Why did Nietzsche love to dance? (2024)

What is it about dance that can transport people, including atheists, to a kind of mystical reverie?

Nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche will be forever associated with the phrase, “God is dead.”

He excoriated the rule-bound Christianity of his rigid era as conformist and theologically false. But he didn’t give up completely on the divine. Not at all.

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He found the sacred through dance. As Nietzsche once said: “I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.” Nietzsche danced daily, saying it was his “only kind of piety,” his “divine service.”

I picked up another sense of what Nietzsche may have been talking about last night when we found ourselves dancing to the fantastic band, Star Captains, which includes Max Zipursky-Rhodes, Gavin Youngash, Jim Black, Nimish Parekh and Dan Klenner.

The Star Captains had a way of tuning into the mood of a crowd to keep the dancing energized and flowing at a merry, ecstatic pace.

We were at the annual Christmas dance organized by Richmond Hospital’s psychiatry department (no bad jokes please). The Star Captains had a large crowd on the dance floor movin’ and groovin’ to their smooth jazz, soul, hip hop and rhythm and blues, all performed with the band’s original, pulsating beats.

The Star Captains, who apparently play at the Fairmont and Shangri-la hotels and private events, were able to transform some old classics into fascinating, intoxicating dance rhythms, which had me and a bunch of other people who don’t dance regularly going for hours.

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(Aside: Most of those that Star Captain lured to the dance floor were women, of course, as has become the norm in North America. Many guys, raised on sports like hockey and soccer, often feel just too self-conscious and awkward to step on to the dance floor. Alas. What a loss for them – and for the women.)

Anyways, I know quite a few atheists, including men, who are extremely passionate about dancing. I’ll have to ask them more about why that is. Is it a Neitzchean thing? I can’t say last night’s dancing was an actual mystical experience.

But who knows? It was certainly liberating and happy and energizing and memorable and helped to give this often-hard life a sense of purpose. If that’s not considered a sacred experience, maybe we are working with a poor definition of mystical.

For the record, even though cranky Nietzsche went crazy as a result of syphilis at the end of his life, he was quite brilliant and eminently quotable. Here are more things he said about the significance of dance:

– “He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.”

– “I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his ‘divine service.’”

– “And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.”

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