Reattaching Shadows: Dancing with Schopenhauer

Abstract

In this essay I explore Schopenhauer’s position on dance, beginning with his brief, pejorative references to it in The World as Will and Representation, and then examining dance’s exclusion from his discussion of the arts there. Toward this end I then turn to Francis Sparshott’s essay on the neglect of dance in the history of aesthetics, considering his understanding of Plato’s valorization of dance, and his comment that Schopenhauer’s dance is the death-dance of Shiva. Seeking a stronger justification for Schopenhauer’s neglect and condemnation of dance in light of the opposite tendency in his Greek and Indian influences, I then suggest that Schopenhauer’s conception of madness as a form of disconnection closely linked to genius offers both a promising diagnosis for the problem of dance’s status and also a way of ameliorating it. Finally, I attempt this remedy by sewing together Schopenhauer’s conceptions of embodiment and music—reattaching its dancing shadow to his philosophy.