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I would only believe in a god who knew how to dance.
And when I saw my devil, there I found him earnest, thorough, deep,
somber: it was the spirit of gravity – through him all things fall.

– Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, section “On Reading and Writing.”

Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that deals with normativity or judgment outside the narrower realms of behavioral interaction (ethics) and permissible and impermissible reasoning (logic). In general, aesthetics is far less restrictive than ethics and logic. But aesthetic judgment still attempts to insert order on what is more – or less – preferable. On the basis of what? The urgency for imposing order is clearer in the case of ethics or logic…

Aesthetics compasses the philosophy of art (and much more besides, but regarding the fine arts it has much to say). We touched on the plastic arts here, and will eventually get around to music. This time we do dance.

Dance1 as art invites philosophical questions and reactions such as:

What is dance? How is it different from other movement?

Is it merely biophysical? Or expression at a earlier evolutionary stage than language? Occurring even in animals, even in entities that may only give the appearance being alive?

Is it a form of body-to-body communication, bypassing cognitive involvement? Perhaps more basic than the other arts? But “communication” already implies cognitive involvement. Some thing is being communicated, what precisely? To the extent it is involuntary, like a sneeze (which may only communicate microbes), it is not art.

What aspects of dance ground its appeal?

  • grace
  • athleticism
  • agency over body (or the reverse: the body grounding cognition)
  • visceral expressiveness

As art, how is dance like and unlike other art forms? What is essential about its manifestation along the external dimensions of time and space, and the internal ones of emotion and cognition?

  • dance – occurs essentially in time, space, and emotively
  • music – occurs essentially in time and emotively
  • plastic arts – occur essentially in space
  • theater – occurs emotively and cognitively
  • film – occurs emotively and cognitively
  • literature – is essentially cognitive
  • performance art – open to all the above; dance clearly is a form of performance art, though performance art is not limited to physical expression (one day I will address how philosophy is performance art - ideas, too, can "perform")

These attempts to state what is basic about an art aside, nothing stops an art form – dance, for instance – from incorporating cognitive content, thereby spiking its punch with commentary, while remaining art and, as such, not prescribing anything. Nevertheless, the visceral means of expressing that dance (along with music) offers, when coupled with cognitive content may be especially potent (as in the Yoann Bourgeois or the "Katharsis" pieces linked to below).

Why would Nietzsche say that only a god who could dance could win him over?

A collection of dance and motion art shorts for entertainment and consideration

Yoann Bourgeois series

Bent and cathartic

Expanded pdf version of this writeup.

Philosophical resources
“Dance as Philosophical Literature | Interview with Renee Conroy” (video), The Calumet Roundtable, Conroy, a dancer and philosopher, attempts answers to some basic questions about dance.

“The Philosophy of Dance” (article), Renee Conroy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2025. Dance approached from a mostly analytic perspective.

We may refer to some of the things discussed in a previous foray into art, here mainly the plastic arts: "Art: what is not in the eye of the beholder." Much, though not all, of it applies as much to dance as art.

“The Importance of Dancing like an Idiot,” (video), The School of Life, Alain de Botton’s “free-range” philosophy view.

“Roger Scruton: Why You NEED to Dance (the Philosophy Explained),” (video), Cultural Consolation, comments on the Nietzschean concepts on the Dionysian and Apollonian and the place of dance within them.

1. For purposes of this discussion, we define dance as motion manifesting agency without lucid goal. It is not accidental, but not utilitarian, not therapeutic either physically or mentally, except incidentally, and not confined to humans either as performers or as audience. It is fundamentally expressive, which entails the presence of an audience to appreciate the communication but not necessarily to cognitively interpret it.

Related topics

Intellectual Discussions
Metaphysics
Aesthetics

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