Dancing and Thinking

Learning to think: our schools no longer have any idea what this means. Even in our universities, even among students of philosophy themselves, the theory, the practice, the vocation of logic is beginning to die out. Read German books: no longer the remotest recollection that a technique, a plan of instruction, a will to mastery is required for thinking — that thinking has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned, as a form of dancing. . . . Who among Germans still knows from experience that subtle thrill which the possession of intellectual light feet communicates to all the muscles! — A stiffly awkward air in intellectual matters, a clumsy hand in grasping — this is in so great a degree German that foreigners take it for the German nature in general. The German has no fingers for nuances. . . . dancing in any form cannot be divorced from a noble education, being able to dance with the feet, with concepts, with words: do I still have to say that one has to be able to dance with the pen — that writing has to be learned?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1888; trans. R. J. Hollingdale, 1968)