We are often told by his admirers that Nietzsche's views are apolitical, and apologists will point out sections such as that found in the section On the New Idol in Zarathustra:
State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tell lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." That is a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.
It is annihilators who set traps for the many and call them "state": they hang a sword and a hundred appetites over them.
Yet passage like this are clearly very political:
Who do I hate most among the rabble today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker's sense of satisfaction with his small existence — who would make him envious, who teaches him revenge.
The Antichrist (57)
Sounds like perfect fascist philosophy to me, and of course a deliberately contrarian position to that of Wagner, who in his later regeneration essays continues to express socialist and anti-capitalist ideas. Nietzsche is just playing the usual game of whatever Wagner says, "I will say the opposite".
There are also other passages in which Nietzsche denounces German imperialism. Nietzsche also makes his opposition to anti-Semitism clear. The insinuation goes like this:
Wagner anti-Semite . . . Nietzsche anti- anti-Semite . . . Wagner bad . . . Nietzsche good
The whole allegedly black-and-white virulent anti-Semitism in das Judentum in der Musik, is, as I have shown, actually far from clear, and it ends with a call to overcome the historically wrought alienation suffered by the Jews at the hands of Germanic "predatory bestiality" so as to rise to a reconciliatory spiritual union between former oppressed and oppressor where Christian and Jew are "einig und ununterschieden" (united and without difference).
At this point, you also see Nietzsche admirers try to shift the blame for the events in National Socialist German off Nietzsche and onto Wagner. Nietzsche's bitter polemics against his once intimate friend are then used as a springboard to further the cause of conveniently framing Wagner as the intellectual, and artistic scape-goat of everything wrong with German Romanticism and why it supposedly was the cause of WWII. It seems that the attitude is that this now absolves other German thinkers, especially Nietzsche, and they can now be discussed without fear of being dragged into another discussion on the intellectual background of National Socialism. It is very convenient for some that Wagner has been chosen as the official scapegoat for WWII and the Holocaust, which takes the heat of their beloved Nietzsche.
Admittedly, this whole fashion for trying to fix the blame for WWII on various German thinkers can be taken too far, and generally it is only undertaken against German thinkers one has some personal or intellectual dislike for: lesson 101 on how to debunk your pet hate amongst nineteenth century German writers or artists—set them up as a proto-Nazi and say that they caused WWII. The most notorious of these attempts is the quotation ad nauseam of the "march of God" statement by Hegel: "the state is the march of God through the world." AHA! - they shout, Hegel is a fascist who believes that it is the role of a militarist state to triumphantly march over history, trampling everything down with it marching boots. The actual quotation (from The Philosophy of Right) goes "es ist der Gang Gottes in der Welt, dass der Staat ist". If you look up "Gang*" in a dictionary it will say "way" or "movement" and "march" is not given as an option at all. So, really, it means: "it is the way of God in the world, that the state exists". There is no Prussian military march over the face of history.
What about Nietzsche, especially Nietzsche in relation to Wagner? People rush to the defence of Nietzsche, who, thanks largely to Derrida, is still highly fashionable. When one tries to actually figure out what Nietzsche's tirade against the state in Zarathustra is all about, one comes away more perplexed than anything else. Is it an anarchist statement? Is it a proto-Tea Party, anti-big government neoliberal tirade? Is it an anti-Reichsdeutsch polemic? At the end of the day, the ideas with much stronger political relevance are Nietzsche's insinuation that democracy is rule by the herd, his advocacy of a psychopathic lack of empathy for suffering, and his advocacy of war, as a beautiful expression of the Will to Power. Next thing, Nietzsche's apologists jump in to remind us he was apolitical. Really? Are we really meant to believe that there is even such as thing as an idea without wider socio-political consequences?
Next, if you then look at what clear statements Wagner made about his political views then the clearest of these is the Fatherland Union Paper, for which a death warrant was put over his head, forcing him into exile for twelve years. There, he announces his support, as a true patriot of the Fatherland, for a peaceful transition to a democratic German. He denounces communism as madness, and decries the evils of monetarism. At this point, people rush in to tell us that Wagner used to be a revolutionary but he became a reactionary. The problem is that the Fatherland Union Paper makes it clear, that he was never a willing pro-democracy revolutionary to start with: he wanted a peaceful transition to democracy. Next thing is that there is no reactionary statement anywhere in Wagner in which he takes back or repudiates the ideals of the Fatherland Union Paper. Chamberlain or Hitler may have done so on Wagner's behalf long after the composer's death, but that hardly counts. So it leaves us with the question: where is Nietzsche's Fatherland Union Paper? There is none. Was a death warrant ever put over Nietzsche's head for his pro-democracy activism? No.
Here is a good example of the typical modern view of Wagner found on the internet:
Nietzsche reminds us that Wagner was once a revolutionary socialist, passionate for the 1848 revolutions. Later he combined myth and music like a political ideologist, putting his music to the service of some crude myths.
I don't know if that was ever published, but you can find similar statements in publication. It's a fairly stereotypical caricature of the alleged evolution of Wagner's idea. Yet, all you have to do is read Wagner's correspondence with his fellow Dresden uprising activist, Roeckel, and you will see that the mythology in the Ring is put to the service of a message that is deeply anti-capitalist, and deeply anti-autocratic: the very same ideals espoused in the Fatherland Union Paper.
Of course, the first thing everyone wants us to know now is that Wagner's adoption of Schopenhauer means that Wagner is now a such an extreme reactionary that he is now to regarded as a proto-fascist. Again, Wagner's writings hint at nothing of the sort. In fact, the reverse is true. Wagner clearly found in Schopenhauer, a psychological explanation for the blind driving force feeding the insatiable heart of capitalist greed—and with it everything that drove man to be so immeasurably vicious to one another: the Blind Will. This too finds its way into the heart of The Ring.
The trouble is that Schopenhauer is unfashionable. Never mind that his ideas of a subconscious drive inspired Freud's ideas of the unconscious Id. Never mind his influence on Kierkegaard. Never mind that Jung makes open secret of the fact that his vision of the mind is just about Jungian Energy and Archetype in place of Schopenhauerian Will and Representation. Never mind that Schopenhauer's analyses of Angst, death, conscience, and guilt completely anticipate those in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit. Never mind that Schopenhauer's ideas about the identity of subject and object at the end of The World as Will bring him extremely close to Hegel's Absolute Knowledge at the conclusion of his Phenomenology. No, all people care about is the fact that Schopenhauer is unfashionable, and is hence generally dismissed as the perfect ideologue of eccentric reactionary cranks—just like Wagner, we are told. This is why we see endless things written about how The Ring is all about Feuerbach, or Bakunin, trying to systematically underplay Schopenhauer, who is seen as an embarrassment who needs to be explained away, then quickly swept under the rug. Here is a good example:
Wagner’s second philosophical discovery, made in the early 1850's, was Arthur Schopenhauer, whom Wagner embraced with fervor as his philosophical mentor for the rest of his life. Two more different philosophers can hardly be imagined — Feuerbach the breathlessly optimistic apostle of secular humanism, on the one hand, and Schopenhauer the searingly cynical proponent of pessimism, on the other. In the aftermath of his disillusionment with Feuerbach, Wagner became an ardent admirer of Schopenhauer. Yet he retained residues of Feuerbach’s influence to the end, his celebration of Schopenhauer notwithstanding, even after he had become convinced that Feuerbach’s hopes for a future in which humanity would live happily ever after were impossibly naive and unattainable.
Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner's Ring by Philip Kitcher, and Richard Schacht (ISBN-10: 0195173597)
The most bizarre statement there is that Schopenhauer is allegedly "cynical"—because he said that human history is one of the most heartbreaking bestiality and lack of compassion towards one another? I call that honest and prophetic of the century after Schopenhauer would be like.
Not only that but Wagner tended to question the accuracy of the description "pessimism" to even describe Schopenhauer. Certainly, it is a strange term to describe a philosophy that believed in compassion, love and the possibility of a redemption from the Blind Will as pessimistic. Wagner was to write:
However, as he himself is alone is that which strives against himself, so his rage expresses itself as a nothing other than its self-negation. The only thing that can finally bring him to his realisation of that which can neutralise suffering is compassion, which as the sublation [Aufhebung] of the Will expresses the negation of a negation, which we understand by the rule of logic as an affirmation.
Da er aber doch selbst wiederum allein nur dieses sich Entgegenstrebende ist, so drückt sein Wüten nichts Anderes als sein Selbst-Verneinung aus, und hierüber zur Selbstbesinnung zu gelangen darf endlich nur das dem Leiden entkeimende Mitleiden ermöglichen, welches dann als Aufhebung des Willens die Negation einer Negation ausdrückt, die wir nach Regeln der Logik als Affirmation verstehen.
Religion und Kunst (1880) Band X Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen
Notice the Hegelian use of the word Aufhebung to express a Schopenhauerian concept. Even the language he uses to discuss Schopenhauer such as "Mitleid, welches als Aufhebung des Willens die Negation einer Negation ausdrückt, die wir als Affirmation verstehen" sounds like something straight out of the Phenomenology. This sort of thing makes Nietzsche's endlessly tedious rantings about pessimism, and nihilism sound like empty sound and fury: which rather summarises him in a nutshell.
If he wanted to, Wagner could have dedicated the text of The Ring to Feuerbach, Marx, Schelling, Fichte, or Bakunin, but he didn't—he virtually dedicated it to Schopenhauer, and just about died saying "how can I thank him enough?" When confronting Wagner, try though as you may, there is simply no escaping Schopenhauer.
Because of this dedication to Schopenhauer, Wagner is also made intellectually unfashionable. In reality, many of the ideas Nietzsche is best known for can already be found in Wagner. We have seen that Wotan — God of war and storms — ruler over man through the power of oaths, is the same as the Yahweh Elohim — God of war and storms — of the Old Testament. When the Eternal Gods go up in flames, this is really Wagner's proclamation of the death of God — of Yahweh Elohim. Even the title of Nietzsche's book Götzendämmerung is little more than a play on Götterdämmerung. Nietzsche calls himself the breaker of tablets handed down to Moses from Yahweh, but on shattering Wotan's spear, the symbol of his might over mankind, Wagner had already done that. The massive influence of Wagner on Nietzsche remains grossly underestimated to that point, once one really comes to grip with it, one must simply ask oneself if Nietzsche really is much more than a minor editorial footnote to Wagner. Indeed, Nietzsche just about admits to this in Ecce Homo.
Notes:
*On the German word Gang: even if you know very little German, you may know that Ausgang means exit, and Eingang means entry. Ausgang = aus (out) + gang (way). Eingang = ein (in) + gang (way) ie these words means "way in" and "way out". The word "Gang" obviously doesn't mean "march" at all. Any idiot should be able to see the mistake.
For more on the Fatherland Union Paper please see this thread.
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