Edgar Degas – The Ballet Class

• Theme: Discipline, embodiment, aesthetic labor

• Visual: A group of young ballerinas stretch, pose, and rehearse in a mirrored studio; an old master gestures sternly; girls adjust shoes, shift weight, await instruction; light falls through tall windows; the atmosphere is calm but charged

Thinking Through Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)’s Philosophy on Art Essence

Nietzsche would enter this room and feel immediately the pressure of form. These girls are not free. But they are not slaves. They are willing captives to form—and that, Nietzsche would say, is the noble soul in modernity: not the one who escapes structure, but the one who shapes herself through it.

There is no ecstasy here. There is tension—the ballet slippers, the stretched legs, the hovering arms. Degas does not paint final performances. He paints the becoming of beauty, and Nietzsche would call this a heroic act: not to be beautiful, but to will beauty again and again, under pressure.

The old ballet master, his gesture stiff, his face weary, is not a god. He is a taskmaster of form, like Apollo himself, demanding measure, order, restraint. And yet—he does not impose identity. He trains it.

Nietzsche would see in the young dancers Zarathustra’s disciples: not saints, not victims, but those who choose to shape themselves by hard laws—not because they must, but because they desire to create style in the body.

This is the morality of the overman: not imposed ethics, but chosen aesthetic constraint.

The mirror at the back of the room offers no metaphysical reflection. It does not reveal the soul. It reflects posture, failure, adjustment. These are not girls waiting for transcendence. They are building form out of flesh.

And that process—repetitive, painful, imperfect—is what Nietzsche calls the will to power: not domination, but self-overcoming.

Degas does not romanticize. He does not flatter. He shows the back of a neck, the awkward crook of a wrist, the adjustment of a strap. But in that unpoetic detail, Nietzsche would say, lies the most honest poetry.

The beauty here is not in the pose. It is in the attempt—the return to the barre, the daily struggle with balance, precision, grace.

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes:

“A great man... is a Prometheus. He must suffer and be bound.”

These girls are not yet “great,” but they are in the Promethean studio—training, sweating, bending themselves toward a form they do not inherit, but earn.

And what of Degas? He does not intrude. He is not sentimental. He is an observer of Becoming, honoring not the finished product, but the work of Becoming itself.

“Art is not the truth,” Nietzsche would say,
“but the lie we use to shape the chaos of life into form. And here, even little girls learn to lie beautifully—with muscle, repetition, and will.”

The dance is not yet danced. The stage is not yet set. But in this moment of strain, of partial grace, Nietzsche finds a new image of nobility—not given, but built, plié by plié.