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Third EssayWhat Do Ascetic Ideals Mean?2
What do ascetic ideals mean? Or, to take a single example which I have been asked to consider often enough, what does it mean when, for instance, an artist, like Richard Wagner in his later years, pays homage to chastity? In a certain sense, of course, he always did this, but in an ascetic sense he did it for the first time at the end. What does this change in "sense" mean, this radical change in the sense? For that`s what it was - with it Wagner leapt right over into his opposite. What does it mean when an artist leaps over into his opposite? . . .
If we are willing to pause momentarily at this question, we immediately encounter the memory of perhaps the best, strongest, most cheerful, and bravest period in Wagner`s life - the time when he was innerly and deeply preoccupied with the idea of Luther`s marriage. Who knows the circumstances which saw to it that today, instead of this wedding music, we have Die Meistersinger [Wagner`s opera The Master Singers] And how much of the former work may perhaps echo in the latter? But there is no doubt that this "Luther`s Wedding" would have involved the praise of chastity. Of course, it would also have contained a praise of sensuality - and that, it strikes me, would have been quite appropriate, very "Wagnerian."
For between chastity and sensuality there is no essential opposition. Every good marriage, every genuine affair of the heart transcends them both. In my view, Wagner would have done well if he had enabled his Germans to take this pleasant fact to heart once more, with the help of a lovely and brave comedy about Luther, for among the Germans there are always a lot of people who slander sensuality, and Luther`s value is probably nowhere greater than precisely here: he had the courage of his own sensuality (at that time people called it, delicately enough, "evangelical freedom" . . .). But even if it were the case that there really were an antithesis between chastity and sensuousness, fortunately there is no need for it to be a tragic antithesis. At least this should be the case for all successful and cheerful mortals, who are far from considering their unstable equilibrium between "animal and angel" as, in itself, an argument against existence. The finest and brightest, like Goethe, like Hafiz, even saw that that made life more attractive. It`s precisely "contradictions" like that which make life more enticing. . . .
On the other hand, it`s easy enough to understand that once pigs who have had bad luck are persuaded to worship chastity - and there are such swine! - they see in chastity only their opposite, the opposite to unlucky pigs, and will worship that - and with such zealous tragic grunting! We can imagine it - that embarrassing and unnecessary antithesis, which Richard Wagner at the end of his life unquestioningly still wanted to set to music and produce on stage. What on earth for? That`s a fair question. For why should he be concerned about pigs? Why should we?
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