There is a famous story about Emma Goldman (1869-1940). She is at a party in New York, just before the turn of the century. Goldman— then a young Jewish woman from Russian Lithuania— is a remarkable person who ran away from home at the age of 16 to escape a forced marriage and made her way to the US. She became a political radical. There are many others present at this party, including some who are, like her, anarchists. She is bespectacled and bohemian looking, with a strong, yet somewhat pixieish face and long curly hair held up in a bun.
As the band kicks up a joyous dance number, she joins with abandon. Her happy dancing attracts the attention of a taciturn activist who tells her with a frown “that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway.”
Goldman responded furiously: “If I can’t dance, then I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”1
18th century Ukraine, a young Hasidic master with startling red hair, the grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov, sits at the head of a Shabbat table surrounded by his male followers (the women cook and bring food, and listen from a distance). “What should we do when Heaven issues harsh decrees?” he asks.
This isn’t an idle question. The harsh decrees of heaven, in that neck of the woods, might include antisemitic pogroms, plague, poverty, and war. Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, the speaker, has experienced plague, war, the death of his children, poverty, and pogroms himself.
“Dance,” the Rebbe says. “At such times, the remedy is to dance.”
Enter Spinoza
Spinoza would agree with Goldman and Rebbe Nachman. This is because for Spinoza, indulging in what he called “sad passions” is not just something which feels bad, but something which literally kills us. Joyful emotions strengthen our life force and increase our capacity to act, and sad passions disempower and incapacitate us.
As I wrote in Against Sad Militancy, as tempting as anger, despair and melancholy can be, as much as it can seem that indulging in them will shame God or someone else into waking up and putting things right, that won’t happen. They don’t help. Naturally we will feel them, but indulging them helps no one- not revolutionaries and not those suffering “the harsh decrees of heaven,” whether that is we ourselves or others.
According to Spinoza, what increases our own power is the increase of our understanding, joy, and our capacity to act in a diversity of ways. This capacity to act is not just mental, it is also always physical as well2. When we dance, we increase our own vitality, strengthen both brain and body, and increase the body’s flexibility, strength, and ability to act and move. A key point here for Spinoza is that strengthening the body always, in a mirror image, strengthens the mind. Essentially, dancing makes us better philosophers.
So action is needed, but to return to my fundamental point: so is dancing.
Dancing alone, with others, for ourselves and for others, and this will be true no matter what happens in the decades ahead.
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Photo by <a href="https://stockcake.com/i/joyful-floral-dance_1171288_1152207">Stockcake</a>
Well, or at least she said something like that. Later, in her 1931 autobiography, Living My Life, she said, “I told him to mind his own business, I was tired of having the Cause constantly thrown in my face. I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to behave as a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” This telling of the episode was later paraphrased by others in the pithy quote above.
This is because for Spinoza the mind and the body are two aspects of one reality: every event in the person is at once physical and mental. Some events reach the threshold of our complex self-awareness, and some don’t, but all mental events are also physical, and all physical events also occur in consciousness, even if the consciousness of, say, your digestion is minimal and not integrated into your full-bore self-conscious awareness. Hence for Spinoza, there is no problem of how consciousness arises from matter, since it doesn’t. The only issue to work out is how conscious matter becomes complex self-awareness.
So validating! Over the past 15 years, I have practiced ecstatic dance to manage grief and loss and elevate my soul. May all people find their paths to dancing!
This perspective is so grounding. The reminder that love is essential and not optional really challenged me to re-evaluate how I show up in the world especially in motherhood, purpose work, and daily interactions. Love as a philosophical necessity… that hits deep. Thank you for weaving both reason and spirit into this reflection.