Friedrich_Nietzsche - Untimely_Meditations_(Cambridge_Texts_in_the_History_of_Philosophy__1997)

Untimely Meditationsthese propositions strike us: that passion is better than stoicism andhypocrisy; that to be honest, even in evil, is better than to lose oneselfin the morality of tradition; that the free man can be good or evil butthe unfree man is a disgrace to nature and is excluded from bothheavenly and eanhly solace; finally, that he who wants to becomefree has to become so through his own actions and that freedom fallsinto no one's lap like a miraculous gift. However shrill and uncannyall this may sound, what speaks here is the voice of that world of thefuture which has a genuine need of art and which can thus expectgenuine satisfaction from it; it is the language of nature restored alsoin the world of man, it is precisely that which I earlier called rightfeeling, in contrast to the false feeling which predominates today.But only nature can enjoy genuine satisfactions and redemptions:unnature and false feeling cannot do so. If it should become aware ofitself, unnature can only long for nothingness, while nature desirestransformation through love: the former wants not to be, the latterwants to be diff erent. Let him who has grasped this pass in review, inall quietness of soul, the simple themes of Wagner's art, and ask himselfwhether it is nature or unnature, as they have just been described,where here pursues its goals.A man homeless and despairing finds redemption from his tormentthrough the compassionate love of a woman who prefers to dierather than be unfaithful to him: the theme of the Fliegende Hollander.- A loving woman, renouncing all happiness for herself, becomes, ina heavenly transformation of amor into caritas, a saint, and saves thesoul of him she loves: the theme of Tannhiiuser. -The highest andmost glorious descends to men out of desire for them and will not beasked whence it has come; when the fatal question is asked, under apainful compulsion it returns to its higher life: the theme ofLohengrin. The loving soul of woman and of the folk are happy toreceive the new beneficent genius, although the preservers of traditiondefame and repulse it: the theme of the Meistersinger. -Twolovers who are unaware they are in love, but believe on the contrarythat they are deeply wounded and despised by one another, demandfrom one another a death-potion, apparendy to expiate their offencebut in reality from an unconscious impulse: they want to be freed bydeath from all separation and dissimulation. The supposed proximityof death unbinds their souls and conducts them to a brief,dreadful happiness, as though they really had escaped from day anddelusion, indeed from life: the theme of Tristan und Isolde.In the Ring des Nibelungen the tragic hero is a god who thirsts afterpower and who, through neglecting no path to its attainment, binds252