/lit/ - Literature

>>22475273
Wagner already encompassed Heidegger's entire critique of technology in his Ring, right down to the ur-ideal of Greece. The essential difference being that in art, at the point of its experience, the question is solved. Philosophy can only point a direction and broach further questions, but art IS something already. So it naturally follows the artistic response to the technological enframing should precede the philosophical response, as a muscle reflex precedes cognition, or the scientific discovery of the reflex via cognition. Wagner portrays the future of our culture in his myths with as much certainly as Aeschylus portrayed his culture's past.

>The Poet's art has turned to politics: no one now can poetise, without politising. Yet the politician will never become a poet, precisely until he ceases to be a politician: but in a purely political world to be not a politician, is as good as to say one does not exist at all; whosoever at this instant steals away from politics (wer sich jetzt noch unter der Politik hinwegstielt), he only belies his own being. The Poet cannot come to light again, until we have no more Politics.
>Politics, however, are the secret of our history, and of the state of things therefrom arising. Napoleon put this clearly. He told Goethe that: the rôle of Fate in the ancient world is filled, since the empire of the Romans, by Politics. Let us lay to heart this saying of him who smarted in St Helena! In it is briefly summed the whole truth of what we have to comprehend before we can come to an understanding, also, about the Content and the Form of Drama.
>The Greek Fate is the inner Nature-necessity, from which the Greek—because he did not understand it—sought refuge in the arbitrary political State. Our Fate is the arbitrary political State, which to us shews itself as an outer necessity for the maintenance of Society; and from which we seek refuge in the Nature-necessity, because we have learnt to understand the latter, and have recognised it as the conditionment of our being and all its shapings.
- Opera and Drama

>Clever though be the many thoughts expressed by mouth or pen about the invention of money and its enormous value as a civiliser, against such praises should be set the curse to which it has always been doomed in song and legend. If gold here figures as the demon strangling manhood's innocence, our greatest poet shews at last the goblin's game of paper money. The Nibelung's fateful ring become a pocket-book, might well complete the eerie picture of the spectral world-controller. By the advocates of our Progressive Civilisation this rulership is indeed regarded as a spiritual, nay, a moral power; for vanished Faith is now replaced by "Credit," that fiction of our mutual honesty kept upright by the most elaborate safeguards against loss and trickery. What comes to pass beneath the benedictions of this Credit, we now are witnessing, and seem inclined to lay all blame upon the Jews.
- Know Thyself

>>21640029
Wagner identified and harshly criticised the enframing power of technology in the modern world, with its ravaging synergy of capitalism, mechanical advancement and the state, long before any philosopher. See his tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen, and prose writings like The Artwork of the Future and Opera and Drama.

>The Greek Fate is the inner Nature-necessity, from which the Greek—because he did not understand it —sought refuge in the arbitrary political State. Our Fate is the arbitrary political State, which to us shews itself as an outer necessity for the maintenance of Society; and from which we seek refuge in the Nature-necessity, because we have learnt to understand the latter, and have recognised it as the conditionment of our being and all its shapings.
- Opera and Drama

>The Nibelung's fateful ring become a pocket-book, might well complete the eerie picture of the spectral world-controller.
- Know Thyself

Is this Ring not the prime symbol of the modern world? Wagner portrays the future of our culture in his myths with as much certainly as Aeschylus portrayed his culture's past. But where the Ring is concerned with the natural qualities of human nature, in Parsifal, the late Wagner, religion is to be pursued as the countermovement to modernity.

>>21579913
>Poet
>Composer
>Dramatist
>Theatre director
>Actor
>Philosopher
>Music Theorist

And he achieved success at the highest level in all of these fields.

what happened to the wagnerposter?

>>21029404
>The blood of the Saviour, the issue from his head, his wounds upon the cross,—who impiously would ask its race, if white or other? Divine we call it, and its source might dimly be approached in what we termed the human species' bond of union, its aptitude for Conscious Suffering. [...] Thus, if we found the faculty of conscious suffering peculiarly developed in the so-called white race, in the Saviour's blood we now must recognise the quintessence of consciously willed suffering itself (des bewusst wollenden Leidens selbst), that godlike Pity which streams through all the human species, its fount and origin.

Baudelaire:
>I found in those of his works which are translated, particularly in Tannhäuser, Lohengrin and the Flying Dutchman, an excellent method of construction, a spirit of order and division which recalls the architecture of ancient tragedies.

Whitman:
>I am again consumed with regret for knowing I have never had a chance to hear the wonderful operas. I say 'wonderful' because I feel that they are constructed on my lines—attach themselves to the same theories of art that have been responsible for Leaves of Grass.

Villiers de l'Isle-Adam:
>He is the very man of whom we have dreamed; he is a genius such as appears upon the earth once every thousand years.

Nietzsche:
>Even now I am still in search of a work which exercises such a dangerous fascination, such a spine-tingling and blissful infinity as Tristan – I have sought in vain, in every art. Everything strange and alien about Leonardo da Vinci is demystified with the first tones of Tristan.

Mallarme:
>Oh strange defiance hurled at poets by him who has usurped their duty with the most open and splendid audacity: Richard Wagner!

Weininger:
>the greatest man since Christ’s time

D'Annunzio:
>In articulating our need for metaphysics, [Wagner] has revealed to us a hidden part of our interior life.

Yeats:
>Wagner's dramas are becoming to Germany what the Greek Tragedies were to Greece.

Strauss:
>Tristan does not, as you believe, represent the "dazzling resurrection" of romanticism, but the end of all romanticism, as it brings into focus the longing of the entire 19th century, longing which is finally released in the Tag- und Nachtsgeprach and in Isolde's Liebestod. . . Tristan is the ultimate conclusion of Schiller and Goethe and the highest fulfilment of a development of the theatre stretching over 2,000 years.

Joyce:
>There are indeed hardly more than a dozen original themes in world LITERATURE ... Tristan und Isolde is an example of an original theme.

Auden:
>perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived

Junger:
>Thoughts about the mighty mind of the dramatist who breathes artificial breath into past ages and dead cultures so that they move like corpses we can quote. A sorcerer of the highest order who conjures with real blood at the gates of the underworld.

Scruton:
>Modern high culture is as much a set of footnotes to Wagner as Western philosophy is, in Whitehead’s judgement, footnotes to Plato.