The Nibelung’s Ring: The Later Philosophy

At the end of the last thrilling episode of our journey through the tangled wilderness of The Nibelung’s Ring, Richard Wagner, fleeing from the kingdom of Saxony with a price on his head, had just reached safety in Switzerland.  There he would remain, scraping by on the money he could make from writing and trying to dodge debt collectors, while laboring away at a gargantuan tetralogy of operas that nobody was interested in producing. It was a difficult time for him, and that turned out to be one of the best things that could have happened.

This is a common experience for a certain kind of clueless young intellectual. I can say this with some confidence because I went through it when I was in my twenties. It can happen any time you get chucked out of a comfortable situation in which all your bills are paid by other people, and suddenly have to keep yourself fed, clothed, and housed by your own efforts. It’s one of the more effective ways to shed the kind of silly beliefs about life that become fashionable among those who don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from.

In my case, the end of my first stint at college and the beginning of my marriage did the trick. Wagner, typically, did it on a grander scale than most, by leading a failed revolution, being dismissed from his comfortable job as Kapellmeister to the royal court of Saxony, and becoming persona non grata in most of the potential markets for his skill set. The results were similar, however, as they generally are:  the clueless young intellectual has to pay a little more attention to realities and a little less attention to abstract notions about realities, and becomes a little less clueless in the process. There’s usually some amount of whining involved—I’m embarrassed to say this was true of me—and here, too, Wagner did it on a bigger scale than most.

Very often, though, what happens is that somewhere in there, usually when the whining trickles away into silence and the not-quite-so-clueless young intellectual realizes that nobody else in the world is listening, an idea, a teaching, a book, or some other mental stimulus shows up, and jolts the intellectual out of the mud wallow he’s dug for himself. That happened to Wagner, too.

His reaction was, surprisingly enough, no more grandiose than most. In his case it was a book that gave him the necessary jolt; he proceeded to study that book with the kind of passionate intensity teachers wish their students would demonstrate now and then, and his letters show that he grasped what the book had to say more completely than most, but that’s not uncommon at all in such situations. From that point on, though Wagner didn’t precisely change his ways—he kept on borrowing money and not paying it back, for example—he flung himself into work with renewed vigor, and the tetralogy shed its facile Feuerbachian optimism to embrace a richer, more tragic, and more realistic view of things.

The book that did the trick for Wagner was Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation) by Arthur Schopenhauer. Wagner was far from the only person in his time to be shaken to the core by Schopenhauer’s work; it had an immense impact across the cultures of Europe and the European diaspora.  Art, literature, music, and popular culture all echoed with the impact of Schopenhauer’s thought. The only field in which it made no impact at all was the one that mattered to Schopenhauer, which was philosophy.

To understand the Schopenhauer phenomenon, it helps to step back a little and recall the dreadful predicament that assailed European philosophy in the wake of Immanuel Kant.  Building on two centuries of hard work by previous philosophers, Kant showed with ruthless clarity that nearly everything we think we know about the world is secondhand guesswork. There really is a world out there—that much he also showed—but our perceptions of it have to go through three filters:  first, the filter of the senses, which only pick up on a tiny fraction of what’s happening out there; second, the filter of the nervous system, which folds, spindles, and mutilates the input of the senses so that it can be processed by the mind and third, the filter of the mind, which is so packed with genetic, cultural, and personal interpretive schemes that it’s a wonder that any information about the world gets through at all.

As I noted two weeks ago, every philosophical tradition makes this discovery sooner or later. In healthy, mature traditions, after a period of lively debate that shows that, in fact, we really can’t know that much about the universe, philosophers turn their efforts away from grand schemes about the nature of everything and refocus on how to live in a world where the nature of everything is exactly what we can’t know.

The focus of the resulting philosophies varies from tradition to tradition. In China, where the decisive turn appears in the writings of Lao Tsu, later philosophy focused on social and political life, seeking to solve the problem of how human beings can live together in relative peace. In India, where the turn is already evident in the Upanishads, later philosophy focused on mysticism and the quest to live in harmony with the Divine. In Greece, where the turn took place during the lifetime of Socrates, later philosophy focused on ethics and explored ways for the individual to live in harmony with himself.

What direction Western philosophy might take in response to the same shattering discovery of the limits of the human mind is anyone’s guess. It may turn out that our philosophical tradition is the exception—that instead of dealing with the challenge, as other philosophical traditions have done, it will plug its eyes and ears with its fingers, chant “La, la, la, I can’t hear you!” at the top of its lungs, and continue to sink into the mire of incoherence and uselessness until it vanishes from sight.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, however, there have been a few noble exceptions to that habit, and the most influential of them was Arthur Schopenhauer.

A few biographical details may help.  Schopenhauer was born in 1788 to a wealthy businessman and his ambitious wife in what was then the tiny German-speaking city-state of Danzig and is now the Polish city of Gdansk. His parents gave him a world-class education, sending him to study in France and England so that he would be fluently trilingual and giving him ample support in his intellectual development, though that and a fat trust fund were nearly the only benefits he got from them.  A troubled, unhappy child, he grew up to be an exceedingly difficult person, though the only thing he had in common with Wagner was arrogance.

He graduated with a doctorate in philosophy in 1813 with a dissertation titled On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which picked up where Kant left off and set out to answer a deceptively simple question: how do we know that a statement is true? What gives us sufficient reason to say that such-and-such is the case?  It was a bravura performance, but he was just warming up.  He spent the years from 1814 to 1818 in Dresden, then a center of intellectual activity, writing at a feverish pace.  The result, The World as Will and Representation, set out to make sense of human existence from the perspective Kant had opened up.

He had a secret weapon, and it’s one that very few other Western philosophers since his time have ever taken up. In his time the riches of Asian philosophy had just begun to find their way to intellectuals in the West, where (like Schopenhauer) they were embraced eagerly by people in nearly every field of thought but philosophy. To this day most Western philosophy prances about pretending that nobody east of the Jordan River ever had a deep thought. Schopenhauer was the great exception. He had a copy of the first European translation of the principal Upanishads, the fundamental texts of Indian philosophy, and took them just as seriously as he took Plato or Kant. That gave Schopenhauer access to a much richer body of thought than his rivals, and helped make The World as Will and Representation the astonishing work that it is.

So Schopenhauer published his masterwork, and waited for the world to congratulate him. It didn’t. Sales of the book were extremely slow. He moved to Berlin to launch a career as a university professor, and failed. After a while he settled in Frankfurt, where he lived alone except for a succession of pet poodles, took out his frustrations by squabbling with his neighbors, patronized the local sex workers and the best restaurant in town, and played the flute for an hour before supper every day.

The philosophical world never did pay him the least attention. After the collapse of the 1848-1849 revolutions, though, a great many formerly clueless intellectuals who got put through experiences similar to Wagner’s suddenly found that Schopenhauer made a lot more sense than what they had been reading. In the decade before his death in 1860, he finally got the acclaim he’d waited for all those years. From then until the outbreak of the Second World War, he was an extraordinarily influential figure across the spectrum of Western intellectual culture; if you know Schopenhauer, you can find references to his work all through the literature of the time. (His fingerprints are all over H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction, for example.)

One reason that WWR (as we’ll call Schopenhauer’s main book from here on) was so influential is that it’s written in almost superhumanly clear and readable German.  Schopenhauer’s exposure to French and English prose had cured him of most of the bad habits that make so many German writers a chore to read, and he used lively metaphors and ordinary vocabulary in place of the tortured Latinisms and labored seriousness that stands in the way of understanding so many German philosophers. The English translations I’ve read never really catch that, but then it would take a writer as good as Schopenhauer to translate his prose into equally vibrant English, and such writers are in short supply. Nonetheless the existing translations are quite readable—much more so than even the best translations of Hegel, just to cite one obvious example.

Yet the great strength of WWR is its content, not its style. As noted already, Schopenhauer took Kant as his starting place. Here’s the opening passage of the book:

“‘The world is my representation’: this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, although man alone can being it into reflective, abstract consciousness. If he really does so, philosophical discernment has dawned on him. It then becomes clear and certain to him that he does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels the earth; that the world around him is there only as representation, in other words, only in reference to another thing, namely that which represents, and this is himself.”

With this, all the handwaving about intellectual intuition, all the claims that certain gifted people can know for certain the direction of history and the inner workings of the Absolute, falls to the ground in a smoking heap. What remains is this:  what can we know about ourselves and the world that we seem to be living in, given that all we have to go on is a jumbled mess of secondhand representations?  How should we then live?

Schopenhauer starts by examining our experience even more closely than Kant did. Is there really nothing we experience directly, without representations getting in the way?  There’s one thing, and you experience it at every moment.

Move your hand. Now move it again. Notice that you don’t have to tell it, “Hand, move!” Nor do you have to imagine it moving, or come up with any other way of representing the movement to your hand. You just move it.  The will is the one thing we encounter directly, without some kind of representation getting in the way. (We can create representations of the will—the word “will” is an example—but those representations are not the same thing as the act of willing.)

So our own will is the one thing we encounter that isn’t just a representation. Fair enough, says Schopenhauer. What happens if we assume, for the sake of argument, that this is true of everyone and everything else? What if we take our own experience of willing as our one encounter with the world as it actually is, our only access to the thing-in-itself beyond all representations?

What happens then is that the world begins to make a kind of sense very different from the one that Hegel tried to impose on it. First of all, the will doesn’t think—thinking is the art of juggling with representations.  It doesn’t feel—feeling is the experience of reacting to representations.  It doesn’t remember—memory is the process of comparing present representations to past ones. The will does none of these things. It simply acts.

Second, it can succeed in its acts or it can fail. When does it fail? When something interferes with it. If will is the essential nature of things, then what can interfere with will?  Will. So the will can be in conflict with itself—and that means, in turn, that the essential nature of things can be in conflict with itself. It can trip over its own feet. Out the door, in other words, go all those attempts to define the essential nature of reality in terms surreptitiously borrowed from the Christian god. Out the same door go Hegel’s attempt to claim that the Absolute is unfolding in historical time in some wonderful direction that he can predict.

Third, what happens when the will fails?  It reacts to its failure. You notice that there’s a rock in the path when you stub your toes on it.  The “Ow!” that results is the basic form of the act of consciousness. We see only those things our vision can’t penetrate; our sense of touch can only tell us of things that resist the pressure of our bodies. So will is how we experience what actually exists, and consciousness—the ability to create representations—derives from it. Since consciousness is secondary and the product of failure, we can never know the world perfectly.

Fourth, since the will can only be conscious of what frustrates it, there is something essentially tragic in existence. Schopenhauer, being the person he was, emphasized that very powerfully. He admitted that someone who didn’t have his pessimistic outlook could rise above the tragedy of existence and affirm the universe with courage and joy—but that wasn’t something he himself was able to do, and he admitted it. It’s been said that every philosophy is an autobiography, and that’s certainly true of Schopenhauer; his own deeply unhappy life is on display here. It took others—notably the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo, who drew extensively on Schopenhauer’s thought—to embrace that possibility and point out that the whole universe is in some sense an eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden.

Fifth, and crucially, there were three ways to deal with the tragic nature of existence. One is the way of affirmation just mentioned. The second is the way of negation, in which the will negates itself and enters into peace:  in essence, the way of mysticism. These two are accessible only to the few. For the many, however, there is a third way, which is art. All the arts—music, painting, poetry, dance, sculpture, fiction, you name it—raise consciousness above will. When you’re looking at a painting, listening to music, reading a novel, or what have you, your will is set aside for the time being; you are attending to a sequence of conscious states that have nothing to do with you, your needs, your desires, or your fears. This allows the will to rest and experience that rare (to Schopenhauer) commodity, joy.

These are the ideas that burst over Richard Wagner like a thunderstorm in 1854, when he first read WWR. They caused him to reshape his entire conception of the Ring cycle. One of the things that made this reshaping so fascinating is that he had already begun composing the music for the first opera, The Rhinegold, in late 1853.  Thus the reshaping process unfolded while he was composing. That first opera was largely Feuerbachian in its structure and meaning, though Schopenhauer’s insights began to show themselves in the last of its four scenes: Alberich, the Nibelung dwarf who was originally slated to be a mere villain, achieves a tortured majesty in the scene where Wotan takes the Ring from him, rising to a moral stature above that of the god, and the seemingly triumphant music with which The Rhinegold closes is shot through with bitter ironies and the first foreshadowings of impending doom.

The Valkyrie and the first two-thirds of Siegfried take much of their complexity from Wagner’s ongoing struggle to integrate Schopenhauer’s insights and to reach past Feuerbach’s focus on politics and society to the deeper existential and psychological dimensions that Schopenhauer had opened up. Then came a hiatus. It became clear to Wagner exactly what was going to come of the dream of a brighter future that he’d gotten from Feuerbach. After seriously considering suicide, he set the Ring aside and worked through the matter in the only way he could, by composing two more operas.

I don’t think there are any operas in the entire history of the genre more different than the tremendous celebration of life and love that is The Mastersingers of Nuremberg and the even more brilliant renunciation of existence itself that is Tristan and Isolde. That musical comparison of the two options was what Wagner had to do before he could follow his vision all the way through.  Only then could he allow the Ring to end the way it had to end; only then could he let Siegfried, the Man of the Future, the ultimate Feuerbachian hero, become the total moral and personal failure that he had to be.

We’ll leave Wagner here, penning the last triumphant notes of The Twilight of the Gods, and proceed two weeks from now to the first of the operas themselves.  After the last of the Ring operas, we’ll return to him, and set the stage for his final attempt to resolve the terrible conflict at the heart of his creative vision:  the “fifth Ring opera,” Parsifal. In the meantime, I’d encourage any of my readers who haven’t done so already to download a copy of the librettos of the first two operas here. The orchestra is warming up, the singers are putting the last touches on their makeup, and the curtain is about to rise.