[641W-{8/23/56}Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 357]
[P. 357] {FEUER} “ … how can an artist hope to find his own intuitions perfectly reproduced inthose of another person, since he himself stands before his own work of art – if it really is a work of art – as though before some puzzle, which is just as capable of misleading him as it can mislead the other person.” [641W-{8/23/56}Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 357]
[642W-{8/23/56}Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 357-358]
[P. 357] {anti-FEUER} {SCHOP} “Rarely, I believe, has anyone suffered so remarkable a sense of alienation from self and so great a contradiction between his intuitions and his conceptions as I have done, for I must confess that only now have I really understood my own works of art (i.e. grasped them conceptually and ex-plained them rationally to myself), and I have done so with the help of another person, who has furnished me with conceptions that are perfectly congruent with my own intuitions. The period during which I worked in obedience to the dictates of my inner intuitions began with the flying Dutchman; Tannhaeuser and Lohengrin followed, and if there is any single poetic feature underlying these works, it is the high tragedy of renunciation, the well-motivated, ultimately inevitable and uniquely redeeming denial of the will. It is this profound feature that gives sanction to my poem and to my music, without which they would have no ability to stir us. Now, nothing is more striking in this context than the fact that, in all the conceptions that I held and which were devoted to speculating upon and reaching an understanding of life, I was working in direct opposition to my own underlying intuitions. While, as an artist, my intuitions were of such compelling certainty that all I created was influenced by them, as a philosopher, I was attempting to find a totally contrasting explanation of the world which, though forcibly upheld, was repeatedly – and much to my amazement – undermined by my instinctive and purely objective artistic intuitions. My most striking experience in this respect came, finally, through my Nibelung poem; it had taken shape at a time when, relying upon my conceptions, I had constructed a Hellenistically optimistic world for myself which I held to be entirely realizable if only people wished it to exist, while at the same time seeking somewhat ingeniously to get round the problem why they did not in fact wish it to exist. I recall now having singled out the character of my Siegfried with this particular aim in mind, intending to put forward here the idea of a life free from pain; more than that, I believed I could express this idea even more clearly by presenting the whole of the Nibelung myth, and by showing how a whole world of injustice arises from the first injustice, a world which is destroyed in order -- to teach us to recognize injustice, root it out and establish a just world in its place. Well, I scarcely noticed how, in working out this plan, nay, basically even in its very design, I was unconsciously following a quite different, and [P. 358] much more profound, intuition, and that, instead of a single phase in the world’s evolution, what I had glimpsed was the essence of the world itself in all its conceivable phases,, and that I had thereby recognized its nothingness, with the result, of course – since I remained faithful to my intuitions rather than to my conceptions --, what emerged was something totally different from what I had originally intended.” [642W-{8/23/56}Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 357-358]
