures that feel and make noises. Not gods, not souls destined for higher things, nor empowered with 'reason' that somehow sets us apart. Merely physical objects, born of basic desire, that feel and crave and suffer and cry out, making noises that we call ‘words’ to correspond to the feelings that we call 'thoughts' (to hide what is really going on).

And yet this fundamental assertion – that desire does not somehow emerge, but is instead the essential nature of all things – this still overwhelms me: the unravelling of the universe as an expression of desire – that is a very big thought, it seems to me.

Learning, education – these have been some very small lies in the grand scheme of things. And in that grand scheme it makes no difference whether I expose them or not. You and I go round, we will do this all again. It matters more that, once in a while, I laugh and dance and don’t fall victim to thinking myself more important than I am.

(And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh)

Image: Yogendra Singh