/lit/ - Literature

>>22639722
>Upon the realm of aesthetics and philosophic Criticism it may be demonstrated, almost palpably, that it was predestined for the German spirit to seize and assimilate the Foreign, the primarily remote from it, in utmost purity and objectivity of intuition (in höchster objektiver Reinheit der Anschauung). One may aver, without exaggeration, that the Antique would have stayed unknown, in its now universal world-significance, had the German spirit not recognised and expounded it. The Italian made as much of the Antique his own, as he could copy and remodel; the Frenchman borrowed from this remodelling, in his turn, whatever caressed his national sense for elegance of Form: the German was the first to apprehend its purely-human originality, to seize therein a meaning quite aloof from usefulness, but therefore of the only use for rendering the Purely-human. Through its inmost understanding of the Antique, the German spirit arrived at the capability of restoring the Purely-human itself to its pristine freedom; not employing the antique form to display a certain given 'stuff,' but moulding the necessary new form itself through an employment of the antique conception of the world. To recognise this plainly, let anyone compare Goethe's Iphigenia with that of Euripides. One may say that the true idea of the Antique has existed only since the middle of the eighteenth century, since Winckelmann and Lessing.

>>22639808
Wagner > Holderlin

>>19925745
Joyce knew Wagner was the greatest dramatist ever.

>>19508413

People are reading Wagner.

>>17613833

The Ubermensch already came.

>>17504495
>Wagner was a schizophrenic masochist
"Okay."

>Then came the Students' Association. The League of Virtue was founded. All so fantastic that no human being could grasp it. But I did. Now it is me no one grasps: I am the most German being, I am the German spirit. Question the incomparable magic of my works, compare them with the rest: and you can, for the present, say no differently than that - it is German. But what is this German? It must be something wonderful, mustn't it, for it is humanly finer than all else? - Oh heavens! It should have a soil, this German! I should be able to find my people! What a glorious people it ought to become. But to this people only could I belong. -
- Richard Wagner diary

>>17443516
>Then came the Students' Association. The League of Virtue was founded. All so fantastic that no human being could grasp it. But I did. Now it is me no one grasps: I am the most German being, I am the German spirit. Question the incomparable magic of my works, compare them with the rest: and you can, for the present, say no differently than that - it is German. But what is this German? It must be something wonderful, mustn't it, for it is humanly finer than all else? - Oh heavens! It should have a soil, this German! I should be able to find my people! What a glorious people it ought to become. But to this people only could I belong. -
- Richard Wagner diary

>>17408437
Based.

>The Christian religion belongs to no specific national stock: the Christian dogma addresses purely - human nature. Only in so far as it has seized in all its purity this content common to all men, can a people call itself Christian in truth. However, a people can make nothing fully its own but what becomes possible for it to grasp with its inborn feeling, and to grasp in such a fashion that in the New it finds its own familiar self again. Upon the realm of aesthetics and philosophic Criticism it may be demonstrated, almost palpably, that it was predestined for the German spirit to seize and assimilate the Foreign, the primarily remote from it, in utmost purity and objectivity of intuition (in höchster objektiver Reinheit der Anschauung). One may aver, without exaggeration, that the Antique would have stayed unknown, in its now universal world-significance, had the German spirit not recognised and expounded it. The Italian made as much of the Antique his own, as he could copy and remodel; the Frenchman borrowed from this remodelling, in his turn, whatever caressed his national sense for elegance of Form: the German was the first to apprehend its purely-human originality, to seize therein a meaning quite aloof from usefulness, but therefore of the only use for rendering the Purely-human. Through its inmost understanding of the Antique, the German spirit arrived at the capability of restoring the Purely-human itself to its pristine freedom; not employing [156] the antique form to display a certain given 'stuff,' but moulding the necessary new form itself through an employment of the antique conception of the world. (02) To recognise this plainly, let anyone compare Goethe's Iphigenia with that of Euripides. One may say that the true idea of the Antique has existed only since the middle of the eighteenth century, since Winckelmann and Lessing.
- Wagner, What is German?

>>17356607
Antisemitism is good.
Christianity is good.
Self-denial is good.
Redemption is good.
Germany is good.

>>17153044
>"I must have an heir!" Exclaimed Wagner in a letter, "and I shall name him Siegfried!"

I wrote this in another thread but it was deleted, and will be useful to any anons interested in reading Wagner:

He's a brilliant thinker, and in many respects of his thought (especially on art), still hasn't been superseded. Most of early Nietzsche's understanding of art comes from Wagner, and it's a mistake to think he necessarily went beyond Wagner's own ideas on art, or even covered much of the same breadth of Wagner's ideas on it. A lot can be said about him and his lifelong writing, but I recommend starting with his later works at least post 1860, being much easier to understand and the final conclusions of his life. Specifically his "Regeneration writings," literally the very last things he ever wrote.

- Religion and Art
- "What Boots this Knowledge?"
- Know Thyself
- Introduction to a work of Count Gobineau's
- Hero-dom and Christendom (last finished essay)

Other very worthwhile works of his (mostly later years) are:

- Judaism in Music
- Beethoven (1870, and his major book on art post-1860, the only work of his with a modern translation but will cost you over a $100 to get)
- The Destiny of Opera
- What is German?
- Modern (continuation of Judaism in Music)
- On Poetry and Composition

He also has a beautiful and sweet short story trilogy about a young German composer who considers himself a disciple to Beethoven, and are very useful for understand Wagner's early understanding and feeling about art, such as his lifelong obsession with unifying word and music:

- A Pilgrimage to Beethoven
- An End in Paris
- A Happy Evening

That said, he doesn't feel it necessary to restate everything he has said in the past. At this point you might as well dive into his major works from the middle of the century, where most of his thought on art, history, science, psychology and generally philosophy are included. Though there is much of it he would later reject or improve upon, and is written with the brashness and arguably unnecessary length (most of them are book-long) of a younger Wagner which can make it difficult to tell what he's exactly trying to say, they are extremely brilliant, original and important works. But a philosopher not being his primary disposition, and feeling the need to say much and all with an artistic slant, so as to convey the meaningful feeling prior to these ideas, he crams a lot into each paragraph. Often ideas of his can sound more eccentric than they are because of this, but with persistence you'll understand. They are (from what I know):

- Art and Revolution
- The Art-Work of the Future
- A Communication to my Friends
- Opera and Drama

CONT

>>17116247
Why are the Germans so perfect bros?

>The plainest type of heroism is that evolved by the Hellenic sagas in their Herakles. Labours put upon him to destroy him, he executes in proud obedience, and frees the world thereby from direst plagues. Seldom, in fact scarcely ever, do we find the hero otherwise than in a state of suffering prepared for him by fate: Herakles is persecuted by Hera out of jealousy of his divine begetter, and kept in menial subjection. In this main trait we surely should not do wrong to recognise an allusion to [278] that school of arduous labours in which the noblest Aryan stems and races throve to grandeur of demigods: the by no means mildest climates whence they enter history at last, as men matured, supply us with a clue to the fortunes of their ancestry. Here we find the fruit of suffering and deprivations vanquished by heroic toil, that proud self-consciousness whereby these stocks are once for all distinguished from the others throughout our whole world-history. Like Herakles and Siegfried, they were conscious of divine descent: a lie to them was inconceivable, and a free man meant a truthful man. Nowhere in history do these root-qualities of the Aryan race shew forth more plainly than in the contact of the last pure-bred Germanic branches with the falling Roman world. Here history repeats the one great feature of their mythic heroes: with bloody hands they serve the Romans, and—rate them infinitely lower than themselves, much as Herakles despised Eurystheus. The accident of their becoming masters of the great Latino-Semite realm was fatal to them. Pride is a delicate virtue and brooks no compromise, such as crossing of breed: but the Germanic race without this virtue has—naught to tell us. For this Pride is the soul of the truthful, of the free though serving. He knows no fear (Furcht), but respect (Ehrfurcht)—a virtue whose very name, in its proper sense, is known to none save those oldest Aryan peoples; whilst honour (Ehre) itself is the sum of all personal worth, and therefore can neither be given nor received, as is our practice to-day, but, a witness of divine descent, it keeps the hero unashamed even in his most shameful of sufferings. From Pride and Honour sprang the rule that, not property ennobles man, but man this property; which, again, was expressed in the custom that excessive possessions were speedily shared out, for very shame, by him to whom they haply fell.

>>17116637
Easy.

>>17050094
>"Beethoven is the greatest genius to ever live"
>implying all of your descriptions of Beethoven don't fit better on Wagner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s88hmJ_osjY

>>17046019
>Without embarking on an inquiry into the mystery just mooted, we yet must call to mind the distinction between the modern culture-poet and the naive poet of the ancient world. The latter was in the first place an inventor of Myths, then their word-of-mouth narrator in the Epos, and finally their personal performer in the living Drama. Plato was the first to adopt all three poetic forms for his "dialogues," so filled with dramatic life and so rich in myth-invention; and these scenes of his may be regarded as the foundation—nay, in the poet-philosopher's glorious "Symposium," the model unapproached—of strictly literary poetry, which always leans to the didactic. Here the forms of naive poetry are merely employed to set philosophic theses in a quasi-popular light, and conscious tendence takes the place of the directly-witnessed scene from life. To extend this "Tendence" to the acted drama, must have appeared to our great culture-poets the surest mode of elevating the existing popular play; and in this they may have been misled by certain features of the Antique Drama. The Tragedy of the Greeks having [139] evolved from a compromise between the Apollinian and the Dionysian elements, upon the basis of a system of Lyrics wellnigh past our understanding, the didactic hymn of the old-Hellenian priests could combine with the newer Dionysian dithyramb to produce that enthralling effect in which this artwork stands unrivalled. Now the fact of the Apollinian element in Greek Tragedy, regarded as a literary monument, having attracted to itself the principal notice in every age, and particularly of philosophers and didacts, may reasonably have betrayed our later poets—who also chiefly viewed these tragedies as literary products—into the opinion that in this didactic tendence lay the secret of the antique drama's dignity, and. consequently into the belief that the existing popular drama was only to be raised and idealised by stamping it therewith. Their true artistic instinct saved them from sacrificing living Drama to Tendence bald and bare: but what was to put soul into this Drama, to lift it on the cothurnus of ideality, they deemed could only be the purposed elevation of its tendence; and that the more, as their sole disposable material, namely Word-speech, the vehicle of notions (Begriffe), seemed to exclude the feasibility, or even the advisability, of an ennoblement and heightening of expression on any side but this. The lofty sentence alone could match the higher tendence; and to impress the hearer's physical sense, unquestionably excited by the drama, recourse must be had to so-called poetic diction.
- Wagner

>"I am a different kind of organism, I have hyper-sensitive nerves, I must have beauty, splendour and light. The world ought to give me what I need! I cannot live the wretched life of a town organist like your Meister Bach! Is it such a shocking demand, if I believe that I am due the little bit of luxury I enjoy? I, who have so much enjoyment to give to the world and to thousands of people!"

Even his most simple work, and traditionally fulfilling of the Gesummtkunstwerk ideal, Tristan und Isolde is far too complex to ever hold such a social role for the masses. The uniqueness of each work of his stands extraordinarily simple, but the complexity of its staging and music will always hold it too far from the every-day.

>>16510881
>He was close enough. He certainly wouldn't be in line with Scruton's beliefs, or those of the majority of /lit/ for that matter. Post one passage representative of his views on women and see how people itt react.
What do you think Wagner even believed? Did you read one short segmant about how Wagner was a liberal revolutionary in the revolutions of 1848 while completely ignoring that he went back on many of those revolutionary views, but never once did Wagner care about any feminism or anarchist, quite literally that would be beyond the Third Reich(as much as I resent the ideology of the Third Reich being thrown over Wagner, this point stands true). Just take a look at this statement during Wagner's most revolutionary phase, in his most notorious revolutionary work "The Art-Work of the Future":

>The redemption of woman into participation in the nature of man is the outcome of christian-Germanic evolution. The Greek remained in ignorance of the psychic process of the ennobling of woman to the rank of man, To him everything appeared under its direct, unmediated aspect,—woman to him was woman, and man was man; and thus at the point where his love to woman was satisfied in accordance with nature, arose the spiritual demand for man.—R. WAGNER.

Just admit that you're wrong about Wagner man.

What is the most masculine, inspiring work you ever read?

Who is your favorite masculine hero?

(Inb4 Jesus)

I’m a big fan of Tennyson’s Ulysses

>>16486270
This is why.

>The Christian religion belongs to no specific national stock: the Christian dogma addresses purely - human nature. Only in so far as it has seized in all its purity this content common to all men, can a people call itself Christian in truth. However, a people can make nothing fully its own but what becomes possible for it to grasp with its inborn feeling, and to grasp in such a fashion that in the New it finds its own familiar self again. Upon the realm of aesthetics and philosophic Criticism it may be demonstrated, almost palpably, that it was predestined for the German spirit to seize and assimilate the Foreign, the primarily remote from it, in utmost purity and objectivity of intuition (in höchster objektiver Reinheit der Anschauung). One may aver, without exaggeration, that the Antique would have stayed unknown, in its now universal world-significance, had the German spirit not recognised and expounded it. The Italian made as much of the Antique his own, as he could copy and remodel; the Frenchman borrowed from this remodelling, in his turn, whatever caressed his national sense for elegance of Form: the German was the first to apprehend its purely-human originality, to seize therein a meaning quite aloof from usefulness, but therefore of the only use for rendering the Purely-human. Through its inmost understanding of the Antique, the German spirit arrived at the capability of restoring the Purely-human itself to its pristine freedom; not employing [156] the antique form to display a certain given 'stuff,' but moulding the necessary new form itself through an employment of the antique conception of the world. (02) To recognise this plainly, let anyone compare Goethe's Iphigenia with that of Euripides. One may say that the true idea of the Antique has existed only since the middle of the eighteenth century, since Winckelmann and Lessing.

>"For me Christianity has not yet arrived, and I am like the early Christians, awaiting Christ's return."

>>16409240
Who's the Wagner of music?