[603W-{1/15/54}Letter to Franz Liszt: SLRW, p. 297]
[P. 297] “In truth, I reached the age of 36 before I became fully aware of that terrible emptiness: until then my nature was held in a state of balance between two conflicting elements of desire within me, one of which I sought to appease by means of my art, while periodically giving vent to the other by means of passionate, fantastical [and sensual] extravagances. (You know my Tannhaeuser, this idealization of a demeanour which in reality is often quite trivial). But then, in Lohengrin perhaps – I had the feeling, nay the certainty, that these two currents came together in a single unity in true love, love which I could know only through yearning but never through actual experience.” [603W-{1/15/54}Letter to Franz Liszt: SLRW, p. 297]
[604W-{1/25-26/54} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 301]
[P. 301] {FEUER} “One thing counts above all else: freedom! But what is ‘freedom’? is it – as our politicians believe – ‘licence?’ – of course not! Freedom is: integrity. He who is true to himself, i.e. who acts in accord with his own being, and in perfect harmony with his own nature, is free; strictly speaking, outward constraint is powerless unless it succeeds in destroying the integrity of its victim, inducing him to dissemble and to persuade himself and others that he is a different person from the one he really is.” [604W-{1/25-26/54}Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 301]
[605W-{1/25-26/54} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 301-302]
[P. 301] {FEUER} “I believe that this ‘integrity’ is essentially the same as the ‘truth’ of which we read in books on philosophy and theology. ‘Truth’ is a concept and, by its nature, is simply objectified ‘integrity’; the actual content of this ‘integrity’, however, is ‘reality’ pure and simple, or rather: ‘the real’, ‘what really is’, and only what is ‘material’ is ‘real’, whereas the ‘immaterial’ is certainly also ‘unreal’, in other words merely ‘thought’ or ‘imagined’. If I am therefore justified in calling ‘integrity’ the most comprehensive feeling for reality, at the same time as acknowledging that feeling, then ‘truth’, in the [P. 302] final analysis, is once again merely the concept of that feeling, or at least has become so in philosophy: it is certain, however, that this concept is as remote from reality as ‘integrity’ – in the sense already indicated – is close to it, which is why people have always deluded themselves as to ‘truth’, so that it has actually become the most deceptive thing in the world; like every concept, it has ended up by becoming no more than a word, and on the basis of such ‘words’ it is of course easy enough to ‘construct a system’, but in doing so one loses hold of reality. Our surest grasp of reality is through feeling, and true feeling is perceived exclusively through the senses.” [605W-{1/25-26/54} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 301-302]
[606W-{1/25-26/54} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 302]
[P. 302] {FEUER} {Pre-SCHOP} “The individual, acting in accordance with his own natural temperament, makes use of endless expedients in order to grasp the world as a whole: these expedients, in all their most manifold complexities, are the ‘concepts’ already described: so proud do we deem ourselves in our ability to grasp a whole by means of concepts that, believing we have the whole, we involuntarily forget that what we have is merely a concept, in other words our pleasure comes simply from an instrument of our own making, while in the meantime we have
