ISBN: 394-60406-7
My rating: 79/100
See Book Notes for other books I have read. If you like my notes, go buy it!
Turinese Letter of May 1888
Overall, I disagree with Kaufmann’s assessment that this is one of Nietzsche’s most important works. It is disjointed, obligatory, and without much substance. He throws insults at Wagner without discussing the content of why he disagrees with Wagner’s overarching philosophy. Perhaps I need to be more familiar with Wagner before even starting the book (as a contemporary of Wagner’s would be familiar), but that’s beside the point – Nietzsche doesn’t bother providing the context of his arguments and just stabs into the dark hoping the point will hit with the reader. In summary, I do not recommend reading this book unless one is a hardcore fan of Nietzsche.
Who is the bad conscience of our time? Nietzsche says it was Wagner in his.
Written after Wagner’s death, Nietzsche decides after longstanding disagreement with Wagner’s ideals to write explicitly about him. It is his last piece, concluded in 1888 right before his mental break.
Parallels between Wagner’s use of cheap musical tricks and emotional tugs and modern Christian worship music? Persuading their intestines to believe there has been a fundamental change and connection with God when in fact nothing has changed – their virtues as empty as when they walked through the church doors.
Key Concepts and Quotes:
- Wagner is decadent: appeal to mass sentiment, over-emphasis on emotion, artificial complexity and pretentiousness, moral and cultural decay (German nationalism, for one).
Section 1
Bizet makes me fertile. Whatever is good makes me fertile. I have no other gratitude, nor do I have any other *proof* for what is good.
Section 2
Don Jose’s last cry, which concludes the work: “Yes, I have killed her, I – my adored Carmen”
My note: this is a quote from Bizet’s play, Carmen, and N likes this quote.
Nietzsche admires Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol: “For all men kill the thing they love …”
I think perhaps a more nuanced way to say this is that the best men are *willing* to kill the thing they love the most in pursuit of their highest good.
[The average] believe one becomes selfless in love because one desires the advantage of another human being, often against one’s own advantage. But in return for that they want to *possess* the other person – Even God does not constitute an exception to this point. … when [love] is wounded it is least generous.
Section 3
Man is a coward, confronted with the Eternal Feminine – and the females know it. – In many cases of feminine love, perhaps including the most famous ones above all, love is merely a more refined form of parasitism, a form of nestling down in another soul, sometimes even in the flesh of another – alas, always decidedly at the expense of the “the host”!
Section 4
“Whence comes all misfortunes in the world?” Wagner asked himself. From “old contracts,” he answered, like all revolutionary ideologists. In plain: from customs, laws, moralities, institutions, from everything on which the old worlds, the old society rests.
Section 6
Passion throws people. … Nothing is cheaper than passion.
Second Postscript
If one is not rich one should have pride enough for poverty.
Epilogue
Master morality is rooted in a triumphant Yes said to *oneself* – it is self affirmation, self-glorification of life; it also requires sublime symbols and practices … All of beautiful, all of great art belongs here: the essence of both is gratitude.