Bardet argues that thought and movement are intertwined gestures. The intersection of thinking and moving creates a dynamic where movement becomes thought, and thought becomes movement. This abstraction of dance to its most primal form—movement—suggests that thought without movement cannot exist. Echoing Heraclitus, Bardet reminds us that the essence of existence is movement itself.

The movement inherent in dance represents the mind’s journey through the Platonic world of ideas. If we consider parallel dimensions, dance might create a fissure allowing pure ideas to enter reality, ready to be grasped by the dancing thinker. This thinker, through dance, can break free from the rigid structures that bind them to a world of superficial opinions and cognitive biases.

Imagining a philosophy infused with dance that could be studied or even expressed in academic prose is challenging. The impersonal nature of academic writing seems at odds with the spontaneous vitality of dance. This raises several questions: Can philosophy exist without dance? Or is all philosophy inherently a display of movement? How should we judge the work of thinkers who lack this agility?

In this light, philosophical prose would require a style akin to the Socratic-Dionysian dance. The aesthetic character of dance would become essential to philosophical writing and philosophy itself. Consequently, the relationship between philosophy and aesthetics would shift; aesthetics would no longer be a mere branch of philosophy but its backbone, especially in an era of widespread skepticism and disillusionment.

It is also crucial to understand dance as an individual phenomenon and see how its essence infiltrates the philosophical realm. From a Nietzschean perspective, Martinez Gallardo describes dance as an intrinsic quality of God, portraying a being vital and transcendent beyond conventional morality. Dance emerges as a significant element in an epistemological quest and a quality that brings life and connects humans with a higher aspect of themselves. This understanding gains even more importance in the modern era, marked by the death of God and the triumph of philosophical skepticism. Thus, dance, with its total bodily engagement, can revitalize the art of thinking and bring us closer to a new conception of divinity.

In this new vision, the divine arises from human willpower, guiding us across the abyss. This god is rooted in an archaic substrate beyond rationality, embodied in the pure expression of creativity—an unstoppable cosmic instinct. This divine presence shines brightest during the wild, unrestrained Dionysian festivals, outside the established order and Apollonian restraint, where blood, wine, desire, and dance merge in vigorous communion.

The convergence of dance and philosophy, as Bardet suggests, occurs in a setting that is not necessarily civilized. Dance offers an escape from the ordinary, Apollonian, and confined civilization. There is perhaps a connection between dance and madness, as both can open the field to new forms of understanding reality. Physicist Vadim Zeland notes that excessive seriousness and importance attributed to an idea create a kind of resistance that hampers the free flow of vital consciousness energy. This resistance, termed potential excess, dissolves through concrete action, particularly when it involves both body and mind. In this sense, dance acts as a perfect solvent for potential excess and, thus, the primary opponent of the free flow of consciousness and thought.

Dance, therefore, becomes a medium through which we can transcend the limitations of rigid, schematic thinking. It allows for a fluid, dynamic interaction with truth, mirroring the perpetual motion of life itself. Through dance, the thinker can break free from the chains of dogma and preconception, embracing a more holistic and embodied approach to philosophy. It is not a surprise, then, that even in the most authoritarian of environments, dance is usually the last thing that can be prohibited. Perhaps this is a signal of the intrinsic freedom that is found within the rhythmic movement, which has not only a liberating power but also the capacity to elevate the morale of whoever allows himself to go with the flow

From the movement of molecules to the explosion of the Big Bang, life in retrospect seems to be nothing more than a grand, majestic dance that transcends language itself and reconnects the individual with their true self. And if the thinker of the most abstract order dares to learn this discipline, perhaps they may reach places where few dare to venture. And perhaps it is this never-ending dance that is destined to take us there. Thus, we must think, dance, and think once more.

References:

Alvaro, D. (2016). Articulating gestures: Review of Bardet, M. (2012). Thinking with movement: An encounter between dance and philosophy. Buenos Aires: Cactus. In Diferencia(s) Journal, 3(2), 223-230. ISSN 2469-1100.

Bardet, M. (2012). Thinking through movement: An encounter between dance and philosophy. Buenos Aires: Editorial Cactus.

Martinez Gallardo, A. (2018). Why every philosopher should know how to dance. Retrieved from Pijama Surf.

Zeland, V. (2004). Reality transurfing, vol. 1: The space of variants. S.l.: Obelisco Editions.

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Videogames, video clips, anime, and Tarantino movies could be considered the four horsemen of the apocalypse: those ready to extirpate the world and psychological understanding of all its substance, to reduce neuronal connections to their minimum expression, to turn us into easily conditioned Pavlovian creatures. However, in more than one respect, such prophecies seem not to have been fulfilled but to have unfolded as the exact opposite of what they preached in the first place. Yes, it is true that, to a large extent, we resemble a bunch of overstimulated beings with less attention span than a mosquito. But couldn’t the overstimulation be a greater energetic capacity? A return to Dionysian sacredness?

As for lack of concentration (and that obscure stigmatization that turned out to be the 90s epidemic of ADHD), in most cases, it is a matter of “being everywhere and nowhere at once,” a role that may quietly grant us some reminiscence of the altered states of consciousness acquired through meditation. Overstimulation has made us immune to it, in the same way a snake becomes immune to the venom it carries within its body every day. We are all city dwellers with the brains of hyped squirrels.

We surpass the speed of light, we travel through time, and images become substance. After all, why should we fall into this arbitrariness in which only in written words is substance found? Few remember that Plato himself was worried about the propagation of books, for they would mean the undermining of oral tradition. This meant a warning to the young to only use books moderately as a secondary helping tool, perhaps. The old becoming scandalized by youngster´s behavior: a tale as old as time.

Our substance, our existential stimulus, is different from our parents’: now it is pure image. It is more colourful: We generate neon gods almost daily. We have as many gods as musicians, publicists, graphic designers, filmmakers, photographers, and so on. All of these constitute a creative act, which requires a certain potential: whatever this potential capacity is, it has been exponentiated.

Television parodies, dank memes, acid humor, and ecstatic nights in the desert allow us to lighten our inherited karmic weight. A lot of weight has been thrown at us. Still, the culture of massive information and accelerated images has given us the necessary tools to drain it, to cut with a millenary chain that has been the yoke of the human being. This has happened spontaneously; we could call it the natural course of events. What for older generations is vanity, stupidity, superficiality, and lack of “metaphysical depth” (keeping in mind that wars waged during the 20th century by the heirs of the Enlightenment, it would be necessary to analyze whether the metaphysics they used were not, at their root, corrupt), for us represents a certain redemption.

If the entire millennial and centennial population chilled with the expectations of a world not built for us but that, nonetheless, we shall inherit sooner or later, existential dread levels would decrease. The deflation of all promised to be so much more than it is would bring us a new world that is fresh, relaxed, and immune to false messiahs. Spontaneous, childlike sensitivity and intuition would break through as the new values.

If we are accused of being a childlike generation, then praise be, for this translates as VIP passes into heaven. However, heaven, understood as a separation from our natural organic life cycle, poses more dangers than blessings.

This leads me to the second part of the argument: the upcoming globalized world for the benefit of the common youth. I believe the extinguishing of any civilization has arisen from separating our lives from our deaths or expecting death as a distant event to redeem us from all the accumulating miasma. We are dying, the emptiness lies beneath us, and such an event gives us space to continue generating wild gods capable of promising only what they are at that moment. The blank space of the canvas emerges as the promise of a great work. The purge of all the tortuous elements that have been tormenting us could be considered our priority, no longer as a matter of intellectual pride but of pure survival instinct.

I will elaborate next. Human power has exponentiated to titanic levels, a third great war would end each and every one of us, or leave us in a cavernous age followed by a nuclear winter. As I mentioned, our surrender to the seemingly superfluous and childish is a metaphysical deflation. This deflation is not casual: it arises from the deepest and most visceral survival instinct. It is a “relax or die” taken to the extreme; our early exposure to images of violence has brought us to a heightened awareness of all that we can become if we are not careful. Romance is not dead, but it has entered a certain repose. This repose is waiting to end once the conditions for its resurgence are propitious. We will not poke our heads in until the last tyrant has faded away from old age and his son enjoys the radical simplicity of an afternoon eating Lays and playing Xbox with his friends.

Perhaps then our closeness will increase, our lust for destruction will be tamed, and perhaps in that peace, we will gain the confidence to, with great enterprise, bring greater life to a neon polytheism, to greater and more complex nights of euphoria, to more evident poetry in the mundane, and cold beers on a summer sunset.

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