[P. 106] “We … should not go far astray, if we defined Music as man’s qualification a priori for fashioning the Drama. Just as we construct for ourselves the world of semblances through application of the laws of Time and Space existing a priori in our brain, so this conscious representment of the world’s idea in Drama would thus be foreordained by those inner laws of Music, operating in the dramatist equally unconsciously [P. 107] with the laws of Causality we bring into employment for apperception of the phenomenal world.” [782W-{9-12/70} Beethoven: PW Vol. V, p. 106-107]
[P. 441] “ … whereas the world gets by and is held together solely by dint of experience, the poet’s intuition precedes all experience and, on the basis of his own unique potentiality, comprehends what it is that gives all experience its significance and meaning. … what we have here is the best possible example of that same phenomenon which alone makes cognition possible, whereby the entire framework of space, time and causality in which the world as represented to us is prefigured in our brain as the latter’s most characteristic functions, so that these conditional qualities of all objects, namely their spatiality, temporality and causality, are already contained within our heads before we recognize these objects, since without them we should have no means of recognizing them at all [Wagner speaks here of Schopenhauer’s – and therefore Kant’s – concept of apriori knowledge].
But what is raised above space, time and causality, and what does not require these expedients for us to recognize it, in other words, what is unconditioned by finality … [i.e., unconditioned by the fate the Norns’ spin into their rope]; [P. 442] this is something that can never be grasped by any common philosophy, but is prefigured by the poet with that same prefiguredness that lies within him, conditioning all that he creates and enabling him to represent this something with infallible certainty, -- this something, I say, which is more definite and more certain than any other object of our cognition, in spite of the fact that it involves no property of the world as we apprehend it through experience [Wagner is speaking here of the poet’s aesthetic intuition granted him by music].
(…)
The common world, which is entirely subjected to the influence of experience forced upon it from without [i.e., entirely subject to the Norns’ knowledge of all that was, is, and shall be], and which can grasp nothing that has not been more or less physically and palpably suggested to it, can never understand the poet’s attitude towards the world of his own experience [thus the Norns do not foresee what the artist-hero Siegfried and his muse of inspiration Bruennhilde will do].” [667W-{1/19/59} Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: SLRW, p. 441-442]
But Feuerbach understood perfectly well that when idealist philosophers like Kant and Schopenhauer spoke of apriori knowledge of time, space, and causality as if these are properties granted by the mind to the essentially unknowable thing-in-itself (i.e., what the world is in and of itself independent of man’s artificial attempts to grasp and encompass it with ideas), they were fooling themselves, for the sake of a futile effort to smuggle religious man’s bid for transcendent meaning back into philosophy. Feuerbach recognized this as a trick of self-deception. It is through this trick that such philosophers strove to restore to the mundane world an element of mystery and transcendence, as if all human efforts to obtain knowledge of a reality outside of man were destined to failure by virtue of the fact that our mind automatically imposes its own ineradicable limits upon
