The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy. · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
5.
What, then, is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In the case of an artist we are getting to understand their meaning: _Nothing at all_ ... or so much that it is as good as nothing at all. Indeed, what is the use of them? Our artists have for a long time past not taken up a sufficiently independent attitude, either in the world or against it, to warrant their valuations and the changes in these valuations exciting interest. At all times they have played the valet of some morality, philosophy, or religion, quite apart from the fact that unfortunately they have often enough been the inordinately supple courtiers of their clients and patrons, and the inquisitive toadies of the powers that are existing, or even of the new powers to come. To put it at the lowest, they always need a rampart, a support, an already constituted authority: artists never stand by themselves, standing alone is opposed to their deepest instincts. So, for example, did _Richard Wagner_ take, "when the time had come," the philosopher Schopenhauer for his covering man in front, for his rampart.
Who would consider it even thinkable, that he would have had the _courage_ for an ascetic ideal, without the support afforded him by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, without the authority of Schopenhauer, which _dominated_ Europe in the seventies? (This is without consideration of the question whether an artist without the milk[1] of an orthodoxy would have been possible at all.) This brings us to the more serious question: What is the meaning of a real _philosopher_ paying homage to the ascetic ideal, a really self-dependent intellect like Schopenhauer, a man and knight with a glance of bronze, who has the courage to be himself, who knows how to stand alone without first waiting for men who cover him in front, and the nods of his superiors? Let us now consider at once the remarkable attitude of Schopenhauer towards _art_, an attitude which has even a fascination for certain types. For that is obviously the reason why Richard Wagner _all at once_ went over to Schopenhauer (persuaded thereto, as one knows, by a poet, Herwegh), went over so completely that there ensued the cleavage of a complete theoretic contradiction between his earlier and his later æsthetic faiths--the earlier, for example, being expressed in _Opera and Drama_, the later in the writings which he published from 1870 onwards.
In particular, Wagner from that time onwards (and this is the volte-face which alienates us the most) had no scruples about changing his judgment concerning the value and position of music itself. What did he care if up to that time he had made of music a means, a medium, a "woman," that in order to thrive needed an end, a man--that is, the drama? He suddenly realised that _more_ could be effected by the novelty of the Schopenhauerian theory in _majorem musicæ gloriam_--that is to say, by means of the _sovereignty_ of music, as Schopenhauer understood it; music abstracted from and opposed to all the other arts, music as the independent art-in-itself, _not_ like the other arts, affording reflections of the phenomenal world, but rather the language of the will itself, speaking straight out of the "abyss" as its most personal, original, and direct manifestation. This extraordinary rise in the value of music (a rise which seemed to grow out of the Schopenhauerian philosophy) was at once accompanied by an unprecedented rise in the estimation in which the musician himself was held: he became now an oracle, a priest, nay, more than a priest, a kind of mouthpiece for the "intrinsic essence of things," a telephone from the other world--from henceforward he talked not only music, did this ventriloquist of God, he talked metaphysic; what wonder that one day he eventually talked _ascetic ideals_.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.