Though Feuerbach had high praise for conscious scientific endeavor, he believed our truest contact with reality, the reality of the ephemeral world, is through the unique and unreproduceable particularity of feeling, because feeling can capture nature’s essence as change, and express the irreducibly diverse, whereas thought, no matter how accurate a picture of nature it provides us, nonetheless congeals the changing and multifarious world into static forms, generalizations, which lose contact with its essentially mobile, unknowably complex nature. Feuerbach has a vast amount to say on this subject, but the following selection sums up the essence of his viewpoint which, as we will see, had a considerable influence on Wagner’s concept of music as feeling which offers man redemption from the burdens of thought:
“Transitoriness [Erda’s All things that are, end!”] is the essence of all feeling.” [2F-TDI: p. 51]
“Only transitoriness grants magical charm to human life, for she is queen of the world.” [28F-TDI: p. 200]
[P. 322] “True, ‘what we think, exists,’ but only as thought; thought is one thing, reality is another; no sleight-of-hand can make them [P. 323] the same.” [342F-LER: p. 322-323]
“… life is essentially restless, disorderly, anarchic; it can no more be understood by the narrow concepts of the philosopher than it can be contained by the narrow laws of the monarch.” [349F-LER: p. 351]
“The new philosophy … is the open-hearted and sensuous philosophy. (…)
… only the sensuous is clear as daylight; all doubt and dispute cease only where sensation begins [the basis for much of Wagner’s speculation on music]. The secret of immediate knowledge is sensation (…)
Something is true … only when it is no longer mediated, but immediate.” [183F-PPF: p. 55]
[P. 43] “The particular belongs to being, and the general belongs to thought. (…) … I owe my [P. 44] existence never to the linguistic or logical bread – bread in itself – but always only to this bread, to the “unutterable!” Being that is founded on many such unutterable things is therefore itself something unutterable. It is indeed the ineffable. Where words cease [as in music], life first begins; and the secret of being is first disclosed.” [179F-PPF: p. 43-44]
“The brain is the parliament of the universe, in which the generic concept represents the infinitely many individuals for whom the brain has not room enough. But precisely because the generic concept is the representative of individuals, and because when we hear the word ‘individuals,’ we think only of specific individuals, it strikes us as perfectly natural and reasonable - especially if our minds are full of generic concepts and we have become estranged from the perception of reality – to derive the particular from the universal, that is, the real from the abstract, existing things from thought, and nature from God.” [346F-LER: p. 335]
Wagner saw man’s scientific impulse to accumulate an ever greater and presumably more and more accurate hoard of objective knowledge of the world, as man’s futile quest to grasp the world as a whole, to complete the circle of experience, to forge Alberich’s Ring, as it were. In this he echoes
