blissful feeling, wholly purged of all vestige of the existential angst which inspired it, except insofar as this contributes to the aesthetic exaltation conveyed by the artwork.
So what then does Bruennhilde mean when she says that Godlike composure rages in billows, and the chastest of light flares up with passion? This highly unusual, seemingly contradictory statement expounds what is in fact the basis for one of Wagner’s few significant critiques of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Schopenhauer believed that redemption was to be found solely in a stilling or quieting of the Will, i.e., of man’s primary instinctive impulses such as fear, self-aggrandizement, and sexual desire, and that this could be obtained through a mystical identification of one’s ego with the “all,” the entire cosmos and everything in it both animate and inanimate. Wagner’s critique was that he found redemption instead not in a stilling or quieting of the Will, but in a heightening of the Will to the point of revelation through sexual love, in which one feels one’s own limited will expanded until it feels itself one with the universal will. We can, however, only make sense of Wagner’s critique of Schopenhauer if we recognize that when he speaks of sexual love he is referring to his metaphor for unconscious inspiration of the artist by his muse, who is his unconscious mind and holds for him man’s repressed hoard of knowledge that the world is inherently and irrevocably loveless. With this in view we can now follow the reasoning of Wagner’s critique as expressed in the extracts below.
We begin with a passage Wagner wrote three years (50-1/51) prior to his first known acquaintance with Schopenhauer’s philosophy in the Fall of 1854. This passage is the conceptual basis of what would later become Wagner’s critique of Schopenhauer’s concept of redemption:
“Nature in her actual reality [Erda’s objective knowledge of all that was, is, and will be] is only seen by the Understanding [Alberich, and Wotan – Light-Alberich - when he wears Alberich’s Ring or knows Erda objectively, without love], which de-composes her into her separatest of parts; if it wants to display to itself these parts in their living organic connexion, then the quiet of the Understanding’s meditation is involuntarily displaced by a more and more highly agitated mood, which at last remains nothing but a mood of Feeling. In this mood, Man unconsciously refers Nature [Erda] once more to himself … . In Feeling’s highest agitation, Man sees in Nature a sympathising being [Erda’s daughter Bruennhilde, i.e., music, through whom Wotan, reborn now as Siegfried, can forget Wotan’s care and fear, which was inspired by Erda’s prophecy] … .” [526W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 218]
We can see here that Wagner considers “quiet” or stilling of the impulses as a state of mind dependent on understanding. But, he says, to grasp the living organic connection of all things this quiet is involuntarily replaced by an “agitated mood” of feeling. Wagner then goes on to suggest that in this way man unconsciously refers nature - as known to us objectively in science (i.e., Erda as understood by Alberich) - to himself so he can see in nature a sympathetic being. We can construe nature (Erda), when it is known to us as a sympathetic being, as Erda’s daughter Bruennhilde, who is Wagner’s metaphor for the unconscious, involuntary mind, and music. This I believe is the meaning underlying Bruennhilde’s remark that “Godlike composure rages in billows; the chastest of light flares up with passion … .” Wagner, not yet familiar with Schopenhauer, nonetheless expressed both in the Ring libretto and in his observation above, what would later become perhaps his most important difference with Schopenhauer. And now we also understand what lies behind Wotan’s leaving the virgin Valkyrie asleep on a mountaintop to be wooed, won
