Kierkegaard readings
Read: the following from, http://www.iep.utm.edu/kierkega/#SH2c
The introductory paragraph
1. Life (1813-1855), parts a to f
2. The "Aesthetic Authorship," just part c. Philosophical Fragments, The Concept of Anxiety, and Prefaces
Read: on
The Concept of Anxiety: http://sorenkierkegaard.org/concept-of-anxiety.html
Read: on
The Sickness unto Death: http://sorenkierkegaard.org/sickness-unto-death.html]
Read about his philosophy of teaching in the Philosophical Fragments
Stop Kidding Yourself: Kierkegaard on Self-Deception
Gordon Marino explains how we talk ourselves out of doing the right thing.
There
is a strong movement afoot calling for more ethics classes, workshops
and review boards. The presumption is that our citizenry is in dire need
of more knowledge of ethics, and more practice in the art of analysis.
While all this may be true, Kierkegaard, a thinker who is seldom
included in texts on moral philosophy, can be enlisted to offer some
cautionary insights to ethics specialists and those who are serious or
perhaps silly enough to believe that the major task in life is to become
a good and righteous individual.
In his own oblique way,
Kierkegaard maintained that more attention needs to be directed towards
the issue of our personal appropriation of ideas – to the question as to
whether or not we live in the ideas we espouse. Abiding by your beliefs
requires refraining from the impulse to talk yourself out of them when
they become highly inconvenient. For this reason, the Danish lyrical
philosopher took serious note of the process of, and human proclivity
for, self-deception. In this short essay, I will discuss Kierkegaard’s
understanding of the significant role that self-deception plays in moral
failure. But how are we to avoid self-deception? Is there a technique
that we might master, or a series of workshops to sign up for? While I
am not about to offer ‘seven steps to self-transparency’, I will suggest
that there are insights that can be gleaned from Leon Festinger and
Sigmund Freud which might be a boon to those of us who wish to avoid
pulling the wool over our own eyes.
The Many Faces of Søren Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard
was the first philosopher since Plato to pay serious attention to the
question of how to communicate ethical-religious truths. It was
Kierkegaard’s view that transmitting these kinds of truths was not just a
matter of disseminating information, or, as it were, passing along a
thought or mental representation. On matters moral, it will not suffice
to broadcast arguments and hand out treatises about the nature of
obligation. Kierkegaard believed that with this kind of endeavor,
communication involved moving the individual with whom you were
communicating into a new and more vibrant relation to his or her own
convictions. And so Kierkegaard developed what he described as a method
of ‘indirect communication’. Integral to this method was his extensive
use of pseudonyms.
Kierkegaard wrote a good deal in his own name – for instance,
The Concept of Irony and
Works of Love. Nevertheless, the works of his which created the greatest impact on the history of ideas were all written under
noms-de-plume. Johannes Climacus was the author of Kierkegaard’s most famous philosophical texts,
The Philosophical Fragments and the
Concluding Unscientific Postscript; Vigilius Haufnensis’ name is on the title page of
The Concept of Anxiety; and Johannes de Silentio brings us the immortal
Fear and Trembling.
At many points throughout the complex authorship, one pseudonym refers
to and often critiques another. Amongst those in the industry of
Kierkegaard scholarship there is naturally much debate about the
significance of these
noms-de-plume. But there is considerable
consensus that each of these pseudonyms was intended to represent a
life-perspective. Climacus, for example, embodies the perspective of a
philosopher; Haufnensis, that of a psychologist. However, according to
his journals, Kierkegaard’s most beloved pseudonym was the devotedly
Christian Anti-Climacus – where the ‘anti’ stands here for ‘before
Climacus’. That is, ‘Christian’ Anti-Climacus is before his
‘philosopher’, Johannes Climacus. Anti-Climacus is the Kierkegaardian
persona behind the monumental
The Sickness Unto Death and
Practice in Christianity. Kierkegaard originally signed his own name to
The Sickness Unto Death,
but changed his mind and published it under a pseudonym because he did
not believe that he lived up to the ideas expressed in the text.
In his preface to
The Sickness, Anti-Climacus begins:
“Many
may find the form of this ‘exposition’ strange; it may seem to them too
rigorous to be upbuilding and too upbuilding to be rigorously
scholarly. As far as the latter is concerned, I have no opinion. As to
the former, I beg to differ; if it were true that it is too rigorous to
be upbuilding, I would consider it a fault… From the Christian point of
view, everything, indeed everything, ought to serve for upbuilding… It
is precisely Christianity’s relation to life (in contrast to a scholarly
distance from life) or the ethical aspect of Christianity that is
upbuilding, and the mode of presentation, however rigorous it may be
otherwise, is completely different, qualitatively different, from the
kind of scienticity and scholarliness that is ‘indifferent,’ whose lofty
heroism is so far, Christianly, from being heroism that, Christianly,
it is a kind of inhuman curiosity.” (SUD p.5)
Kierkegaard’s ideal
Christian self held that all intellectual work ought to be edifying or
‘upbuilding’, which for Kierkegaard and his authors means it ought to
speak to and ultimately augment a non-narcissistic, ethical-religious
concern about oneself. Anti-Climacus continues his preface, “All
Christian knowing, however rigorous its form, ought to be concerned [in
upbuilding], but this concern is precisely the upbuilding.” For
Kierkegaard, the objectivity or pretense of objectivity that had become
the model of academic and scientific researchers was a kind of spiritual
suicide, since it involved the suppression of the self-concern that is
the taproot of our best selves.
Though Kierkegaard was a
quadruply-reflected individual, he had second thoughts about thinking
driven by mere curiosity. So far as he was concerned, the unconscious or
half-conscious aim behind a good deal of philosophical ratiocination
was to put ourselves in the dark. An object lesson: in both the
Concluding Unscientific Postscript and
a famous discourse published under his own name, ‘The Decisiveness of
Death (At the Side of a Grave)’, Kierkegaard insists that there is a
difference between understanding that all humans are mortal and grasping
that I myself am going to die. The latter discourse goes on to fix the
point that the idea of your own death is perhaps the most upbuilding of
teachers; and so Kierkegaard prods us to understand that it is certain
that one uncertain day it will all be over. Along his dialectical way,
Kierkegaard notes and scoffs at the fact that philosophers have come up
with intellectual ruses to help them avert from the sight of their own
graves: ruses of the form, “death is nothing to be feared, for ‘when it
is, I am not, and when I am not, it is not.’” But despite all the
puzzles that we might generate about it, our own death is often on our
mind and there is a right and wrong way of relating to it.
Another
object lesson in misplaced cogitation is more to our point: there are
philosophers who, taking note of the intractable problems that Sartre
raised with the Freudian account of repression, reason that no coherent
account of self-deception can be given. Thus, they deceive themselves
into imagining that they cannot deceive themselves. Kierkegaard assures
us that whether we have a theoretical model for it or not,
self-deception is a reality, and a frightful snare – frightful for its
destructive power, and for the fact that it is undetectable.
In
emphasizing Kierkegaard’s suspicions about self-reflection and its
pitfalls, I do not mean to imply that he was some type of irrationalist.
As Kierkegaard’s
Book on Adler makes plain, he acknowledges
the supreme importance of conceptual clarity and coherence. Still, he
was savvy to certain forms of the misuse of reason. Of course, abuse is
no argument against use, as Stephen Toulmin has noted. And yet, true
believers in the sanctity of reason should welcome knowledge of the
signs hinting that reason is being used for self-obscurification –
especially when the hints bear upon our ethical aspirations.
Lessons In Life
Like
Kant, Kierkegaard held that we each have knowledge enough to discern
right from wrong, in the form of conscience. On both Kant’s and
Kierkegaard’s accounts, if we did not have such knowledge we would not
be morally culpable. But we
are morally culpable: therefore, we must have the knowledge. Ethically speaking, the challenge is not to acquire
more knowledge, but instead to hold on to the knowledge that we already have. In Part II of
The Sickness Unto Death,
Anti-Climacus defines despair – which is the sickness unto death – as
sin. He then reflects on different views of sin, the first being the
Socratic notion that sin is ignorance. In the end, the author will argue
that in a way Socrates was right: sin often involves a form of
ignorance – but it is an ignorance that we ourselves are responsible for
producing.
In
The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard’s
persona bemoans the fact that people acquire mountains of knowledge that
do not make a dent in their lives. Like Johannes Climacus,
Anti-Climacus insists that there are two levels of understanding. When
the deeper, existential layer is missing, we have the foundation for
comedy. As though from the pulpit, Anti-Climacus proclaims:
“No,
but when a man stands and says the right thing, and consequently has
understood it, and then when he acts he does the wrong thing, and thus
shows that he has not understood it – yes, this is exceedingly comic. It
is exceedingly comic that a man stirred to tears so that not only sweat
but also tears pour down his face, can sit and read or hear an
exposition on self-denial, on the nobility of sacrificing his life for
the truth – and then in the next moment,
ein, zwei, drei, vupti,
almost with tears still in his eyes, be in full swing, in the sweat of
his brow and to the best of his modest ability, helping untruth to be
victorious. It is exceedingly comic that a speaker with sincere voice
and gestures, deeply stirred and deeply stirring, can movingly depict
the truth, can face all the powers of evil and of hell boldly, with cool
self-assurance in his bearing, a dauntlessness in his air, and an
appropriateness of movement worthy of admiration – it is exceedingly
comic that almost simultaneously, practically still ‘in his dressing
gown,’ he can timidly and cravenly cut and run away from the slightest
inconvenience.” (
SUD p.91)
A few pages later this pivotal lesson in moral phenomenology proceeds, “In the life of the spirit there is no standing still [
stilstand] (really no state [
tilstand],
either; everything is actuation).” In life, there is no calling a time
out, no stepping out of time for a few minutes: “If a person does not do
what is right at the very second that he knows it – then, first of all,
knowing simmers down. Next comes the question of how willing appraises
what is known.” (
SUD p.94)
Sounding like a faculty psychologist, Anti-Climacus continues:
“Willing
is dialectical and has under it the entire lower nature of man. If
willing does not agree with what is known, then it does not necessarily
follow that willing goes ahead and does the opposite of what knowing
understood (presumably such strong opposites are rare); rather, willing
allows some time to elapse, an interim called: ‘We shall look at it
tomorrow.’ During all this, knowing becomes more and more obscure, and
the lower nature gains the upper hand more and more; alas, for the good
must be done immediately, as soon as it is known… but the lower nature’s
power lies in stretching things out.” (
SUD p.94)
In this
dialogue between the mind and will, perhaps the lower nature gains a
foothold by raising the question in the mind, “Do I really know what I
ought to do in this case?” Like fish in the sea, our medium is time, and
when it comes to conscience, time is often portrayed in Kierkegaard as
an enemy or a narcotic that puts us to sleep with regard to what is
really important. Anti-Climacus closes:
“Gradually, willing’s
objection to this development lessens; it almost appears to be in
collusion. And when knowing has become duly obscured, knowing and
willing can better understand each other; eventually they agree
completely, for now knowing has come over to the side of willing and
admits that what it wants is absolutely right. And this is how perhaps
the great majority of men live: they work gradually at eclipsing their
ethical and ethical-religious comprehension…” (
SUD p.94)
This
is a powerful statement. On Anti-Climacus’ analysis, most people work
at obscuring their ethical-religious understanding, which is to say, at
muffling the voice of conscience. Why? Because that ethical-religious
understanding, “would lead them out into decisions and conclusions that
their lower nature does not much care for.” (p.94)
In the
Kierkegaardian unconscious, as opposed to the Freudian, there is an
understanding that doing the right thing will bring us into a collision
with our worldly interests. And so, when such a collision seems as
though it might be in the offing, we hesitate and take a little time to
“eclipse our ethical-religious understanding.” For an embarrassing
example – back in the Eighties I was a graduate student working on a
dissertation on Kierkegaard. I wanted very badly to study for a year in
Denmark so that I could master Kierkegaard’s native tongue and read his
works in the original. I applied for a Fulbright scholarship and was a
finalist. At the time, our government was involved in what I took to be
unconscionable activities in Nicaragua. I resolved, or it might be
better to say, I almost resolved, to tax-resist rather than to
contribute to what I took to be absolutely heinous policies. However, a
friend informed me that if I tax-resisted I could forget about the
Fulbright, and for that matter about having any peace in my life in the
near future. Using an apt image, he convinced me to sleep on my
decision; and go to sleep I did.
Another friend, a psychoanalyst,
was also very helpful in talking me out of the counsel of my conscience.
She told me that tax-resisting at this point in my life was probably
motivated by a fear of success, impulses towards self-destruction, and
perhaps an element of grandiosity. The dialogue that Kierkegaard
describes between knowing and willing occurred. In the end knowing and
willing agreed, and the easy road became the right road. I resisted my
impulse to tax-resist, and went on to study Kierkegaard and his views on
self-deception in Denmark.
Again, Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms
instruct that when push comes to shove, we are inclined to shove our
heads in the sand and talk ourselves out of what we know. But it could
be argued that such claims simply make the point that moral insight is
not enough in life: we also need moral
character. In this
sense, Kierkegaard might be understood as offering a brief on behalf of
Aristotelian virtue ethics. And yet there are signs aplenty that
Kierkegaard took Aristotle to be unduly naïve about the human capacity
for radical evil. Again and again, Kierkegaard recites that what we
really need a revelation for is not to understand the incarnation, but
rather to truly grasp that we are sinners. Paradoxically enough, such an
understanding would require faith, yet faith is the opposite of sin.
For those who wince at the mention of theological terms such as ‘sin’,
it might suffice to accept Kierkegaard’s persistent claim that
self-deception is the cause of much moral failure, while resisting the
intimation that, this side of faith and prayer, there is little we can
do to protect ourselves from ourselves.
The Psychology of Self-Deception
As
Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche all observed, philosophy, moral
philosophy in particular, is in dire need of psychology. It does no
good to construct complex maps of the self and erect Byzantine theories
of the
summum bonum if you have no sense of what you are up
against in yourself. So in the interests of filling the prescriptions of
Schopenhauer and friends and responding to the problem of
self-deception, I would like to introduce the psychologist Leon
Festinger.
Festinger wrote his very powerful theory in the late
Seventies. He argues that when you have two conflicting beliefs, you are
in the unpleasant state he calls
cognitive dissonance. In this
state of mental tension, you will be motivated to alter one of the
beliefs. But the stronger the belief, the more likely that you will do
whatever is necessary to retain it. For example, I had a student last
year who thought he was an honest person who would never steal. One day
he let it slip that he downloaded all kinds of music and movies. I
reproached him, saying that this was theft. But true to Festinger’s
theory, he explained that he only pirated material that he would never
have bought in the store. Hence, he was able to purloin music
and retain
the belief that he was a pure and honest soul. Or again, if I have a
belief that I am an honest person and find myself telling a lie, I can
convince myself that the lie is only a
white lie, and as such is not evidence that I am dishonest.
Festinger’s
theory all but states that we are naturally inclined to hoodwink
ourselves. The key to being able to make earnest – which for Kierkegaard
would be to say, ethical-religious – use of Festinger’s theory, is to
have enough observing ego to be able to admit to yourself when you are
in a squeeze between incompatible beliefs.
On the face of it, one
might not think that Freud and Kierkegaard would have much to say to one
another. Though they were both Galileos of the inner world, Kierkegaard
was a philosopher and a poet of faith, and Freud a fundamentalist of
the lab-coat stripe. Kierkegaard insisted that religion was the bedrock
of moral life. Freud, on the other hand, furrowed his brow at the moral
record of religion. Nevertheless, Freud might be an ally in the
Kierkegaardian struggle against self-deception.
Kierkegaard fought
against many forms of the leveling process. In particular, he
maintained that we should never think of lowering our moral ideals on
the grounds that they are impossible to achieve. In his psychological
masterwork
The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard’s psychologist Vigilius Haufniensis huffs:
“The
more ideal ethics is, the better. It must not permit itself to be
distracted by the babble that it is useless to require the impossible.
For even to listen to such talk is unethical, and is something for which
ethics has neither time nor opportunity. Ethics will have nothing to do
with bargaining…” (
CA p.17)
For Kierkegaard, even to
consider the possibility that we might lower the bar for ourselves is a
transgressive attempt to talk ourselves out of the truth.
In his most philosophical work,
Civilization and its Discontents,
Freud reasons that we should not aspire to moral ideals that are
unrealistic – such as loving our enemies or thinking that we should
despise ourselves for sexual wishes. On Freud’s account, hyperbolic
ideals make for excessive repression, and in the process of those
repressive acts, energy is turned over to the super-ego, which in turn
becomes even more persecutory, and ultimately more enmeshed in
unconscious drives. Freud writes:
“[W]e are very often obliged,
for therapeutic purposes, to oppose the super-ego, and we endeavor to
lower its demands. Exactly the same objections can be made against the
ethical demands of the cultural super-ego. It, too, does not trouble
itself enough about the facts of the mental constitution of human
beings. It issues a command and does not ask whether it is possible for
people to obey it. On the contrary, it assumes that a man’s ego is
psychologically capable of anything that is required of it, that his ego
has unlimited mastery over his id. This is a mistake; and even in what
are known as normal people the id cannot be controlled beyond certain
limits. If more is demanded of a man, a revolt will be produced in him
or a neurosis, or he will be made unhappy.” (
CD p.21:74)
Freud
argues that Christ may as well have commanded us to fly as command
universal love. Like Nietzsche, Freud was alert to the fact that the
super-ego – conscience itself – can be lunatic, marching people off to
death-camps but insisting that the victims tidy up their bunks before
they go to the ovens. For Freud, grandiose moral ideals are a goad to
excessive repressions, and to explosions of instincts in the form of
noteworthy transgressions.
Though morally conservative, I think
Freud can be read as recommending we take a tolerant attitude towards
the impulses that visit us. According to Freud, we are literally by
nature condemned to desires which a higher layer of the self finds
repugnant. Incestuous feelings are a prime example. Nevertheless, on
Freud’s reckoning, to the extent that we can acknowledge such impulses
and feelings, we will be less likely to express these drives in actions
or in some form of psychological legerdemain. Kierkegaard has always
given me to understand that when you are discussing morals and
psychology, it is important to put the flesh of concrete examples on the
bones of theory. So let me give a personal example of Kierkegaardian
psychology with a Freudian twist.
As a young man I enjoyed some
success in sports. One of my sons caught the fire, and I pushed him
quite hard to become a Division One football player. He made it to the
elite level, but then floundered in football, and ultimately transferred
to a smaller school and quit the pigskin arts. Even though he had moved
to one of the best academic institutions in the country, I was furious
at him – and worse, furious with myself for being in such an
unreasonable rage. As Festinger would have predicted, I was fishing
around for a good reason to be angry at him – until it hit me that given
my past and the place that sports played in my relationship with my own
father, it was understandable that I would be upset with him. All of
which is only to say that in this instance I was able to avoid both
terrorizing myself and building up an ersatz case against my son. The
whole emotional storm blew over in about a month and my relationship
with my son is on a very good and warm footing now. But things could
have easily been otherwise.
Conclusion
Once
again, Kierkegaard warns those of us with moral aspirations to be wary
of the tendency to think ourselves out of our moral coordinates. It
could be gainsaid that Kierkegaard does not provide us with anything in
the way of a litmus test to decide when our reflections are an earnest
attempt to find the right course of action or an attempt to back out of a
potential sacrifice. Worse yet, Kierkegaard seems insensitive to the
complexity of ethical problems on issues such as distributive justice.
Those blind spots aside, we would be well advised to take note of the
light he sheds on the darkness we bring upon ourselves.
© Prof. Gordon D. Marino 2008
Gordon Marino is Director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library and Professor of Philosophy at St Olaf’s College, Minnesota.
Nietzsche on the Music of Bizet and Wagner
"Der Fall Wagner" (The Case of Wagner) - Turin Letter of May, 1888
ridendo dicere severum...
1
Yesterday--would you believe it?--I heard Bizet's masterwork
for the 20th time. Again, I attended with a gentle devotion; I did not
run away, again. This victory over my impatience surprises me. How
fulfilling is such a work! One turns into a masterpiece with it.--And, indeed, I appeared to myself, every thime that I heard Carmen,
to be more of a philosopher, a better philosopher than I usually appear
to myself: having become so patient, so happy, so East-Indian, so sedentary...
To sit for five hours: the first step to sanctity!--May I say that
Bizet's orchestral sound is the only one I can still endure? That other orchestral sound that is now en vogue, the Wagnerian, brutal, artificial, and "innocent" at
the same time and, with it, speaking to the senses of the modern soul
simultaneously--how disadvantageous is this Wagnerian orchestral sound
to me! I call it Scirocco. I break out into unpleasant perspiration. My good weather is over.
This music appears perfect to me. It approaches lightly, flexibly, courteously. It is pleasant, it does not perspire.
"That which is good is light, everything divine walks on tender feet":
the first premise of my aesthetic. This music is vicious, refined,
fatalistic: with it, it stays popular--it has the refinement of a race,
not that of an individual. It is rich. It is precise. It builds, it
organizes, accomplishes its goal: with it, it represents the opposite to
the musical polypus, to the "infinite melody"! Has one ever heard more
painful, tragic accents on stage?...And how these are achieved! Without
grimaces! Without counterfeiting! Without the lie of the grand
style!--Finally: This music takes the listener for an intelligent
person, for a musician, himself--and in this, it is the opposite to
Wagner who, whatever else he was, he was, in any case, the world's most impolite genius (Wagner takes us quasi "as if"--he says one thing so often until one despairs--until one believes it).
To repeat it: I become a better man when Bizet speaks to me, also a better musician, a better listener. Can one even still listen better?--I even bury my ears beneath this
music, I hear its origin. It appears to me that I am experiencing its
creation--I tremble in the face of dangers that accompany some kind of
risks, I am delighted with happen stances that Bizet is innocent
of.--And, how curious!, basically I do not think of it, or I do not know how much I think of it...since quite different thoughts race through my head at that time... Has one noticed that music frees the
mind? lends wings to thoughts? that one becomes a philosopher all the
more, the more one becomes a musician?--The grey sky of abstraction
appears to be filled with lightning; the light is strong enough for the
filigree of things; the great problems are close enough so that one can
almost touch them; the world from the vantage point of a mountain top.
--I just define the philosophical pathos.--And unexpectedly, answers fall into my lap, a minor hailstorm of ice and wisdom, of solved problems.
... Where am I?--Bizet makes me fertile. Everything good makes me
fertile. I have no other gratitude,--I also have no other proof for that which is good.
2
This work, too, redeems; Wagner is not the only "redeemer". With it, one says farewell to the humid North,
to all water steam of the Wagnerian ideal. Already the plot saves us
from it. It still has Merimee's logic in its passion, the shortest line,
the hard necessity; it has, above all, what belongs to the hot climate, the dryness of the air, the limpidezza in
the air. Here, the climate is changed in every respect. Here, another
sensuality speaks, another sensitivity, another serenity. This music is
serene, but not of a French or of a German serenity. Its serenity is
African; doom is hovering above it, its happiness is brief, sudden,
without pardon. I envy Bizet for it that he has had the courage for this
sensitivity that has not yet found expression in refined European
music--for this more Southern, this browner, more sun-burnt
sensitivity... How good the yellow afternoons of its happiness are for
us! We look out with it: have we ever seen a smoother sea?--And
how this Moorish dance calmingly speaks to us! How, in its lascivious
melancholy, even our insatiability reaches the point of satiety, for
once!--Finally love, love that is translated back into nature! Love that, in its means, is war, and its basis the deadly hatred of
the genders!--I know of no case where the tragical joke that
constitutes the essence of love, expresses itself so strictly, so
terribly became a formula, as in the last cry of Don Jose, with which
the work closes:
-
Such a concept of love (the only one that is worthy of the
philosopher--) is rare: it distinguishes one work of art among
thousands, since, on average, artists proceed in the same manner as the
rest of the world, or even worse--they misunderstand love.
Wagner has also misunderstood it. They even believe to be selfless in it
since they strive for the advantage of another being, often against
their own advantage. However, in exchange they want to own the
other being. ... Even God makes no exception here. He is far from
thinking "What business of yours is it if I love you?"--he becomes
vicious when one does not return his love-- L'amour – with this statement, one is right among Gods and humans--est de tous les sentiments le plus égoïste, et par conséquent, lorsqu'il est blessé, le moins généreux. (B. Constant.)
3
Can you already see how much this music improves me?--Il faut méditerraniser la musique:
I have the key to this formula (Jenseits von Gut und Böse: II 723). The
return to nature, health, serenity, youth, virtue!--And yet, I was one
of the most corrupt Wagnerians. ... I was able to take Wagner
seriously... Oh, this old magician! what has he not tried to convince us
of! The first that his art offers to us is a magnifying glass: one
takes a look, one does not dare to believe one's own eyes--everything
becomes great, even Wagner himself becomes great; ... What a smart rattlesnake! All of its life, it has been rattling on to us about devotion, about faith, about purity, with a praise of chastity, it removed itself from the rotten world!--And we believed this rattlesnake...
– Yet, you cannot hear what I am saying? You, yourself, prefer Wagner's problem over
that of Bizet? I, too, do not underestimate it, it has its magic. The
problem of redemption or salvation is, itself, a very worthy problem.
About nothing else has Wagner thought as deeply as about redemption and
salvation: his opera is the opera of redemption. With him, there is
always someone who wants to be saved: sometimes a man, sometimes a
maiden--this is his problem.--And how richly he varies his
leitmotif! What rare, what deep evasions! Who taught us, if not Wagner,
that innocence prefers to save interesting sinners? (as in the case of
Tannhäuser). Or that even the "eternal Jew" is saved, settles down,
when he gets married? (as in the case of the "Flying Dutchman"). Or
that old, spoilt women prefer to be saved by chaste young men (as in
Kundry's case). Or that beautiful girls prefer to be saved by a knight
who is a Wagnerian? (as in the "Meistersinger"). Or that even married
women like to be saved by a knight (as in Isolde's case). Or that "the
old God", after he has morally compromised himself in every respect, is
finally saved by a free thinker and immoralist? (as in the "Ring").
Admire, particularly, the deep meaning of the latter! Do you understand
it? I am--weary--of understanding it... That one can gain still other
insights from the works named, I want to rather prove than to dispute.
That one can be driven to despair by a Wagnerian ballet--and to
virtue! (once again the case of Tannhäuser). That it can have the
gravest consequences if one does not go to bed at the right time (once
again the case of Lohengrin). That one should never know too precisely
who one is married to (for the third time the case of
Lohengrin).--Tristan and Isolde glorify the perfect spouse who, in a
certain case, has only one question, "but why did you not tell me this
sooner? Nothing (is) simpler than that!" The reply:
»Das kann ich dir nicht sagen; {I can not tell you that]
und was du frägst, {and what you ask]
das kannst du nie erfahren.« [you can never learn.]
Lohengrin
features a solemn eight-fold explanation of exloring and asking. With
this, Wagner (re)presents the Christian concept of "thou shalt and thou
must believe". It is a crime against the highest, the most sacred, to be
scientific. ... The Flying Dutchman, too, preaches the noble
presumption that woman can even settle the most unsteady fellow, to
speak with Wagner, to
save him. Here, we allow ourselves a
question: Going out from the premise that this were true, would it also
be desirable? --What becomes of the "eternal Jew" whom a woman adores
and
ties down? He merely stops being eternal, he marries, he is
of no further concern to us.--Translated into reality: the danger to
artists, to geniuses--and that is what the "eternal Jews" are--lies in
woman: the
adoring women are their demise. Almost none of them
has enough character not to be spoilt--"saved", when he feels treated
like a god--soon, he
condescends to woman.--Man is a coward in
the face of the eternally feminine: women know that.--In many cases of
womanly love, and perhaps particularly in the most famous ones, love is
only a refined form of
parasitism, a form of nest-building in a
strange soul, sometimes even in a strange flesh--oh! how much always at
the expense of "the host"!--
One knows Goethe's fate in the
moraline-sour, spinsterly Germany. He was always suspicious to Germans;
he has had honest admirers amongst Jewish women. Schiller, the "noble"
Schiller who hit them left and right with his grand words,
he was
their hearts' favorite. What did they accuse Goethe of? The "Berg der
Venus" (Venus' hill); and that he wrote Venetian epigrams. Already
Klopstock preached morality to him; there was a time when Herder, when
he spoke of Goethe, preferred to use the word "Priap". Even "Wilhelm
Meister" was only considered a sympbol of decline, as "moral decay". For
example, Niebuhr was enraged about the "Menagerie vom zahmen Vieh" (the
menagery of tame animals) and of the infamous hero in it, who finally
breaks out into a lament that
Biterolf could have sung: »Nichts
macht leicht einen schmerzlicheren Eindruck, als wenn ein großer Geist
sich seiner Flügel beraubt und seine Virtuosität in etwas weit
Geringerem sucht,
indem er dem Höheren entsagt« (nothing makes a
more painful impression as easily as when a great mind lets himself be
robbed of his wings and seeks his virtuosity in something far lesser
in renouncing the higher).
... Above all, however, the "higher spinster" was enraged: all small
courts, all kinds of "Wartburgs" in Germany crossed themselves in
protection from Goethe.--
This story is what Wagner has put into music: He
saves Goethe,
that is understood; but in such a way that he cunningly takes sides
with the "higher spinster". Goethe is saved: a prayer saves him, a
higher maiden "pulls him upward"...
–
What would Goethe has thought of Wagner?--Goethe has once put this
question to himself: what was the danger that was hovering over all
romanticists: the doom of the romanticists. His reply was: »am
Wiederkäuen sittlicher und religiöser Absurditäten zu ersticken« (to
suffocate in the regurgitation of moral and reiligous absurdities).
Shorter:
Parsifal.--To this, the philosopher adds an epilogue.
Sanctity--perhaps
the last that nation and women still get to see in higher values, the
horzion of the ideal for everything what, by nature, is
myops.
Amongst philosophers, however, as every horizon, a mere case of lack of
understanding, a kind of closing the gates before that where their world
only
begins--
their danger, their ideal,
their capacity for wishing...Expressed more politely:
la philosophie ne suffit pas au grand nombre. Il lui faut la sainteté –
4
–
I am telling the story of the "Ring": It belongs here. It, too, is a
story of redemption: only that this time it is Wagner who is being
saved.--For half of his life, Wagner believed in
revolution, as
only a Frenchman could have believed in it. He searched for it in the
runes of myth, he believed to have found the typical revolutionary in
Siegfried.--"Where
does all the evil in the world come from?", Wagner asked himself. From
"old covenants", he replied, as all revolutionary ideologists do. In
plain German: from customs, from laws, moral codes, institutions, from
all that on which the old world and the old society rests. "How does one
abolish evil in the world? How does one abolish the old society?" Only
by declaring war on the "old covements" (tradition, morality).
Siegfried does
that. He begins early with it, very early: his conception is already a
declaration of war on morality-- he is the product of adultery, of
incest...
not the saga but Wagner is the inventor of this radical trait; in this point, he has
corrected the saga... Siegfried continues as he has begun: he only follows his first impulses, he throws all tradition, all
fear overboard. What displeases him, he strikes down. He rages against old Gods without reverence. His major endeavor, however, is
to emancipate woman--"to save Brünnhilde"...Siegfried
and Bruennhilde, the sacrament of free love; the rise of the golden age; the demise of the Gods of the old morality –
the evil is abolished ...
Wagner’s ship navigated, for quite some time, merrily along this
course. No doubt, Wagner was searching for his highest goal on this
course. The ship ran onto a cliff. Wagner was stranded. The cliff was
Schopenhauer’s philosophy; Wagner was stranded on his
contrary view
of the world [the Feuerbachian view!]. What hat he put into music?
Optimism. Wagner was ashamed. More so since Schopenhauer had coined a
malicious description for it –
ruthlessoptimism. He was ashamed
once more. He thought about this for a long time, his situation seemed
desperate ... Finally, a way out dawned on him: the cliff onto which he
ran, what? if he would interpret it as his
goal, as the intention behind everything, as the real purpose of his journey? to be stranded
here – that was also a goal.
Bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci ...
And he translated the "Ring" into "Schopenhauerian". Everything goes
wrong, eveything is destroyed, the new world is as bad as the old one –
the
nothing, the Indian Circe is beckoning – Bruennhilde who,
according to previous intentions, should have bade farewell with an aria
in honor of free love, who was to console the world to wait for a
socialist utopia with which everything will "turn out well", she is
assigned a different task now. First, she has to study Schopenhauer; she
has to render the fourth book of "Welt als Wille und Vorstellung" in
verses.
Wagner was redeemed ... In all earnestness, this
was a redemption. The relief that Wagner has to thank Schopenhauer for, is immeasurable. Only the
philosopher of decadence gave the artist
of decadence back to himself";
[from
the "Nachschrift":] Music as Circe... In this, his last work is a
masterpiece. Parsifal will always keep its rank in the art of seduction,
as a
stroke of genius of seduction... I admire this work, I wish that I had written it, myself; short of this,
I understand it...
Wagner was never more inspired than in the end. The refinement in the
alliance of beauty and disease goes so far here that it virtually casts a
shadow over Wagner's earlier art--it appears too bright, too healthy.
Do you understand that? Health and brightness as shadows? almost as an
inference?... So far, we are already
pure fools... There has never been a grreater master of the numb, hieratic frangrances--never has there lived an equal connoisseur of the
smallinfinities,
of all that trembles and of all effusiveness, of all feminisms of the
"idioticon of happiness"!--Drink, my friends, from the goblets of this
art! You will never find a more pleasant way to un-nerve your minds, to
forget your manliness under a rose-bush...Oh, this old magician! This
Klingsor of all Klingsors! How he, with it, declares war on
us!
on us, the free spirits! How he aims to please every cowardice of the
modern soul with his magic-girl-tunes!--There was never a more
deadly hatred of
realization!--One has to be a cynic in order not to be tempted here,
one as to be able to bite in order not to adore, here! Well, then, old
seducer! The cynic warns you--
cave canem....
Wikipedia article on Wagner: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner
Wikipedia article on Nietzsche contra Wagner: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche_contra_Wagner
Overture from Bizet's
Carmen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQI5LtRtrb0
Overture from Wagner's
Parsifal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_4S7mgdeuU
From Brian Magee, our host on the BBC videos we have been watching, about his book: The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy
Richard
Wagner's devotees have ranged from the subtlest minds (Proust) to the
most brutal (Hitler). The enduring fascination with his works arises not
only from his singular fusion of musical innovation and theatrical
daring, but also from his largely overlooked engagement with the boldest
investigations of modern philosophy. In this radically clarifying book,
Bryan Magee traces Wagner's intellectual quests, from his youthful
embrace of revolutionary socialism to the near-Buddhist resignation of
his final years. Magee shows how abstract thought can permeate music and
stimulate creations of great power and beauty. And he unflinchingly
confronts the Wagner whose paranoia, egocentricity, and anti-Semitism
are as repugnant as his achievements are glorious.
Ideas allegedly
drawn from Magee's book: Nietzsche’s break with Wagner also led to a
break with Schopenhauer. He came to believe that the empirical world is
the only one that exists, rejecting Schopenhauer’s concept of the
noumenal. And since there is no world other than the one we experience,
then the only ‘meaning to life
is life’, and we should therefore focus on the
quality of
our life rather than striving for something more. This is a
substantially more optimistic view than Schopenhauer’s eternal striving
of the will. The idea of denying the will to transcend the phenomenal
world is at the heart of Wagner’s operas; indeed,
Der Ring des Nibelungen,
Tristan und Isolde,
Der Meistersinger and
Parsifal – and most of his earlier operas too – are all entirely focused on this idea, and thus contradict Nietzsche’s personal views.
From a wikipedia article on one of his operas: In 1854, Wagner first read
Schopenhauer, and was struck by the philosopher's theories on
aesthetics.
[5] In
this philosophy, art is a means for escaping from the sufferings of the
world, and music is the highest of the arts since it is the only one
not involved in representation of the world (i.e. it is abstract). It is
for this reason that music can communicate emotion without the need for
words. In his earlier essay
Opera and Drama (1850–1)
[6] Wagner
had derided the staples of operatic construction: arias, choruses,
duets, trios, recitatives, etc. As a result of reading Schopenhauer's
theories on the role of music, Wagner now re-evaluated this prescription
for opera.
Nietzsche on Bach:
- In 1870 Nietzsche heard Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. This
was Bach’s great (Wohlfarth calls it "miraculous") confessional
masterpiece and was performed only once during the composer’s lifetime.
He had planned a second performance but the city council refused to
support it financially. Nearly a century later, Mendelssohn directed the
second performance. The rest is history. When Nietzsche heard it, he
paid it this tribute: "One who has completely forgotten Christianity
truly hears it here as Gospel."13
- "In Bach there is
still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism;
he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks
back from there to the Middle Ages."
Obsession with florid
operatic melody is trivial: 'The poet's greatness is mostly to be
measured by what he leaves unsaid, letting us breathe in silence to
ourselves the thing unspeakable; the musician it is who brings this
untold mystery to clarion tongue, and the impeccable form of his
sounding silence is
endless melody '.
[16]
In 1854, Wagner first read
Schopenhauer, and was struck by the philosopher's theories on
aesthetics.
[5] In
this philosophy, art is a means for escaping from the sufferings of the
world, and music is the highest of the arts since it is the only one
not involved in representation of the world (i.e. it is abstract). It is
for this reason that music can communicate emotion without the need for
words. In his earlier essay
Opera and Drama (1850–1)
[6] Wagner
had derided the staples of operatic construction: arias, choruses,
duets, trios, recitatives, etc. As a result of reading Schopenhauer's
theories on the role of music, Wagner now re-evaluated this prescription
for opera.
Wagner began composing the music for
Das Rheingold between November 1853 and September 1854, following it immediately with
Die Walküre (written between June 1854 and March 1856).
[59] He began work on the third
Ring opera, which he now called simply
Siegfried,
probably in September 1856, but by June 1857 he had completed only the
first two acts before deciding to put the work aside to concentrate on a
new idea:
Tristan und Isolde,
[60] based on the
Arthurian love story
Tristan and Iseult.
One source of inspiration for
Tristan und Isolde was the philosophy of
Arthur Schopenhauer, notably his
The World as Will and Idea, to which Wagner had been introduced in 1854 by his poet friend
Georg Herwegh. Wagner later called this the most important event of his life.
[61] His
personal circumstances certainly made him an easy convert to what he
understood to be Schopenhauer's philosophy, a deeply pessimistic view of
the human condition. He remained an adherent of Schopenhauer for the
rest of his life.
[62]
One
of Schopenhauer's doctrines was that music held a supreme role in the
arts as a direct expression of the world's essence, namely, blind,
impulsive will.
[63] This
doctrine contradicted Wagner's view, expressed in "Opera and Drama",
that the music in opera had to be subservient to the drama. Wagner
scholars have argued that Schopenhauer's influence caused Wagner to
assign a more commanding role to music in his later operas, including
the latter half of the
Ring cycle, which he had yet to compose.
[64] Aspects of Schopenhauerian doctrine found their way into Wagner's subsequent libretti.
[n 6]
Wagner
was responsible for several theatrical innovations at Bayreuth; these
include darkening the auditorium during performances, and placing the
orchestra in a pit out of view of the audience.
[118]
The
Wagner scholar Curt von Westernhagen identified three important
problems discussed in the essay which were particularly relevant to
Wagner's own operatic development: the problem of unifying verse stress
with melody; the problems caused by formal
arias in dramatic structure, and the way in which opera music could be organised on a different basis of organic growth and
modulation;
and the function of musical motifs in linking elements of the plot
whose connections might otherwise be inexplicit (what was to become
known as the
leitmotif technique, although Wagner himself did not use this word).
[2]
Wagner
inspired great devotion. For a long period, many composers were
inclined to align themselves with or against Wagner's music. Anton
Bruckner and
Hugo Wolf were greatly indebted to him, as were
César Franck,
Henri Duparc,
Ernest Chausson,
Jules Massenet,
Richard Strauss,
Alexander von Zemlinsky,
Hans Pfitzner and numerous others.
[195] Gustav Mahler was devoted to Wagner and his music; aged 15, he sought him out on his 1875 visit to Vienna,
[196] became a renowned Wagner conductor,
[197] and his compositions are seen by
Richard Taruskin as extending Wagner's "maximalization" of "the temporal and the sonorous" in music to the world of the symphony.
[198] The harmonic revolutions of
Claude Debussy and
Arnold Schoenberg (both of whose
oeuvres contain examples of tonal and
atonal modernism) have often been traced back to
Tristan and
Parsifal.
[199] The Italian form of operatic
realism known as
verismo owed much to the Wagnerian concept of musical form.
[200]
Wagner's
concept of the use of leitmotifs and the integrated musical expression
which they can enable has influenced many 20th and 21st century
film scores. The critic
Theodor Adorno has noted that the Wagnerian leitmotif "leads directly to
cinema music where
the sole function of the leitmotif is to announce heroes or situations
so as to allow the audience to orient itself more easily".
[205] Amongst film scores citing Wagnerian themes are
Francis Ford Coppola's
Apocalypse Now, which features a version of the
Ride of the Valkyries,
Trevor Jones's soundtrack to
John Boorman's film
Excalibur,
[206]and the 2011 films
A Dangerous Method (dir.
David Cronenberg) and
Melancholia (dir.
Lars von Trier).
[207]
Left-wing interpretations of Wagner also inform the writings of Theodor Adorno among other Wagner critics.
[n 21] Walter Benjamin gave Wagner as an example of "bourgeois false consciousness", alienating art from its social context.
[246]
He
was disappointed to find that the music had no pleasing rhythm or
melody. Nietzsche claimed that Wagner’s music was a mere means to
enhance theatrical posing and gesturing. Wagner was more of an actor
than a composer.
1. The concept of Wagner’s “unending melody” is
used to designate what Nietzsche regards as the chaotic degeneration of
rhythmic feeling. This tendency results in a dangerous use of music to
merely produce a dramatic effect. 2. Wagner’s music tries to produce a
physically jarring effect on the
Biedermeier audience. Mozart’s opera ‘’Don Giovanni’’, in contrast, had a serious music that was cheerful and tender.
