And in his following astute meditation on the obstacles, probably insurmountable, of attaining actual transcendence, actual redemption from one’s natural limitations and inherent egoism, Wagner exposes the irresolvable contradiction at the root of Wotan’s futile quest to free himself from himself:
[P. 345] “… 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 [the brain] which, in its normal state [say, among Alberich and his fellow Nibelungs], recognized itself as having been created by the will and therefore as being subservient to it; and so, in its abnormal, sympathetic state [Wotan’s], 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 [Siegfried will kill Fafner, the Giant who embodies the self-preservation instinct, and also religious faith’s fear of knowledge].
This act of denying the will is the true action of the saint: that it is ultimately accomplished only in a total end to individual consciousness [as in the oceanic feeling of oneness we experience when we lose ourselves in music, which gives us the feeling of transcendence without the accomplished fact]– 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 … .” [the sorrowless youth eternal which the taste of Freia’s golden apples grants the gods of Valhalla] [636W-{6/7/55}Letter to Franz Liszt: SLRW, p. 345-346] [See also635W]
And as for those who are convinced that Wagner had to depend directly and exclusively on Schopenhauer’s writings (with which – it is generally agreed – he first became familiar in 1854) to find the inspiration for his expression of a pessimistic outlook on the nature of man such as he gives voice to in our extract above, I offer below an observation about the nature of things written by Feuerbach in 1830 which seems almost to be a cryptic reduction of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic outlook into a few brief sentences:
“The birth of one being is another’s death. The drive of self-preservation in nature is also a drive to destruction. … how unfortunate existence and life are for a single being, which cannot exist without opposing and contradicting another being, or how miserably limited and conditioned life is because it can continue only with the limitation and condition that it is a contradiction. … it therefore seems as if it might be … a misfortune to live, to be a living, single being, an individual…. this condition, that life can continue only as contradiction, that every living thing has its mortal enemy, manifests a limit and the finitude of life itself.” [9F-TDI: p. 78]
It sounds as if Feuerbach might in fact have been familiar with the first volume of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which Schopenhauer had published prior to 1830, when Feuerbach wrote what appears to be a cryptic reference to Schopenhauer above.
