for that purpose – and is thus able to perceive the world undistorted by the will, i.e. aesthetically; the objects of the world of external phenomena are thus seen undistorted by the will and are its ideal images, which it is the artist’s task to capture and set down, as it were. In the case of a strong individual, his interest in the world of external phenomena is necessarily encouraged by this act of observation, and it grows to the point where he permanently forgets the original needs of his own personal will, in other words he begins to sympathize with the things outside him, and he does so for their own sake and not because of any personal interest in them.” [635W-{6/7/55}Letter to Franz Liszt: SLRW, p. 345]
[636W-{6/7/55}Letter to Franz Liszt: SLRW, p. 345-346]
[P. 345] {SCHOP} “… the true geniuses and the true saints of all ages … tell us that they have seen only suffering and felt only fellow-suffering. In other words, they have recognized the normal [P. 346] condition of all living things and seen the cruel, eternally contradictory nature of the will to live, which is common to all living things and which, in eternal self-mutilation, is blindly self-regarding; the appalling cruelty of this will, which even in sexual love wills only its own reproduction, first appeared here reflected in that particular cognitive organ which, in its normal state, recognized itself as having been created by the will and therefore as being subservient to it; and so, in its abnormal, sympathetic state, it developed to the point of seeking lasting and, finally, permanent freedom from its shameful servitude, a freedom which it ultimately achieved only by means of a complete denial of the will to live.
{FEUER} This act of denying the will is the true action of the saint: that it isultimately accomplished only in a total end to individual consciousness – for there is no other consciousness except that which is personal and individual – was lost sight of by the naïve saints of Christianity, confused, as they were, by Jewish dogma, and they were able to deceive their confused imagination by seeing that longed-for state as a perpetual continuation of a new state of life freed from nature, without our judgment as to the moral significance of their renunciation being impaired in the process, since in truth they were striving only to achieve the destruction of their own individuality, i.e. their existence.” [636W-{6/7/55}Letter to Franz Liszt: SLRW, p. 345-346]
[637W-{6/7/55}Letter to Franz Liszt: SLRW, p. 347]
[P. 347] “In early Christianity we can still see clear traces of a total denial of the will to live, and a longing for the end of the world, i.e. the cessation of all life. The unfortunate part about it, however, is that such profound insights into the nature of things are vouchsafed only to those individuals who are totally abnormal in the sense described above, as a result of which they can be fully understood by them and by them alone; in order to convey these insights to others, the sublime founders of the world’s religions must therefore speak in such images as are accessible to people’s ordinary – normal – powers of comprehension … .” [637W-{6/7/55}Letter to Franz Liszt: SLRW, p. 347]
[638W-{Late 55 (?)} Letter to Roeckel (in Wagner an Roeckel, p. 54-64) as quoted by L.J. Rather in The Dream of Self-Destruction, p. 87-89]
[P. 87-89] {SCHOP} “The normal human’s organs, specifically the brain, are solely at the will’s service. The dissociation of cognition from the will’s service is an abnormal act, which occurs only
