Kathleen Higgins is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas Austin. Her lecture “‘Thoughts That Come on Doves’ Feet’: Philosophy as Experience in the Work of Friedrich Nietzsche” was given as part of the Fall 2013 Franke Lectures in the Humanities, a series organized in conjunction with the Yale College seminar taught by Paul North, Associate Professor of German, and Paul Grimstad, Assistant Professor of English.
This undergraduate seminar presented perspectives on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The lecture probes the meaning of Nietzsche’s enigmatic claim, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that “Thoughts that come on doves’ feet guide the world.” Higgins connects this claim and its imagery to her larger argument about the styles of Nietzsche’s writing and philosophizing and their relationship to his beliefs about how thinking works. Higgins argues that for Nietzsche, it is important to see that everyday thinking and philosophy are susceptible to changes, to moods, and to bodily states. The world is guided by thoughts that come when they will rather than when we will them. Both we and the world are guided by “thoughts that come on doves’ feet.”