26 :: ? In a seminar where I presented a paper a number of years ago1 , I raised some eyebrows when I provided an interpretation of a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols. Nietzsche says: Learning to think ... logic as a theory, as a practice, as a craft, is beginning to die out ... there is no longer the remotest recollection that thinking requires a technique, a teaching curriculum, a will to mastery – that thinking wants; to be learned like dancing, as a kind of dancing. (TI 512). The philosophers who were present at the seminar were generally willing to accept that Nietzsche is arguing for the view that we should learn thinking “like” or “on the model” of dancing.2 However, I was arguing for something more: that Nietzsche goes beyond merely claiming that dance is a metaphor for philosophical thinking (that light and joyful thinking that is able to escape the spirit of gravity that Nietzsche decries in the nihilism that he diagnoses in 19th century culture), and is rather making another, much more radical, claim. He is, in my interpretation and is evident from the quote above, urging his readers to learn thinking as a kind of dancing, i.e. as a OR, WHY I AM A PHILOSOPHER OF DANCE species or subset of dancing. In my reading of Nietzsche’s many pronouncements on dancing and thinking, thinking is characterised as a bodily discipline that requires a specific physical technique. The implication of this, the one that some of the philosophers present found most unpalatable, is that a person who wants to know how to think must know how to dance. How, they asked, could thinking and dancing be reduced to the same level? Thinking surely belongs to the elevated realm of the rational and the logical; whereas dancing is, at best, an art that is the result of hours of bodily discipline, or, at worst, THINKING AS DANCING 1. I later published this paper as “Dance and/as art: Considering Nietzsche and Badiou”. The full reference appears in the reference list. 2. To my knowledge, the first published paper exploring Nietzsche’s conception of dance is that of Edward F. Mooney (1970).