Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely MeditationsOne hardly needs to say that the breath of the tragic lies over thislife. And everyone who can sense something of it from out of his ownsoul, everyone to whom the constraint of a tragic deception as to thegoal of life, the bending and breaking of intentions, renunciationand purification through love are things not wholly unknown, mustfeel in that which Wagner now exhibits as an art-work a dreamlikerecollection of the great man's own heroic existence. From some fardistance we shall believe we hear Siegfried telling of his deeds: intothe touching happiness of recollection there is weaved the profoundsadness of late summer, and all nature lies still in a yellow eveninglight. -9To reflect on what Wagner the artist is, and to meditate on the spectacleof a truly liberated artistic capacity and autocracy, is something thateveryone who has thought about and suffered from Iww Wagner theman evolved will have need of as a means of recovery and refreshment.If art in general is only the ability to comm1tnicate to others what onehas experienced, if every art-work contradicts itself if it cannot makeitself understood, then Wagner's greatness as an artist must consistin precisely that demonic communicability of his nature, which as itwere speaks of itself in every language and makes known its inner,most personal experience with the extremest clarity; his appearancein the history of the arts is like a volcanic eruption of the totalundivided artistic capacity of nature itself after humanity had accustomeditself to seeing the arts isolated from one another as thoughthis were an eternal rule. One can thus be undecided which name toaccord him, whether he should be called a poet or a sculptor or amusician, each word taken in an extraordinarily wide sense, orwhether a new word has to be created to describe him.Thepoetic element in Wagner is disclosed by the fact that he thinks invisible and palpable events, not in concepts; that is to say, he thinksmythically, as the folk has always thought. The myth is not foundedon a thought, as the children of an artificial culture believe, it is itselfa mode of thinking; it communicates an idea of the world, but as asuccession of events, actions and sufferings. Der Ring des Nibeluf!gen isa tremendous system of thought without the conceptual form ofthought. Perhaps a philosopher could set beside it something exactlycorresponding to it but lacking in image or action and speaking to usmerely in concepts: one would then have presented the same thingin two disparate spheres, once for the folk and once for the antithesis236