A Nietzsche Reader (Classics) by Friedrich Nietzsche

Author:Friedrich Nietzsche [Nietzsche, Friedrich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2003-11-27T04:30:00+00:00

and what thou ask’st,

that thou canst never know.

Lohengria contains a solemn outlawing of question and inquiry. Wagner therewith became an advocate of the Christian conception ‘thou shalt and must believe’. It is a crime against the highest and holiest to be scientific … The Flying Dutchmanpreaches the sublime doctrine that woman constrains even the most footloose man, in Wagnerian language ‘redeems’ him. Here we permit ourselves a question. Supposing this were true, would it therefore also be desirable? – What becomes of the ‘Wandering Jew’ when worshipped and constrained by a woman? He merely ceases to wander: he gets married, he no longer concerns us. – Translated into reality: the danger for artists, for geniuses – and it is they who are the ‘Wandering Jews’ – lies in woman: worshipping women are their ruin. Hardly one of them has sufficient character not to be ruined – ‘redeemed’, when he feels himself treated like a god – he straightway condescends to woman. […]

What Goethe would have thought of Wagner? – Goethe once posed to himself the question what the danger was which hovered over all romantics: the romantics’ fatality. His answer is: ‘to choke through the repeated chewing of moral and religious absurdities’. More briefly: Parsifal…

*

– I shall once more narrate the story of the Ring. It belongs here. It, too, is a story of redemption: except that this time it is Wagner who is redeemed. – For half his lifetime Wagner believed in revolution as only a Frenchman has ever believed in it. He sought for it in the runic writings of myth, he thought that in Siegfried he had found the typical revolutionary. – ‘Whence comes all the evil in the world?’ Wagner asked himself. From ‘ancient compacts’, he answered, like all revolutionary ideologists. In plain words: from customs, laws, moralities, institutions, from all that upon which the old world, the old society depends. ‘How can the world be rid of evil? How can the old society be abolished?’ Only by declaring war on the ‘compacts’ (the traditional, the moral). That is what Siegfried does. He starts early, very early: his beginning is already a declaration of war on morality – he comes into the world through adultery, through incest … It is not the saga but Wagner who devised this radical trait; he corrected the saga on this point … Siegfried continues as he has begun: he obeys only his first impulse, he throws overboard everything traditional, all reverence, all fear. Whatever he dislikes he strikes down. Ancient deities he irreverently runs full tilt at. His chief undertaking, however, is to emancipate woman – ‘to redeem Brünnhilde’ … Siegfried and Brünnhilde; the sacrament of free love; the dawn of the golden age; the twilight of the gods of the old morality – the evil has been abolished … For a long time Wagner’s ship sailed merrily along on this course. No doubt of it, Wagner sought on this course his highest goal. – What happened? A piece of misfortune.

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