“My greatest experience was a recovery. Wagner is merely one of my sicknesses. Not that I wish to be ungrateful to this sickness. When in this essay I asset the proposition that Wagner is harmful, I wish no less to assert for whom he is nevertheless indispensable--for the philosopher. Others may be able to get along without Wagner, but the philosopher is not free to do without Wagner. He has to be the bad conscience of his time: for that he needs to understand it best. But confronted with the labyrinth of the modern soul, where could he find a guide more initiated, a more eloquent prophet of the soul, than Wagner? Through Wagner modernity speaks most intimately, concealing neither its good nor its evil--having forgotten all sense of shame. And conversely: one has almost completed an account of the value of what is modern once one has gained clarity about what is good and evil in Wagner.
I understand perfectly when a musician says today: `I hate Wagner, but I can no longer endure any other music.’ But I also understand a philosopher who would declare: `Wagner sums up modernity. There is no way out, one must first become a Wagnerian.’” I intend to write a brief piece in which I explore several related points:
- That Nietzsche’s claim, that the philosopher needs Wagner, has much merit.
- That a philosopher today needs not only Wagner, but even more Nietzsche.
- That for a person who values faith in the divine and who wants to be thoughtful or philosophical in his or her life, Nietzsche is indispensable.
- That the modern-contemporary soul is especially revealed in the music of Wagner, and in the philosophy of Nietzsche.
