Growing up in Naumburg, its religious circle had been governed by the plain Lutheran ideals of duty, modesty, simplicity and restraint, but her return to the city coincided with the Awakening movement, which valued fervency and sublime revelation over rational belief. People declared themselves born again. They denounced themselves in public as desperate sinners. This newfangled behavior did not suit the Nietzsche ladies, and while there was not the smallest deviation from the intention that Friedrich was to follow his father and his grandfather into the Church, there was no question of the family becoming part of such an unbuttoned ecclesiastical circle. Instead, they found their friends among the wives of Court functionaries and the wives of Justices of the High Court, a wealthy and powerful section of provincial society untroubled by new ideas.
In the same year, 1854, Nietzsche became passionately interested in the Crimean War. For centuries, the strategically important Crimean peninsula sticking out into the Black Sea had been a bone of contention between Russia and Turkey. It was currently in Russia’s possession and now the troops of Tsar Nicholas 1 were fighting the forces of the Ottoman Empire and its allies, England and France. It was the first war to be covered by photographers. Thanks to the electric telegraph, reports were received from the front almost as they happened. Nietzsche and his school friends Wilhelm Pinder and Gustav Krug followed the campaigns avidly. Their pocket money went on lead soldiers, they pored over maps and built models of the battlefields, they shaped a pool to represent the harbor of Sebastopol and they made navies of paper boats.
Lucerne was a short train ride from Basel and Nietzsche was eager to take up his invitation to continue the conversation about Schopenhauer and to hear more of Wagner’s Schopenhauerian opera, Tristan und Isolde.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy is chiefly set out in the huge book The World as Will and Representation (1818) in which he develops earlier thinking by Kant and Plato.
We live in the physical world. What we see, touch, perceive or experience is the representation (Vorstellung) but behind the representation lies the true essence of the object, the will (Willa). We are aware of ourselves, both in the perceptual fashion by which we know external things and, quite differently, from within as “will.”
The representation is in a state of endless yearning and eternal becoming as it seeks unity with its will, its perfectible state. The representation may occasionally become one with the will but this only causes further discontent and further yearning. The human genius (a rare being) may achieve wholeness in the union of will and representation but for the rest of the human herd it is an impossible state in life, only to be achieved in death.
All life is yearning for an impossible state and therefore all life is suffering. Kant had written from a Christian standpoint which made the ever-imperfect, ever-yearning state of the empirical world bearable because some sort of happy ending could be anticipated if you tried hard enough. Redemption was always possible through Christ.
Schopenhauer, on the other hand, was heavily influenced by his study of Buddhist and Hindu philosophies with their abnegatory emphasis on suffering, destiny and fate, and on the fact that desires when satiated only give rise to fresh desires. The sense of Hux at the noumenal (metaphysical) level of the will is resolved in a yearning for nothingness.
Schopenhauer is known as the pessimistic philosopher but for a young man such as Nietzsche who was 5nding Christianity increasingly impossible, he provided a viable alternative to Kant, whose inHuence dominated the German philosophical establishment, not least because Christianity was a vital component of the fabric of German society, enrolled by the State in the service of conservative, nationalist politics. This put both Nietzsche and Wagner in the posi. tion of outsiders, which of course they minded not at all.
Nietzsche had not read Schopenhauer uncritically. On the way he had studied F. A. Lange’s History of Materialism and Critique of IL: Meaning in the Present (Gcsc/zz’chtc dc: Materialismus und Kritz'li seiner Bcdcutung in der Gcgenwart, 1866), and he had made notes.
1. The world of the senses is a product of our organization.
2. Our visible (physical) organs are, like all other parts of the phenomenal world, only images of an unknown object.
3. Our real organization is therefore as much unknown to us as real external things are. We continually have before us nothing but the product of both.
Thus the true essence of things-the thing-in-itself-is not only unknown to us: the concept of it is neither more nor less than the final product of an antithesis which is determined by our organization, an antithesis of which we do not know whether it has any meaning outside our experience or not.
Within this free-fall unknowing, Schopenhauer struck a deep emotional need in him, giving him comfort. The proposition that all life is a state of suffering applied to him more than most, with his poor body in a constant state of chronic ill health and often great pain. Naturally it yearned for its ideal state. Likewise, he was in a state of yearning for his “true being” that would make existence seem intelligible and thus justified. At this stage he was particularly confused as to what his “true being” was. Schopenhauer told him that we cannot realize the oneness of our true being because our intellect constantly fragments the world-and how can it be other! wise, when our intellect itself is but a small part, a fragment of our representation?
Nietzsche was feeling this in the most personal way; “The most irksome thing of all is that I am always having to impersonate someone-the teacher, the philologist, the human being,” he wrote after taking up the Basel professorship, and it was hardly a surprising feeling given that he was a young man dressing like an old man to impersonate wisdom, an undergraduate impersonating a professor, an exasperated son impersonating a good son to his irritating mother, and a loving and dutiful son to the memory of his dead Christian father while in the process of losing his Christian faith. As if these everyday impersonations were not enough, there was the question of his statelessness, the formal identity within which all these impersonations existed. Utterly fragmented, he knew himself in the Schopenhauerian state of striving and suffering: a man far from understanding his true will let alone realizing it.
Wagner on the other hand was, at least in his own opinion, such a long way down the road of Schopenhauerian thought as to have attained the status of genius. He felt so confident that his will and representation had become one that he and his mistress Cosima playfully addressed each other by Schopenhauerian love-narnes. He was Will (Will) and she was Vorstell (Representation).
For Schopenhauer, music was the one art capable of revealing the truth about the nature of being itself. Other arts such as painting and sculpture could only be representations of representations. This put them at two removes from the ultimate reality, the will. Music, however, being formless, in the sense of being non-representational, had the capacity directly to access the will, bypassing the intellect.
Since discovering Schopenhauer in 1854, Wagner had been studying how to compose what Schopenhauer calls “suspension.” A piece of Schopenhauerian music must be like a life: moving from discord to discord, only resolved at the moment of death (in music, the final note of the piece).
The ear, like the shuddering soul, is endlessly yearning for the final resolution. Man is dissonance in human form; therefore musical dissonance must be the most effective artistic means of representing the pain of individual existence.
Composers who had gone before were wedded to observing musical form and obeying the ancestral rules: the formal, formulaic structure of the symphony for instance, or the concerto. Listening to them made you conscious of their individual contribution to music’s historical continuity and development. If you knew the language you could easily place them on the historical line.
But Schopenhauer challenged the very idea of history, calling “time” only a form of our thought. This freed Wagner from recognizable representation. Nietzsche described Wagner’s Zukunfirs. musik (“Music of the F uture”) as the triumphant culmination of all art because it was not concerned, like the others, with the images of the phenomenal world but rather spoke the language of the will directly. From the deepest source of its being, music was the Will’s most quintessential manifestation. And of all music, Wagner’s exercised a spell over him that was becoming ever stronger; he could not keep a cool head when he listened to it, his every fiber quivered, his every nerve vibrated. Nothing else produced such a penetrating and lasting feeling of ecstasy in him. Surely what he was experiencing was the sensation of direct access to the will? He longed to renew his acquaintance with the Master.
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