Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

-\ IRichard Wagner in Bayreuthbecome a power in its own right which now embraces mankind withghostly arms and impels it to where it does not really want to go. Assoon as men seek to come to an understanding with one another,and to unite for a common work, they are seized by the madness ofuniversal concepts, indeed even by the mere sounds of words, and,as a consequence of this incapacity to communicate, everything theydo together bears the mark of this lack of mutual understanding,inasmuch as it does not correspond to their real needs but only tothe hollowness of those tyrannical words and concepts: thus to all itsother sufferings mankind adds suffering from convention, that is to sayfrom a mutual agreement as to words and actions without a mutualagreement as to feelings. Just as when every art goes into decline apoint is reached at which its morbidly luxuriant forms and techniquesgain a tyrannical domination over the souls of youthful artistsand make them their slaves, so with the decline of language we arethe slaves of words; under this constraint no one is any longer capableof revealing himself, of speaking naively, and few are capable of preservingtheir individuality at all in the face of an education whichbelieves it demonstrates its success, not in going out to meet clearneeds and feelings in an educative sense, but in entangling theindividual in the net of 'clear concepts' and teaching him to thinkcorrectly: as if there were any sense whatever in making of a man abeing who thinks · and concludes correctly if one has not first succeededin making of him one who feels rightly. Now when the musicof our German masters resounds in the ears of mankind injured tothis extent, what is it really that here becomes audible? Precisely thisright feeling, the enemy of all convention, all artificial alienation andincomprehension between man and man: this music is a return tonature, while being at the same time the purification and transformationof nature; for the pressing need for that return to nature arosein the souls of men filled with love, and in their art there sounds naturetransformed· in love:Let us take this to be one of Wagner' s answers to the question s towhat music signifies in our time: he also has a second. Therelationship between music and life is not only that of one kind oflanguage to another kind of language, it is also the relationship betweenthe perfect world of sound and the totality of the world ofsight. Regarded as a phenomenon for the eyes, however, and comparedwith the phenomena of life of earlier times, the existence ofmodern men exhibits an unspeakable poverty and exhaustion, despitethe unspeakable gaudiness which can give pleasure only to the215