Schopenhauer’s followers. – What happens when people of a higher culture and barbarians come into contact: the lower culture usually takes on the vices, weaknesses, and excesses of the higher culture, on which basis it feels a certain attraction to that culture and finally, by way of the acquired vices and weaknesses, accepts some overflow of the valuable force of the higher culture – one can also observe this nearby and without travelling to barbarian peoples, to be sure in a form that is somewhat over-refined and intellectualized and not so easily palpable. And what do Schopenhauer’s German followers usually take over at first from their master? In relation to his higher culture, they must feel barbarous enough to be at first barbarously fascinated and seduced by him. Is it his sense for hard facts, his good will to clarity and reason, that so often makes him appear so English and so un-German? Or is it the strength of his intellectual conscience, which endured a life-long contradiction between being and willing and forced him to contradict himself continually and on almost every point in his writings? Or is it his cleanliness in matters of the church and of the Christian god? – for here his cleanliness was unprecedented among German philosophers, so that he lived and died ‘as a Voltairean’.49 Or was it his immortal doctrine of the intellectuality of intuition, of the a priori nature of the causal law, of the instrumental nature of the intellect and the unfreedom of the will?50 No, all this does not enchant and is not felt to be enchanting; but Schopenhauer’s mystical embarrassments and evasions in those places where the factual thinker let himself be seduced and corrupted by the vain urge to be the unriddler of the world; the indemonstrable doctrine of One Will (‘all causes are merely occasional causes of the appearance of the will at this time and this place’; ‘the will to life is present wholly and undividedly in every being, even the least, as completely as in all beings that have ever been, are, and shall be, taken together’),51 the denial of the individual (‘all lions are at bottom only one lion’; ‘the plurality of individuals is an illusion’,52 just as development is only an illusion – he calls Lamarck’s thoughts ‘an ingenious, absurd error’),53 his ecstatic reveries on genius (‘in aesthetic intuition the individual is no longer individual but pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge’; ‘the subject, in being wholly taken up in the object it intuits, has become the object itself’),54 the nonsense about compassion and how, as the source of all morality, it enables one to make the break through the *principium individuationis;*55 and also such claims as ‘death is actually the purpose of existence’,56 ‘one cannot deny a priori the possibility that a magical effect cannot also emanate from someone who has already died’ – these and other such excesses and vices of the philosopher are always what is accepted first of all and made into a matter of faith – for vices and excesses are the easiest to imitate and require no extensive preparatory practice. But let us discuss the most famous of living Schopenhauerians, Richard Wagner. What happened to him has happened to other artists: he misinterpreted the characters he created and misunderstood the philosophy that was implicit in his own art. Until the middle of his life, Richard Wagner let himself be misled by Hegel; he repeated this mistake when he started reading Schopenhauer’s doctrine into his characters and began expressing himself in terms of ‘will’, ‘genius’, and ‘compassion’. Nevertheless it will remain true that nothing goes so directly against the spirit of Schopenhauer as what is genuinely Wagnerian in Wagner’s heroes: I mean the innocence of the utmost selfishness; the faith in great passion as the good in itself, in a word, what is Siegfried-like57 in the countenances of his heroes. ‘All of this smells even more like Spinoza than like me’, Schopenhauer might say. Although Wagner would have good reason to look for some other philosopher than Schopenhauer, the enchantment to which he succumbed with regard to this thinker has blinded him not only to other philosophers but also to science; his entire art increasingly wants to present itself as a companion piece and supplement to Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and with increasing explicitness it renounces the loftier ambition of becoming a companion piece and supplement to human knowledge and science. And not only is it the whole secretive splendour of this philosophy – which would also have attracted a Cagliostro58 – that draws him to this, but the particular gestures and affects of the philosophers were always seducers as well! Wagner is Schopenhauerian, for example, in his exasperation over the corruption of the German language;59 even, however, if one should approve of Wagner’s imitation of Schopenhauer in this point, one must not conceal the fact that Wagner’s style itself suffers rather seriously from all those ulcers and tumours whose sight so enraged Schopenhauer. Regarding the Wagnerians who write German, Wagnerianism is starting to prove as dangerous as any Hegelianism ever has. Wagner is Schopenhauerian in his hatred of the Jews, to whom he is unable to do justice even in their greatest deed; after all, the Jews are the inventors of Christianity.60 Wagner is Schopenhauerian in his attempt to conceive of Christianity as a seed of Buddhism that has drifted far and to prepare a Buddhistic age for Europe, with an occasional reconciliation with Catholic-Christian formulas and sentiments.61 Wagner is Schopenhauerian when he preaches mercy in our relations with animals; as we know, Schopenhauer’s predecessor in this was Voltaire, who may also, like his successors, have known to disguise his hatred of certain things and persons as mercy towards animals.62 At least Wagner’s hatred of science, which finds expression in his preaching, certainly does not come from a spirit of mercy and goodness – any more, obviously, than it does from any spirit at all. In the end, the philosophy of an artist is of little significance if it is merely an afterthought (eine nachträgliche Philosophie) and does not harm the art itself. One cannot be too careful to avoid bearing ill will against an artist for an occasional, perhaps very unfortunate and presumptuous masquerade; let us not forget that, without exception, our dear artists are to some extent actors and have to be, and that without acting they would hardly be able to hold out very long. Let us remain faithful to Wagner in what is true and original in him – and especially, as his disciples, by remaining faithful to ourselves in what is true and original in us. Let us leave him his intellectual tempers and cramps; let us, in all fairness, ask what strange kinds of nourishment and needs an art like his may require in order to be able to live and grow! It doesn’t matter that as a thinker he is so often wrong; justice and patience are not for him. Enough that his life is justified before itself and remains justified – this life which shouts at every one of us: ‘Be a man and do not follow me – but yourself! Yourself!’63 Our life, too, shall be justified before ourselves! We too shall freely and fearlessly, in innocent selfishness, grow and blossom from ourselves! And as I contemplate such a person, the following sentences still come to mind today as they did before: ‘That passion is better than Stoicism and hypocrisy; that being honest even in evil is better than losing oneself to the morality of tradition; that the free man can be good as well as evil, but the unfree man is a disgrace to nature and has no share in heavenly or earthly comfort; finally that everyone who wants to be free must become so through himself, and that freedom does not fall into anyone’s lap as a wondrous gift’ (Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, p. 94).64