[693W-{11/6/64}Letter to King Ludwig II of Bavaria: SLRW, p. 626-627]
[P. 626] {FEUER} “It is a marvellous passage where I now have to resume composition, having put the finishing touches to a number of earlier passages! It is the most sublime of all scenes for the most tragic of my heroes, Wotan, who is the all-powerful will-to-exist and who is resolved upon his own self-sacrifice; greater now in renunciation than he ever was when he coveted power, he now feels all-mighty, as he calls out to the earth’s primeval wisdom, to Erda, the mother of nature, who had once taught him to fear for his end, telling her that dismay can no longer hold him in thrall since he now wills his own end with that selfsame will with which he had once desired to live. His end? He knows what Erda’s primeval wisdom [P. 627] does not know: that he lives on in Siegfried. Wotan lives on in Siegfried as the artist lives on in his work of art: the freer and the more autonomous the latter’s spontaneous existence and the less trace it bears of the creative artist – so that through it (the work of art), the artist himself is forgotten, -- the more perfectly satisfied does the artist himself feel: and so, in a certain higher sense, his being forgotten, his disappearance, his death is – the life of the work of art.” [693W-{11/6/64}Letter to King Ludwig II of Bavaria: SLRW, p. 626-627]
[694W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 8-9]
[P. 8] {FEUER} {SCHOP} “It is an attribute of the poet, to be riper in his inner intuition (Anschauung) of the essence of the world than in his conscious abstract knowledge: precisely at that time I had already sketched, finally completed, the poem of my ‘Ring des Nibelungen.’ With this conception I had unconsciously admitted to [P. 9] myself the truth about things human. Here everything is tragic through and through, and the Will, that fain would shape a world according to its wish, at last can reach no greater satisfaction than the breaking of itself in dignified annulment. It was the time when I returned entirely and exclusively to my artistic plans, and thus, acknowledging Life’s earnestness with all my heart, withdrew to where alone can ‘gladsomeness’ abide.” [694W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 8-9]
[695W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 10-11]
[P. 10] {FEUER} “ … we find personal success and great, if not enduring influence on the outer fashioning of the world allotted to the violent, the passionate individual, who, unchaining the elemental principles of human Impulse under [P. 11] favouring circumstances, points out to greed and self-indulgence the speedy pathways to their satisfaction. To the fear of violence from this quarter, as also to a modicum of knowledge thus acquired of basic human nature, we owe the State. In it the Need is expressed as the human Will’s necessity of establishing some workable agreement among the myriad blindly-grasping individuals into which it is divided. It is a contract whereby the units seek to save themselves from mutual violence, through a little mutual practice of restraint. As in the Nature-religions a portion of the fruits of the field or spoils of the chase was brought as offering to the Gods, to make sure of a right to enjoy the remainder, so in the State the unit offered up just so much of his egoism as appeared necessary to ensure for himself the contentment of its major bulk.” [695W-{64-2/65} On State and Religion: PW Vol. IV, p. 10-11]
