/lit/ - Literature

>>23400296
But does this mean that Religion itself has ceased ?—

No, no! It lives, but only at its primal source and sole true dwelling−place, within the deepest, holiest inner chamber of the individual; there whither never yet has surged a conflict of the rationalist and supranaturalist, the Clergy and the State. For this is the essence of true Religion: that, away from the cheating show of the day−tide world, it shines in the night of man's inmost heart, with a light quite other than the world−sun's light, and visible nowhence save from out that depth.

>>23398200
Whosoever thinks he has said the last word on the essence of the Christian faith when he styles it an attempted satisfaction of the most unbounded egoism, a kind of contract wherein the beneficiary is to obtain eternal, never−ending bliss on condition of abstinence [or "renunciation "—Entsagung] and free−willed suffering in this relatively brief and fleeting life, he certainly has defined therewith the sort of notion alone accessible to unshaken human egoism, but nothing even distantly resembling the Wahn−transfigured concept proper to the actual practiser of free−willed suffering and renunciation. Through voluntary suffering and renunciation, on the contrary, man's egoism is already practically upheaved, and he who chooses them, let his object be whate'er you please, is thereby raised already above all notions bound by Time and Space; for no longer can he seek a happiness that lies in Time and Space, e'en were they figured as eternal and immeasurable. That which gives to him the superhuman strength to suffer voluntarily, must itself be felt by him already as a profoundly inward happiness, incognisable by any other, a happiness quite incommunicable to the world except through outer suffering: it must be the measurelessly lofty joy of world−overcoming, compared wherewith the empty pleasure of the world−conqueror seems downright null and childish.

[Religion] lives, but only at its primal source and sole true dwelling−place, within the deepest, holiest inner chamber of the individual; there whither never yet has surged a conflict of the rationalist and supranaturalist, the Clergy and the State. For this is the essence of true Religion: that, away from the cheating show of the day−tide world, it shines in the night of man's inmost heart, with a light quite other than the world−sun's light, and visible nowhence save from out that depth.

>>23393566
Whosoever thinks he has said the last word on the essence of the Christian faith when he styles it an attempted satisfaction of the most unbounded egoism, a kind of contract wherein the beneficiary is to obtain eternal, never−ending bliss on condition of abstinence [or "renunciation "—Entsagung] and free−willed suffering in this relatively brief and fleeting life, he certainly has defined therewith the sort of notion alone accessible to unshaken human egoism, but nothing even distantly resembling the Wahn−transfigured concept proper to the actual practiser of free−willed suffering and renunciation. Through voluntary suffering and renunciation, on the contrary, man's egoism is already practically upheaved, and he who chooses them, let his object be whate'er you please, is thereby raised already above all notions bound by Time and Space; for no longer can he seek a happiness that lies in Time and Space, e'en were they figured as eternal and immeasurable. That which gives to him the superhuman strength to suffer voluntarily, must itself be felt by him already as a profoundly inward happiness, incognisable by any other, a happiness quite incommunicable to the world except through outer suffering: it must be the measurelessly lofty joy of world−overcoming, compared wherewith the empty pleasure of the world−conqueror seems downright null and childish.

[Religion] lives, but only at its primal source and sole true dwelling−place, within the deepest, holiest inner chamber of the individual; there whither never yet has surged a conflict of the rationalist and supranaturalist, the Clergy and the State. For this is the essence of true Religion: that, away from the cheating show of the day−tide world, it shines in the night of man's inmost heart, with a light quite other than the world−sun's light, and visible nowhence save from out that depth.

>>23372862
GREAT KANT taught us to postpone the wish for knowledge of the world to criticism of man's power of knowledge; if we thus arrived at the most complete uncertainty about the reality of the world, Schopenhauer next taught us to draw the most infallible conclusions as to the world's In-itself from a farther-reaching criticism, no longer of our mental faculties, but of that Will in us which goes before all knowledge. "Know thyself, and thou hast read the world"—the Pythia said; "look round thee, all of this art thou"—the Brahmin.

How totally these lessons of ancestral wisdom had been lost to us, we may judge by their having to be re-discovered after tens of centuries by Schopenhauer treading in the shining wake of Kant. For if we view the present state of all our Sciences and Statecraft, we find them void of any true religious core, and simply wed to a barbaric babbling, to which two thousand years of practice have given a well-nigh venerable aspect in the people's purblind eye.

Who ever finds that "Know thyself" applied to any rating of the world? Not one Historic action do we know, that betrays this doctrine's influence on the transactors. We strike away at what we know not, and should we haply hit ourselves, we think another struck us. Who has not witnessed this once more in the present stir against the Jews, let us say, when looked at in light of that doctrine? What has given the Jews their now so dreaded power [265] among and over us, not one man seems to stop and ponder; or if he goes into the question, he seeks no farther than the facts and phases of the last ten years, or at most a few years earlier: nowhere can we trace as yet an inclination to a deeper search into ourselves, in this case to a thorough criticism of the will and spirit of all that conglomerate of nature and civilisation which we, for instance, call the "German."

https://survivorbb.rapeutation.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=3915

>>23350700
>The Ideal was the aim of the single genius, and what survived its work was merely the trick of technical dexterity; and so we see Greek art without the Grecian genius pervading all the Roman Empire, without drying one tear of the poor, or drawing one sob from the withered heart of the rich.

>>23332320
A deaf musician! Can we imagine a blind painter? But we know a blind visionary. The deaf musician is now like Tiresias, for whom the world of appearances is closed and who is therefore aware of the basis of all appearance through his inner eye; undisturbed by the noises of life he listens only to the harmonies in his mind and from his depths still speaks only to a world – a world which has no more to say to him. Thus the genius is freed from everything external to himself and remains entirely with and in him. What a miracle it must have seemed to anyone then seeing Beethoven with the look of Tiresias: a world wandering among men, the ‘in itself ’ of the world as a wandering man!

>>23255136
>In the evening a letter from Prof. Nietzsche, which pleases us, for his mood had given us cause for concern. Regarding this, R. says he fears that Schopenhauer’s philosophy might in the long run be a bad influence on young people of this sort, because they apply his pessimism, which is a form of thinking, contemplation, to life itself, and derive from it an active form of hopelessness.

>What about myself in relation to Schopenhauer’s philosophy—when I was completely Greek, an optimist? But I made the difficult admission, and from this act of resignation emerged ten times stronger.

>Why! Even to-day the German nation knows no better of him than what one railway-passenger may gather from his neighbour, namely that Schopenhauer's teaching is to shoot oneself dead.

>>23243364
>The outcome of the Schopenhauerian philosophy, to the shame of every earlier philosophic system, is the recognition of a moral meaning of the world; which crown of all Knowledge might then be practically realised through Schopenhauer's Ethics. Only the love that springs from pity, and carries its compassion to the utmost breaking of self-will, is the redeeming Christian Love, in which Faith and Hope are both included of themselves,—Faith as the unwavering consciousness of that moral meaning of the world, confirmed by the most divine exemplar; Hope as the blessed sense of the impossibility of any cheating of this consciousness.

>GREAT KANT taught us to postpone the wish for knowledge of the world to criticism of man's power of knowledge; if we thus arrived at the most complete uncertainty about the reality of the world, Schopenhauer next taught us to draw the most infallible conclusions as to the world's In-itself from a farther-reaching criticism, no longer of our mental faculties, but of that Will in us which goes before all knowledge. "Know thyself, and thou hast read the world"—the Pythia said; "look round thee, all of this art thou"—the Brahmin.

>>23223878
Wagner's essay The Wibelungen (detailed discussion of the Grail, Tradition, Ghibellines, Barbarossa, etc.) and music-drama Parsifal. In the prior he utterly rejects the connection between Arthurian myth and Christianity, on the grounds that it is only superficial, in the latter he affirms it. So there is a large amount of diversity and development in his thought on the subject, between paganism and Christianity. Wagner said everything Evola did but better, and expressed his ideas with artistic genius.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXItznePeFI

>Cosima: "he talks to me about this trait of the Grail mystery: that the blood becomes wine, so we, strengthened, can turn toward the earth, whereas the transformation of wine to blood draws us away from the earth."

>>23094522
>His physical appearance in 1839 was described by the painter Friedrich Pecht: strikingly elegant, indeed aristocratic in his appearance, despite his somewhat short legs, and with such a strikingly beautiful woman on his arm (his wife Minna) that she alone would have sufficed to make the couple interesting, if Wagner himself had not had such an arresting head that one’s attention was involuntarily fixed upon him.

>Meeting him a few years later (1843), the author Eliza Wille described him thus: It had remained a fleeting encounter […]. But Wagner’s features had impressed themselves on my mind: his elegant, supple figure, the head with the mighty brow, the acute eye and the energetic lines around his small and tightly closed mouth. A painter who was sitting next to me drew my attention to his straight, protruding chin, which seemed to be carved out of stone, giving the face a special character.

>Gautier remembered being fixed for a full, silent minute by the soul-scoping intensity of his gaze. In letters home, Villiers described the “fabulous being” in terms suitable for the cruel angels and crazed scientists of his stories: “Something like immortality made visible, the other world rendered transparent, creative power pushed to a fantastic point, and, with that, the sweat and the shining of genius, the impression of the infinite around his head and in the naïve profundity of his eyes. He is terrifying.”

>Cosima states: I Reflect how R.’s nature consists, like his works, of a mixture of great strength and delicacy; his mouth, ears, skin are as fine and delicate as a woman's, his bone structure sturdy, even gnarled.

>>22919435
Schopenhauer didn't think life was meaningless, he recognized meaning according to its reality as a biological phenomena, coming to meaninglessness in its everyday experience of the outside world, but also its fundamental essence when detached from time and space, there in its ideal sphere to be vanquished by nothing. In this sense Schopenhauer was the greatest optimist, championing the only genuine meaning in this world. Your view of simply willing, 'making', life to be better, is fundamentally illusory, and you should choose, by contrast, the path of self-knowledge as the only means of achieving what you aim for.

>Even to-day the German nation knows no better of him than what one railway-passenger may gather from his neighbour, namely that Schopenhauer's teaching is to shoot oneself dead.

>If we involuntarily conceive of the Divine as a sphere where Suffering is impossible, that conception ever rests on the desire of something for which we can find no positive, but merely a negative expression. So long as we have to fulfil the work of the Will, that Will which is ourselves, there in truth is nothing for us but the spirit of Negation, the spirit of our own will that, blind and hungering, can only plainly see itself in its un-will toward whatsoever crosses it as obstacle or disappointment. Yet that which crosses it, is but itself again; so that its rage expresses nothing save its self-negation: and this self-knowledge can be gained at last by Pity born of suffering—which, cancelling the Will, expresses the negation of a negative; and that, by every rule of logic, amounts to Affirmation.
>If we take this great thought of our philosopher [Schopenhauer] as guide to the inexorable metaphysical problem of the purpose of the human race, we shall have to acknowledge that what we have termed the decline of the race, as known to us by its historic deeds, is really the stern school of Suffering which the Will imposed on its blind self for sake of gaining sight,—somewhat in the sense of the power "that ever willeth ill, and ever doeth good."

>GREAT KANT taught us to postpone the wish for knowledge of the world to criticism of man's power of knowledge; if we thus arrived at the most complete uncertainty about the reality of the world, Schopenhauer next taught us to draw the most infallible conclusions as to the world's In-itself from a farther-reaching criticism, no longer of our mental faculties, but of that Will in us which goes before all knowledge. "Know thyself, and thou hast read the world"—the Pythia said; "look round thee, all of this art thou"—the Brahmin.

>>22915577
We may recall the cry of Schopenhauer at Giordano Bruno's fate, that stupid monks of the blessed Renaissance era should have brought to the stake in fair Italy a man who on the Ganges, at the selfsame date, would have been honoured as wise and holy.

Without going into the trials and sufferings of great minds in every age and country, too plainly visible, and consequently without touching on their deeper cause, we here will only note that their relation to their surroundings has always been of tragic nature; and the human race will have to recognise this, if it is ever to come to knowledge of itself. True religion may already have enabled it to do so; whence the eternal eagerness of the generality to rid itself of such belief.

In the Theatre the whole man, with his lowest and his highest passions, is placed in terrifying nakedness before himself, and by himself is driven to quivering joy, to surging sorrow, to hell and heaven. What lies beyond all possibility of the ordinary man's experiencing in his own life, he lives it here; and lives it in himself, in his sympathy deep-harrowed by the wondrous duping. One may weaken this effect through the senseless abuse of a daily repetition (which draws after it a great perversion of the receptive powers), but never suppress the possibility of its fullest outburst; and finally, that outburst may be played on, according to the ruling interest of the day, for any manner of corruptive end. In awe and shuddering, have the greatest poets of all nations and all times approached this terrible abyss; 'twas they devised the aimful laws, the sacred conjurations, to bann the demon lurking there, by aid of the good genius; and Aeschylus with priestly rites led e'en the chained Erinnyes, as divine and reverend Eumenides, to the seat of their redemption from a baneful curse. 'Twas this abyss great Calderon arched over with the heavenly rainbow, conducting to the country of the saints; from out its depths stupendous Shakespeare conjured up the demon's self, to set it plainly, fettered by his giant force, before the astonished world as its own essence, alike to be subdued; upon its wisely measured, calmly trodden verge, did Goethe build the temple of his Iphigenia, did Schiller plant God's miracle tree of his Jungfrau von Orleans. To this abyss have fared the wizards of the art of Tone, and shed the balm of heaven's melody into the gaping wounds of man; here Mozart shaped his masterworks, and hither yearned Beethoven's dreams of proving finally his utmost strength. But, once the great, the hallowed sorcerers yield place, the Furies of vulgarity, of lowest ribaldry, of vilest passions, the sottish Gnomes of most dishonouring delights, lead high their revels round its brink. Banish hence the kindly spirits—(and little trouble will it cost you: ye merely need to not invoke them trustfully!)—and ye leave the field, where Gods had wandered, to the filthiest spawn of Hell; and these will come uncalled, for there have they ever had a home whence naught could scare them but the advent of the Gods.

>>22850658
Thus undoubtedly the essence of Dramatic art, as against the Poet's method, at first seems totally irrational; it is not to be seized, without a complete reversal of the beholder's nature. In what this reversal must consist, however, should not be hard to indicate if we recall the natural process in the beginnings of all Art, as plainly shewn to us in improvisation. The poet, mapping out a plan of action for the improvising mime, would stand in much the same relation to him as the author of an operatic text to the musician; his work can claim as yet no atom of artistic value; but this it will gain in the very fullest measure if the poet makes the improvising spirit of the mime his own, and develops his plan entirely in character with that improvisation, so that the mime now enters with all his individuality into the poet's higher reason. This involves, to be sure, a complete transformation of the poetic artwork itself, of which we might form an idea if we imagined the impromptu of some great musician noted down. We have it on the authority of competent witnesses, that nothing could compare with the effect produced by Beethoven when he improvised at length upon the pianoforte to his friends; nor, even in view of the master's greatest works, need we deem excessive the lament that precisely these inventions were not fixed in writing, if we reflect that far inferior musicians, whose penwork was always stiff and stilted, have quite amazed us in their 'free fantasias' by a wholly unsuspected and often very fertile talent for invention.—At anyrate we believe we shall really expedite the solution of an extremely difficult problem, if we define the Shakespearian Drama as a fixed mimetic improvisation of the highest poetic worth. For this explains at once each wondrous accidental in the bearing and discourse of characters alive to but one purpose, to be at this moment all that they are meant to seem to us to be, and to whom accordingly no word can come that lies outside this conjured nature; so that it would be positively laughable to us, upon closer consideration, if one of these figures were suddenly to pose as poet. This last is silent, and remains for us a riddle, such as Shakespeare. But his work is the only veritable Drama; and what that implies, as work of Art, is shewn by our rating its author the profoundest poet of all time.—

>>22835728
>The feeling is growing in my mind that the only possible means a man has of distinguishing himself from the age in which he lives is to become thoroughly conscious of his own strength, and to do this, if needs be, by engaging in a pitched battle with the meanness and pettiness of the age. As far as I am concerned, I have arrived at the point where I do not intend to mince matters, and should the Empress Augusta cross my path she would fare precisely as others do in this respect. Something must come of all this, for one thing is certain: compromise is not to be considered for a moment. Having got one's self so cordially hated, the only thing to be done is to make one's self feared. . . .
- Wagner's advice to Nietzsche in a letter

>>22829279
>At seven in the morning R. wishes me a good morning and says he has already been thinking a lot about Socrates. It is very remarkable (he says) that his whole approach Is negative; this means he is wise, but no philosopher, he is always trying to fathom where wisdom can be found, in Heaven and beneath the ground in Hades, everywhere. In this sense he can be compared with Kant, who in his Critique of Pure Reason declares that this problem cannot be solved, and he stands in relation to Plato more or less as Schopenhauer’s first book stands to his second. To this extent he is also the clearest example of a step forward in the development of the human spirit. He could only be mild and benevolent, since all around him he saw error. But he must have been terribly irritating, since he could not be put into any category, not even among the philosophers, and yet he attracted everyone to him; if he had only accepted money, all would have been well. Plato was the first philosopher—Socrates was simply his forerunner, of the greatest importance to him, since he threw doubt on all recognized values. Such earlier men as Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, etc., were practicians, they sought to explain the objective world. Plato was the first to recognize the world’s ideality, that the species was everything, the individual nothing.

>>22827055
Judaism in Music, Some Explanations Concerning "Judaism in Music", Modern, Public and Popularity, Religion and Art and Know Thyself. For Wagner classical music is, in its very essence, as harmony evolved out of the bottomless depths of spiritual yearning in the monasteries, Christian.

>In particular does the purely physical aspect of the Jewish mode of speech repel us. Throughout an intercourse of two millennia with European nations, Culture has not succeeded in breaking the remarkable stubbornness of the Jewish naturel as regards the peculiarities of Semitic pronunciation. The first thing that strikes our ear as quite outlandish and unpleasant, in the Jew's production of the voice-sounds, is a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle: add thereto an employment of words in a sense quite foreign to our nation's tongue, and an arbitrary twisting of the structure of our phrases—and this mode of speaking acquires at once the character of an intolerably jumbled blabber (eines unertraglich verwirrten Geplappers); so that when we hear this Jewish talk, our attention dwells involuntarily on its repulsive how, rather than on any meaning of its intrinsic what. How exceptionally weighty is this circumstance, particularly for explaining the impression made on us by the music-works of modern Jews, must be recognised and borne in mind before all else. If we hear a Jew speak, we are unconsciously offended by the entire want of purely-human expression in his discourse: the cold indifference of its peculiar "blubber" ("Gelabber") never by any chance rises to the ardour of a higher, heartfelt passion. If, on the other hand, we find ourselves driven to this more heated expression, in converse with a Jew, he will always shuffle off, since he is incapable of replying in kind. Never does the Jew excite himself in mutual interchange of feelings with us, but—so far as we are concerned—only in the altogether special egoistic interest of his vanity or profit; a thing which, coupled with the wry expression of his daily mode of speech, always gives to such excitement a tinge of the ridiculous, and may rouse anything you please in us, only not sympathy with the interests of the speaker.

>>22826895
>R. began the day with a conversation about the Greek attitude toward love, which we cannot ourselves envisage and which, when it did not degenerate into depravity, produced the highest qualities of aestheticism. “The adoration of women, on the other hand, is a completely new factor, and one which divides us entirely from the antique world. The ancient Germans respected women as something mysterious, closer to Nature—rather in the way the Egyptians worshiped animals—and, in order to preserve their divinity intact, did not wish to touch them. What this cult has led to today, whereby women since chignons and bibi hats have demanded to be adored and from which they derive all this emancipation nonsense—that we already know.”
- Cosima's Diaries

>What we can never understand in any language about the Greek way, is what wholly separates us from it, e.g. their love — in — pederasty.
- Wagner's Brown Book

>>22822220
>After breakfast he talks about philosophy and says that Kant found something eternal in his quiet avenue in Konigsberg, an ideality of time and space, like Jesus in Galilee: “My Kingdom is not of this world.”

>He works, before that read Kant, and again speaks of it at lunch; “One never regrets communing with a significant mind, and one should in fact occupy oneself only with such original beings.”

>>22822375
Wagner. It's no surprise he was one of the biggest influences on Symbolists/Decadents/Modernists, who in general resemble your description.

Tristan is the greatest portrayal of love in the Western canon.

>>22819699
Just as words and constructions are hurled together in this jargon with wondrous inexpressiveness, so does the Jew musician hurl together the diverse forms and styles of every age and every master. Packed side by side, we find the formal idiosyncrasies of all the schools, in motleyest chaos. As in these productions the sole concern is Talking at all hazards, and not the Object which might make that talk worth doing, so this clatter can only be made at all inciting to the ear by its offering at each instant a new summons to attention, through a change of outer expressional means. Inner agitation, genuine passion, each finds its own peculiar language at the instant when, struggling for an understanding, it girds itself for utterance: the Jew, already characterised by us in this regard, has no true passion (Leidenschaft), and least of all a passion that might thrust him on to art-creation. But where this passion is not forthcoming, there neither is any calm (Ruhe): true, noble Calm is nothing else than Passion mollified through Resignation. Where the calm has not been ushered in by passion, we perceive naught but sluggishness (Trägheit): the opposite of sluggishness, however, is nothing but that prickling unrest which we observe in Jewish music-works from one end to the other, saving where it makes place for that soulless, feelingless inertia. What issues from the Jews' attempts at making Art, must necessarily therefore bear the attributes of coldness and indifference, even to triviality and absurdity; and in the history of Modern Music we can but class the Judaic period as that of final unproductivity, of stability gone to ruin.

>>22788804
Just read Wagner's The Wibelungen (detailed discussion of the Grail, Tradition, Ghibellines, Frederick the Great, etc.) and Parsifal. In the prior he utterly rejects the connection between Arthurian myth and Christianity, on the grounds that it is only superficial, in the latter he affirms it. So there is a large amount of diversity and development in his thought on the subject. Wagner said everything Evola did but better, and was an artistic genius to boot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXItznePeFI

>>22771813
Wagner's stellar essay Religion and Art.

>We have nothing here to do with the astoundingly varied attempts of speculative human reason to explain the nature of this Son of the God, who walked on earth and suffered shame: where the greater miracle had been revealed in train of that manifestation, the reversal of the will-to-live which all believers experienced in themselves, it already embraced that other marvel, the divinity of the herald of salvation. The very shape of the Divine had presented itself in anthropomorphic guise; it was the body of the quintessence of all pitying Love, stretched out upon the cross of pain and suffering. A—symbol?—beckoning to the highest pity, to worship of suffering, to imitation of this breaking of all self-seeking Will: nay, a picture, a very effigy! In this, and its effect upon the human heart, lies all the spell whereby the Church soon made the Græco-Roman world her own. But what was bound to prove her ruin, and lead at last to the ever louder "Atheism" of our day, was the tyrant-prompted thought of tracing back this Godliness upon the cross to the Jewish "Creator of heaven and earth," a wrathful God of Punishment who seemed to promise greater power than the self-offering, all-loving Saviour of the Poor. That god was doomed by Art: Jehova in the fiery bush, or even the reverend Father with the snow-white beard who looked down from out the clouds in blessing on his Son, could say but little to the believing soul, however masterly the artist's hand; whereas the suffering god upon the cross, "the Head with wounds all bleeding," still fills us with ecstatic throes, in the rudest reproduction.

>>22773717
Wagner's most important nationalist writings are German Art and German Policy, What is German? and Beethoven (originally titled 'Beethoven and the German Nation'). Smaller articles are For the New Year 1880, Shall We Hope? and Know Thyself. While all of Wagner's dramas are products off his nationalism, the most poignant to the topic is Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.

>With Palestrina’s music religion had vanished from the church, whereas the artificial formalism of Jesuitical practice counter-reformed religion and at the same time music. Thus, for the sensitive observer, the same Jesuitical style of construction of the preceding two centuries obscures the venerable nobility of Rome; thus the glories of Italian painting became soft and sweet; thus, under the same guidance, ‘classical’ French poetry arose in whose stultifying laws we can detect a quite telling analogy with the laws governing the construction of the operatic aria and the sonata. We know that it was the German spirit, so very much feared and hated ‘beyond the mountains’, which, everywhere and including in the area of art, confronted and redeemed this artificially introduced corruption of the spirit of the European peoples. If in other areas we have celebrated Lessing, Goethe, Schiller and others as having saved us from such corruption, we should now today demonstrate that through the musician Beethoven, who spoke in the purest language of all peoples, the German spirit redeemed the human spirit from deepest shame. For by raising music (which had been reduced to a merely diverting art) through its innermost essence to the height of its sublime vocation, he has given us understanding of the art by which the world explains itself to universal consciousness as clearly as even the most profound philosophy might explain it to the expert thinker alone. And this is the sole basis of the great Beethoven’s relationship to the German nation.