And in our second extract from Wagner we find him, however, like Wotan, registering his discomfort with the prospect of a science-based world-view which deprives man of what religious belief had once offered, the feeling that the world ultimately has noumenal, mysterious, transcendent meaning, which Wagner identifies here with “real life,” and “love”:
“I am not so out of touch with nature as you suppose, even though I myself am no longer in a position to have scientific dealings with it. (…) It is only when nature is expected to replace real life – love – that I ignore it.” [624W-{1/25-26/54} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 312] [See also 1046W]
Wagner would later find his villainous character Hagen embodied in his onetime friend, and future enemy, the atheist, Friedrich Nietzsche, who would pick up the ball of atheism where Wagner had dropped it, about the time when Wagner was striving to wholly divorce himself from Feuerbach’s atheism and materialism. Wagner, of course, alludes to Nietzsche in the following comment recorded by Cosima in 1878, after Nietzsche had broken off relations with Wagner, largely because of Wagner’s back-sliding from his former Feuerbachian, atheist perspective (Wagner by 1878 was involved in writing Parsifal, which Nietzsche regarded as Wagner’s servile and cowardly testament to a retro, romantic Christianity):
“N.’s book provokes R. into saying playfully, ‘Oh, art and religion are just what is left in human beings of the monkey’s tail, the remains of an ancient culture!’ (…) ‘Actually,’ R. adds with a laugh, ‘genius is simply envy.’ “ [921W-{6/27/78}CD Vol. II, p. 103]
By 1878 Nietzsche had openly launched his epic assault upon what he regarded as the pessimistic nihilism, dangerous for a healthy culture, of Christianity and romantic art (particularly Wagner’s art), and like Feuerbach was engaged in reconstructing a historical genealogy of nihilism by tracing religion, art (in so far as art expressed sentiments grounded in what were formerly religious values), and morality, back to their origin in nature and the human body.
Wotan’s self-destructive craving for world-end, in despair at his inability to transcend the natural limits of his own nature, and the world, because he is the victim of religious self-deceit (Loge’s false promises), which has instilled in him an unnatural longing for forms of self-expression which can’t be fulfilled in real life, is the very essence of what Nietzsche described as Nihilism. According to Nietzsche the ultimate consequence of Christian thought, which despises the real world in favor of an illusory one, once modern man confronts the fact that religion’s claims and promises are an illusion, a dream, and that there is no alternative but the scientific world-view which provides no sanctuary for Christian ideals, is self-destruction and longing for world-destruction. The man whose values, even subliminally, are predicated on the old religious longing for an “other world” of redemption from this one, faces the following irresolvable existential dilemma: on the one hand, thanks to man’s advancement in knowledge, the consoling illusions of man’s transcendent value which once made life livable and meaningful can no longer be sustained, while on the other hand, the only world left to us, the objective, real world presented to us by science, is considered to be intolerable:
