knowledge of man’s psychological, emotional needs. Wagner captured this distinction beautifully in his following remark to August Roeckel, that he rejects scientific, objective knowledge of nature only when it interferes with Wagner’s personal, subjective idea of love, and of what life ought to be:
“I am not so out of touch with nature as you suppose, even though I myself am no longer in a position to have scientific dealings with it. (…) It is only when nature is expected to replace real life – love – that I ignore it. In this respect I resemble Bruennhilde with the ring. I would rather perish or be denied all enjoyment than renounce my belief.” [624W-{1/25-26/54} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 312]
And Wagner has added that he, like Bruennhilde, would as soon die as accept a real world of the type in which transcendent love is merely an illusion.
Wagner renounced objective knowledge of nature (Erda’s knowledge, the rope of fate which the Norns spin) precisely because, in his view, the real world - presumably invulnerable to the distortions of human imagination - seems to be loveless, and therefore the primary impulse prompting all the living must be fear of death, the self-preservation urge:
“ ‘A human being should not feel pity,’ R. says. ‘Nature doesn’t want it; he should be as cruel as the animals; pity has no place in the world.’ “ [812W-{2/8/72} CD Vol. I, p. 456]
“… all around me is quite doleful; what has any manner of significance, helpless and suffering: and only the insignificant can thoroughly enjoy existence. Yet what recks Nature of it all? She goes her blind way, intent on nothing but the race: i.e., to live anew and anew, commence ever again: spread, spread – utmost spread; the individual, on whom she loads all burdens of existence, is naught to her but a grain of sand in this spread of the species; a grain she can replace at any moment … ! Oh, I can’t stand hearing anyone appeal to Nature: with finer minds ‘tis finely meant, but for that very reason something else is meant thereby; for Nature is heartless and devoid of feeling, and every egoist, ay, every monster, can appeal to her example [as Alberich does, who affirms Erda’s knowledge of all that was, is, and will be] with more cause and warranty than the man of feeling [Wotan, who even in his lust for power over the outside world does not wish to give up love]. (…) Yet it is just like everything in Nature: for the individual she holds misery, death and despair, in readiness, and leaves him to lift himself above them by his highest effort of resignation: she cannot prevent that succeeding, but looks on in amazement, and says perhaps: ‘Is that what I really willed?’ “ [Wagner alludes here to Wotan’s secret means of escape from Erda’s insufferable realm of reality, the art Wotan’s daughter by Erda, Bruennhilde, will inspire Siegfried to create.] [658W-{9/30/58} Letter to Mathilde Wesendonck: RWLMW, p. 46]
As proof that Wagner was prepared to acknowledge man-made self-delusion, or fiction, as the source of all value, which trumps objective truth, we have his following rumination on the teaching of history:
[P. 397] “He … talks at lunch about the study of history in childhood and where one should begin … . He thinks, from the beginning of mankind, the first migrations and the return to the region of the Ganges, then the figures of Semiramis, Cyrus, in order to arrive at the Greeks; and this without
