THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
In the second of his well-named Thoughts out of Season "Schopenhauer
as Educator" he turned his fire upon the chauvinistic universities.
"Experience teaches us that nothing stands so much in the way of developing
great philosophers as the custom of supporting bad ones in state
universities. . . . No state would ever dare to patronize such men as
Plato and Schopenhauer. . . . The state is always
afraid of them." 2*
He renewed the attack in "The Future of Our Educational Institutions";
and in "The Use and Abuse of History" he ridiculed the submergence of
the German intellect in the minutiae of antiquarian scholarship. Already
in these essays two of his distinctive ideas found expression: that morality,
as well as theology, must be reconstructed in terms of the evolution theory;
and that the function of life is to bring about "not the betterment of the
majority, who, taken as individuals, are the most worthless types," but
"the creation of genius," the development and elevation of superior
personalities. 25
The most enthusiastic of these essays was called "Richard Wagner in
Bayreuth." It hailed Wagner as a Siegfried "who has never learned the
meaning of fear," 26 and as founder of the only real art, because the first
to fuse all the arts into a great esthetic synthesis; and it called upon Germany
to realize the majestic significance of the coming Wagner festival
"Bayreuth signifies for us the morning sacrament on the day of
battle." 27 This was the voice of youthful worship, the voice of an almost
femininely refined spirit who saw in Wagner something of that masculine
decisiveness and courage which went later into the conception of the
Superman. But the worshipper was a philosopher too, and recognized in
Wagner a certain dictatorial egotism offensive to an aristocratic soul. He
could not bear Wagner's attack upon the French in 1871 (Paris had not
been kind to Tannhduser!} ; and he was astounded at Wagner's jealousy
of Brahms. 28 The central theme even of this laudatory essay boded no
good for Wagner: "The world has been Orientalized long enough; and
men now yearn to be Hellenized." 20 But Nietzsche already knew that
Wagner was half Semitic.
And then, in 1876, came Bayreuth itself, and Wagnerian opera night
after night, without cuts, and Wagnfriennes, and emperors and princes
and princelets, and the idle rich crowding out the impecunious devotees.
Suddenly it dawned upon Nietzsche how much of Geyer there was in
Wagner, 80 how much The Ring of the Nibelungs owed to the theatrical
effects which abounded in it, and how far the melos that some missed in
the music had passed into the drama. "I had had visions of a drama
Si
"Schopenhauer as Educator," sect. 8. */6ML, sect. 6.
*T. O. S., i, 117. ,
**The Wagner-Nietzsche Correspondence, p. 233,
*T. O. S., 1, 123.
*Ibid.,
104.
"Nietzsche considered Wagner's father to be Ludwig Geyer, a Jewish actor.