I would only believe in a god who could dance...

Image: Yogendra Singh

"I would only belive in a god who could dance,

and when I found my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound and solemn:

it was the spirit of gravity - through him  all things fall."

- Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

 Dance is a central theme for Nietzsche. It’s rarely recognised as such because generally the folk who dissect Nietzsche consider themselves thinkers - and thinkers don’t dance. Like much of Nietzsche’s writing this is true both literally and metaphorically. 

Why is dance so important? Let’s move swiftly, lightly: let’s say, for the sake of argument, that cognition is embodied. Dance is an expression of mental freedom; how we move on the floor represents how we move mentally. The armchair thinker is going nowhere.

I know this seems lighthearted but it’s really terribly serious: it’s the death of you.

When you stop dancing, you are already dead. ‘Dance’ is deep for Nietzsche - a sentiment, a ‘stimmung’. A feeling that is the measure of life. It shows in our writing as it does in our feet. Once a thinker begins to take themselves too seriously, once the spirit of gravity has taken hold of them, they are incapable of movement. They will merely trot out the same old self-affirmations for the remainder of their days, like a scratched record. Let's be thinkers for a second and say 'their self-identity has become so tightly bound to their core beliefs that they are incapable of recognising or accepting any challenge to them.'

So I worry at our modern sense of gravity, of seriousness. I worry that we have lost dance. I turn away from fossils to towards TikTok and encourage you to do the same. Laughing at myself has become a matter of life and death.