Wagner Contra Nietzsche Part I

The more you read Nietzsche, the more that you realise that almost everything turns out to be some sort of violent counter reaction to his former closest friend, Wagner. Nietzsche is like a bitter ex-wife, hell bent on getting her own back by running a very personally motivated polemic against Wagner in the press. If Wagner takes one view, Nietzsche does his best to "differentiate" himself from him by standing him on his head taking the diametric opposite posture. If Wagner loves one thing, then Nietzsche will take it upon himself to hate it.

The more of Wagner's prose works you read, the more you realise just how much of an overwhelming influence Wagner had on him, to the point that most of the most interesting things ascribed to Nietzsche just come from Wagner. Even at the best of times, Nietzsche increasingly sounds like a continuous and perpetual commentary on Wagner, and even where it looks like it is a commentary on Schopenhauer, it is always Schopenhauer seen through Wagnerian eyes. However, most Nietzsche readers remain clueless about this, because they almost never get to read Wagner's own thoughts (and when they do they find a bizarre and incomprehensible Ellis "translation" — they soon give up).

Yet for whatever reason, Wagner never condescended to go on the counter offensive against his former friend. He shook his head and walked away. We have a Nietzsche Contra Wagner that goes on the length of Nietzsche's collected works, but never a Wagner Contra Nietzsche. Yet oddly enough, rather than give credit to Wagner for refusing to allow himself to be dragged down to the same level of mud slinging, history has mostly sided with Nietzsche and his bitter diatribes. Few of Nietzsche's apologists acknowledge the emotionally nature of these outbursts and instead take them as part of the gospel of the preacher of "joyful wisdom".

The most important Nietzschean idea born of the aftermath of his split with Wagner is that of the Will to Power. We have seen that in Wagner, the Will to Power is the very embodiment of everything that makes capitalism (and thereby fascism) evil. This is why The Ring of the Nibelung is all about the evils of the blind lust for Power. Wagner found, in the philosophy of Schopenhauer, the psychological explanation for what makes capitalism tick: insatiable greed, and unfathomable willfulness. You could create the most perfect form of government, or raise every oppressive institution to the ground in a fiery apocalyptic, Feuerbachian or anarchical Bakunian Götterdämmerung. Yet it would do nothing to stem the power of the Blind Will, and from the ashes of the old order a new Alberich would greedily pick out the Rheingold to oppress the world once more, like a Stalin or a Mao. For Wagner, the only Redemption from capitalism was the denial of the Will, of the very font of human greed, which is embodied by the ring of the Nibelungs. Denial of the Will was the only final redemption from capitalism—the lust for power and gold: the Will to Power.

Of course, all Nietzsche does is turn Wagner upside down on his head—a simplistic consequence of the personally motivated bitterness of these Nietzsche Contra Wagner type of polemics. Nietzsche alleges that the Schopenhauerian denial of the Will to Live is decadent, degenerate and in its place takes to glorifying the Will to Power (a concept that can be found in his published works and not just in the sketches of the book by the same name). The point that he is really making is that "greed is good"—capitalism is good. Nietzsche does a simply beautiful job of Romanticising this:

Einst hattest du Leidenschaften und nanntest sie böse. Aber jetzt hast du nur noch deine Tugenden: die wuchsen aus deinen Leidenschaften. Du legtest dein höchstes Ziel diesen Liedenschaften ans Herz: da wurden sie diene Tugenden und Freudschaften.

Once you suffered of passions and called them evil. But now you have only your virtues left: they grew out of your passions. You took your highest goal of these passion to heart: there they turned into your virtues and joys.

Zarathustra: Von den Freuden und Leidenschaften

The argument is that the human competitive drive to come up with some idea more brilliant, more amazing is what drives human creativity. The craving for knowledge is the craving for power. Indeed, knowledge is power. If you kill the passions, and deny this Will to Power in order to escape the suffering engendered by passionate craving, you end up killing human creativity, and all striving to better oneself:

Schaffen — das ist die große Erlösung von Leiden, und des Lebens Leichtwerden. Aber daß der Schaffende sie, dazu selber tut Leid not und viel Verwandelung.  Ja, viel bitteres Sterben muss in eurem Leben sein, ihr Schaffenden! Also seid ihr Fürsprecher und Rechtfertiger aller Vergänglichkeit.  Daß der Schaffende selber das Kind sei, das neu geboren werden, dazu muss er auch die Gebärerin sein wollen und der Schmerz der Gebärerin.

Creation — that is the great redemption from suffering, and life's glowing light. But that the creator may be, suffering is needed and much change. Indeed, there must be much bitter dying in your life , you creators. Thus are you advocates and justifiers of all impermanence. So that the creator can become the child who is newly born, the creator must also want to be the mother who gives birth and want the pangs of the birth-giver.

Zarathustra:  Auf den Glückseligen Inseln

Greed is good, greed engenders suffering. Suffering is good—let there be more suffering.

The Will is the source of human creativity, and is as much a positive, creative force as it is a destructive one. Passion is good. Passion, and the agonising birth-pangs it engenders are to be celebrated, not extinguished nor denied just to avoid suffering. Greed—being on heat (brünstig) like a dog—is good:

"Wille zur Warheit" heisst ihr's, ihr Weisesten, was euch treib, und brünstig macht? . . . Das ist euer ganzer Wille, ihr Weisesten, als ein Wille zur Macht; und auch wenn ihr von Guten und Bösen redet und von den Wertschätzungen.

"Will to truth," you who are wisest call that which drives you and makes you go on heat [brünnstig macht]? . . . What is your total Will, you who are wisest, than a Will to Power? — even when you speak of Good and Evil too or of valuations of worth.

 If Schopenhauer saw the Will as a force as blindly destructive as a storm, and saw the power that underlies Nature as fundamentally dark, chaotic, and destructive, then Nietzsche would have none of it. Despite being the teacher of the Shadows of God—hidden remnants of a Christian thinking deeply engrained in the minds and stubbornly persisting long after God has been declared dead— Nietzsche wants us to know that God was right when on creating the world "he saw that it was good". Like the conventional Jesus, we are to love the world for all of its pain and misery. Nietzsche would have no truck with Schopenhauer's rejection of the optimistic mainstream Judeo-Christian view of the world in favour of a more Gnostic view where the force that engendered the cosmos was a dark, destructive—even evil—one.

We have also seen that Wagner can be seen in a Gnostic light (albeit a Feuerbachian Gnostic light)—with our present fallen world having been created, not by a benevolent loving God, but by Lucifer or by Yahweh Elohim, wrathful God of war and storms . Whether you follow Gnosticism or Schopenhauer, the world is dark, and fallen, with senseless misery being its basic condition. Again, Nietzsche will have none of this. To him, the idea of a fallen world is anathema, a doctrine for Hinterwelter intended to set up the netherworld as being more desirable than this fallen one: death that transports us to the Netherworld is better than life in this fallen world. It is the denial of Life in this world, in favour of Death in the afterlife—and decadence, says Nietzsche. Choose Life, he says, and not Death.

Last of all, Wagner's later writings are deeply anti-war and pacifist. He denounces all attempts at the rationalisation of war, as being necessary for the betterment of the world. Naturally, Nietzsche takes a deliberately contrarian position. You see an outright rejection of the peace and love of the feminine Gnostic Sophia, the Eternal Feminine, often represented as the Dove of Aphrodite, as being something for effeminate sissies:

Ihr sag, die Sache sei es, die sogar den Krieg heilige? Ich sage euch: der gute Krieg ist es, der jede Sache heiligt.

Der Krieg und der Mut haben mehr grossen Digne getan, als die Nächstenliebe. Nicht euer Mitleiden, sondern eure Tapferkeit rettete bisher die Verunglückten.

"Was ist gut?" fragt ihr. Tapfer sein ist gut. Laßt die kleinen Mädchen reden: gut sein ist, was hübsch zugleicht und rührend ist.

You say, does the good cause sanctify war? I say to you: it is the good war, which sanctifies that cause. 

War and courage have done more great things than love of thy neighbour. Not your pity but your bravery will redeem the casualties.

"What is good?" you ask. To be brave is good. Let the little girls say "good is that which is pretty, and, at the same time, moving."

Zarathustra: Von Kriege und Kriegsvolke 

Nietzsche will not have any truck with any redemption from a world dominated by a wrathful lust for storms, vengeance and war. Greed is good. Suffering is good. War is good. Hate is good. Cruelty is good and to be voluptuously enjoyed like Romans watching the slaughter at the circus:

Almost everything we call 'higher culture' is based on the spiritualisation and intensification of cruelty; the wild beast has not been laid to rest at all, it lives, it flourishes—it has merely become deified. That which constitutes the painful voluptuousness of tragedy is cruelty, which produces a pleasing effect in so-called tragic pity. . . 

From Beyond Good and Evil 229 

For Wagner, wisdom is ultimately the self-denial of Love, where Brünnhilde is his ultimate embodiment of the Gnostic Sophia, the Eternal Feminine.

In this worldview, absolute Love is absolute self-denial—even Death. To fully embrace Love is too fully embrace Death. The supreme self-sacrificial act is supreme Love. That is why in Tristan und Isolde the potion of Love turns out to be the potion of Death: Love and Death are the same thing. Yet that absolute self-sacrifice is supreme humility and compassion for the suffering of all of humanity.

Typically, Nietzsche sneers at Love as being little more than a Shadow of God—admittedly even the Koran calls Jesus the prophet of Love. Cynically, Nietzsche, the misogynist, counters (presumably paraphrasing Wagner) that:

Ist es nicht besser, in die Hände eines Mörders zu geraten, als in die Träume eines brünstigen Weibes?

Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a woman on heat [eine brünnstiges Weib]? 

Zarathustra: Von der Keuschheit

 The brün in brünstig is the brün of Brünnhilde, and is related to brennen (to burn) - brünstig more literally meaning burning with passion (in heat is the Kauffman translation which accurately brings out Nietzsche's cynicism).

If Schopenhauer says that Love is caritas, charity, and self-denial, he says that it is also compassion (Mitleid = "suffer with" in German). "Bah humbug" says Nietzsche — to pity someone is the worst thing you could do to them:

Wahrlich, ich mag sie nicht, die Barmherzigen, die selig sind in ihrem Mitleiden: zu sehr gebricht es ihnen an Scham.

Darum wasche ich mir die Hand, die dem Leidenden half, darum wische ich mir auch noch die Seele ab. Denn daß ich den Leidenden leidend sah,  dessen schämte ich mich um seiner Scham willen; und als ich him half, da verging ich mich hart an seinem Stolze.

Truly, I like them not, these compassionate of heart, who feel blessed in their pity: too little embarrassed are they in their shame.

Having seen the sufferer suffering, I was ashamed for the sake of his shame; and when I helped him, I transgressed grievously against his pride.

Zarathustra: Von den Mitleidigen 

To pity is to look down upon someone from a high horse, as a pitiful and contemptible creature — an insult to them. Compassion and empathy are a sin in Nietzsche's book. Admittedly, Nietzsche places friendship higher than love, because friendship is the empowering force that pushes the other to higher things, rather than merely being pitifully besotted with the other.

Even with respect to the subject of vivisection Nietzsche is totally predictable and goes out of his way to praise it. Nietzsche was to write in his notebook:

Vivisection—that is the point of departure! Many are becoming conscious of the fact that it is going to hurt many beings if knowledge is going to occur. As if it has ever been different! And what pain!! What cowardly, feeble rabble!

As a writer Nietzsche is immeasurably more talented and eloquent than Wagner. With his silvery tongue, Nietzsche can almost sucker you in with his charisma into seeing things his malice driven anti-Wagnerian way. He had me convinced for many years. Yet ultimately his is essentially a way of getting his own back on the deeply anti-capitalist Wagner by Romanticising capitalism and its ruthless wars, cruelty, and endless greedy passions. Nietzsche's is probably also a turn of the century optimism that knew nothing of the two world wars that were on their way. The dark brutality and monstrosity of a loveless world ruled by hatred and war described by Schopenhauer turns out to far more honest—a world where the Will to Power needs no Romantic glorification.

Worse still, modern psychologists see lack of empathy as the characteristics of a psychopath. Likewise, the exhortations to be a manically joyful optimist came from a man profoundly withdrawn, cut himself off from his friends, and who relied on chloral hydrate to get any sleep at all. It is probable that most of his works represent some sort of quasi-delusional prodromal stage of the quaternary syphilis eating away at his brain.

Yet oddly, the judgement of history seems to favour the silvery tongued Nietzsche more than Wagner, whose writings are at best stylistically awkward and at worst impenetrable. It seems that most philosophers, including Adorno, tend to accept Nietzsche's emotional anti-Wagnerian tirades as gospel, or at least be unduly influenced by them. Even then, at the end of his sane life, Nietzsche did eventually make the following confession in Ecco Homo (in the rather bizarrely entitled section Why I am so Clever):

I need to say a word to express my gratitude for that which of all things in it has refreshed me by far the most profoundly and cordially. This was without doubt my intimate association with Richard Wagner. I offer all my other human associations cheap; but at no price would I relinquish from my life the Tribschen days, those days of mutual confidences, of cheerfulness, of sublime incidents — of profound moments . . . I do not know what others may have experienced with Wagner: over our sky no cloud ever passed. 

Wagner is the antidote to everything German par excellence—still poison, I do not dispute it . . . But I still today seek a work of a dangerous fascination, of a sweet and shuddering infinity equal to that of Tristan—I seek in all the arts in vain. All the strangenesses of Leonardo da Vinci lose their magic at the first note of Tristan.  This work is altogether Wagner's non plus ultra; he recuperated from it with die Meistersinger and the Ring. . . .The world is poor for him who has never been sick enough for this 'voluptuousness of hell': to employ a mystic's formula is permissible, almost obligatory, here, I think.  I think I know better than anyone what tremendous things Wagner was capable of, the fifty worlds of strange delights to which no one but he had wings; and as I am strong enough to turn even the most questionable and most perilous things to my own advantage and thus to become stronger, I can call Wagner the great benefactor of my life. That in which we are related, that we have suffered more profoundly, from one another also, than men of this century are capable of suffering, will eternally join our names together again and again; and as Wagner is among Germans merely a misunderstanding, just as surely am I and always will be. 

Perhaps one day Wagner will be seen by philosophers too in a new light. Perhaps one day the world will see how deeply ironic it is that it should be Wagner rather than Nietzsche that has been judged as the prophet of the Triumph of the Will to Power, and a psychopath to boot. And, instead of accepting, as Adorno did, that Nietzsche's polemical accusations of decadence (born of the sort of bitterness that only comes when two formally intimate friends part ways), they will come to the realisation that the decadence that Nietzsche heard in the music was more Nietzsche's own decadence reflected in the mirror of Wagner's music. Above all, people will see how right Nietzsche was in saying that the German imperialists who saw in Wagner a justification for their Realpolitik totally misunderstood Wagner — and misunderstood him immeasurably more than they misunderstood Nietzsche.