Lodewijk Muns

This is an introduction to my three-part essay Schopenhauer, Wagner.

As a philosophical pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer might seem to have a certain relevance today. Of all catastrophic eras, this is the first to bear the combined consequences of global overpopulation, human-caused climate change and mass extinction, growing economic inequality, mass disinformation and a proliferation of war – and all of this met with stubborn impotence and political unwillingness to deal with it. Pessimism equals realism.

However, Schopenhauer’s pessimism is not based on any insight from history and the evolution of human society. It does not recognise any era as unique or unprecedented in an interesting way. Schopenhauer’s pessimism is of a timeless sort, based on a presumed immutable, metaphysical wrong. Since life is mostly and necessarily suffering, it is better to be dead; even better, not to have been born at all.

What in retrospect seems most insightful, is perhaps his view that sexuality is the manifestation of the species’ ‘will’ to self-preservation. In our feelings of love and sexual attraction, it is the species that acts through us in its own supra-individual interest. In this respect Schopenhauer has briefly anticipated Darwin. What inspires this insight, however, is not an interest in biology and evolution, or concern about population growth; it is, rather, his feeling that the sexual urge is in itself a kind of doom from which we should seek to escape.

Schopenhauer’s philosophy has a rather grim outlook. That it has nevertheless captivated so many readers for almost two centuries is partly due to its general simplicity and comprehensiveness. It combines metaphysics and ethics, an explanation (of sorts) of the nature of reality with a guide to conduct. Perhaps more importantly, it gives expression to a particular feeling and attitude. Its strongest appeal may lie in the fact that it offers a welcome release from compulsive optimism, from an implausible belief that everything might yet turn out for the best. The doctrine that life is a miserable affair is more a feeling than a rational assumption; but it is not an unreasonable feeling. Although it is impossible to measure the weight of happiness against misery, it is all too obvious that the world is overwhelmingly full of suffering.

Popularity curves

Schopenhauer remained virtually unknown until the early 1850s – some thirty years after the publication of the first volume of his magnum opus, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Appearance). He deliberately positioned himself as an outsider, in marked opposition to his older competitor Hegel, whom he showered with jealous invective (“a repulsive, mindless charlatan and unparalleled scribbler of nonsense”).

Since 1850 Schopenhauer’s popularity curve went up for a while; for a time, around 1910, surpassing Hegel’s (in German, at least; graph on the right). Somewhat surprising is the decline of Wagner’s curve since 2000 (left). A striking peak around 2010 for mentions of Schopenhauer in English is recognisable in the number of recent ‘handbooks’, ‘companions’ and ‘lexicons’.

Left: Google Books frequencies for the terms “Arthur Schopenhauer, “Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel”, “Richard Wagner”, 1800-2020 (German corpus; click for English). Right: Google Books frequencies for the terms “Schopenhauer” and “Hegel”, 1840-1940 (German corpus; click for English).

Schopenhauer, Wagner

Wagner discovered Schopenhauer in 1854, just as the philosopher was coming into vogue. From then on, he was one of his most enthusiastic propagandists. It is likely that Schopenhauer owes much of his readership even to this day to Wagner’s recommendation (I am no exception). From the philosopher’s point of view, this would have been ironic: the admiration was by no means mutual.

The essay Schopenhauer, Wagner originated as a somewhat elaborate sidetrack to the music-philosophy podcast Beyond the Bony Labyrinth. There is no shortage of studies of this particular, exceptional philosopher-composer constellation (quite the contrary), but I still felt the subject could be approached from a different perspective.

Part 1, The Metaphysics of Music and Sex, presents a summary of Schopenhauer’s ideas. Most presentations of his philosophy assume that it is still of some value today. It is an assumption I don’t share: whatever it has to offer is of purely historical interest. His metaphysics of sex, side by side with his metaphysics of music, produces a notorious paradox: in sexual desire we are slaves to the Will, which ought to be negated; music, on the other hand, has an exalted status as a direct revelation and affirmation of the Will, recognisable in the fluctuation between tension and resolution, desire and satisfaction. Schopenhauer’s solution to this paradox: that we enjoy music with a dispassionate aesthetic detachment, didn’t satisfy Wagner; nor did his ascetic morality.

This is the theme of part 2, Metaphysics and Metaphor in Tristan und Isolde, which also attempts to analyse the slippery ambiguity of the metaphorical-metaphysical association of love and death in this opera.

Part 3, on Screaming, Clairvoyant Dreams and Parsifal, follows a somewhat winding path through a tangle of closely (and perhaps unsuspectedly) related topics. Its leads from Wagner’s nightmares (which often caused him to wake up screaming), through the scream as a primitive, instinctive utterance and supposed origin of music and language, the unmusical screams of his operatic heroines (in particular, Kundry in Parsifal), the ‘sublime’ as an aesthetic alternative to beauty, Schopenhauer’s ideas about clairvoyant dreams and Wagner’s application of them to the composer’s creativity, to the thorny issue of the pseudo-Christian ethics of Wagner’s last opera.

Schopenhauer, in the portrait on the wall, looks down on a gathering in Wahnfried, Bayreuth. On the left, Cosima Wagner, on the right the publicist and Wagner propagandist Hans von Wolzogen. Franz Liszt is making some fine point about a score on his lap. But what is Wagner doing?

The original Schopenhauer portrait was painted posthumously by the fashionable portraitist Franz von Lenbach, as a birthday gift by Cosima to her husband. She found resemblances between the philosopher and her husband in their dissimilar eyes and “the melancholy sharp gaze that is characteristic of genius”.

This famous painting by Wilhelm Beckmann (in the Richard Wagner Museum, Luzern) is usually dated 1880, but according to Wikipedia, Beckmann visited Bayreuth for the first time in 1886 (Wagner died in 1883). There is no mention of Beckmann in Cosima Wagner’s diaries. The stiffness of the painting suggests that it may well have been made after Wagner’s death. Beckmann founded a Richard-Wagner-Verein in Düsseldorf, and in the 1930s became a Hitler favourite.