“Dancing in chains. — With every Greek artist, poet and writer one has to ask: what is the new constraint he has imposed upon himself and through which he charms his contemporaries (so that he finds imitators)? For that which we call ‘invention’ (in metrics, for example) is always such a self-imposed fetter. ‘Dancing in chains’, making things difficult for oneself and then spreading over it the illusion of ease and facility — that is the artifice they want to demonstrate to us. Already in Homer we can perceive an abundance of inherited formulae and epic narrative rules within which he had to dance: and he himself created additional new conventions for those who came after him. This was the school in which the Greek poets were raised: firstly to allow a multiplicity of constraints to be imposed upon one; then to devise an additional new constraint, impose it upon oneself and conquer it with charm and grace: so that both the constraint and its conquest are noticed and admired.” – Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow

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Philosophy is essentially poetic thought dancing in the chains of successively constraining realities: scientific, psychological, sociological, political, economic, and so on.

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Most of us expect to build up to something compelling (usually some negatively conceived happiness — the absence of what we think is preventing happiness) through faithful observance of constraints. Or we think that if happiness hasn’t occurred, it’s because of some oversight. We start from the ground and aggregate upward. Standing at the top of the heap we think we’ll grab happiness out of the sky.

Philosophy starts from what is compelling and works downward, one reality at a time until it touches earth and closes the circuit.

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The chains of science, like all theoretical chains, are light and fine. They just draw limits around your movements.

The chains of practice, however, actually weigh your limbs down and threaten to immobilize you. Business, socializing, parenting, governing — pursuits traditionally avoided by philosophers — are not outside the domain of philosophy, they’re just such heavy fetters that few thinkers will wear them. It’s not that they are hard to think about. It is that they are hard to think within. They encumber the entirety of one’s being, thought and all.