In addition to hiking, dancing is one of the most prominent soldiers in Nietzsche's “moving [m] army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms.” Based on Nietzsche's reflections on the art of movement, Jonas Pohler explores the paramount importance that it plays in our present day. Is the effect of dance primarily sexual? What does dance have to do with technology? What symbolism is the dancing gesture able to convey?

Artists often do not come off well in Nietzsche’s work. They represent the prototype of the dependent, truth-hostile and reality-denying person who is at the mercy of his own moods without self-control. A childish, dramatizing, hot-tempered and generally ridiculous creature, an egomaniac whose actions and demeanor are aimed solely at courting the applause of others. Or is Nietzsche not taking his word for it here? Should this really be his final verdict about the creative spirit?

He develops much of what Nietzsche describes about the artist on the figure Richard Wagner, with whom he has a brief, intensive, but ultimately disappointing acquaintance. The artist and the thinker could have been the ideal friendship for Nietzsche for a while. But after breaking with Wagner, Nietzsche has a lot of derogatory things to say about the artist as a type. How different — for comparison — is the friendship between artist and thinker in Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse, who deals extensively with Nietzsche.

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