Here I am, poor soul that I am, confined to my room again for the last eight days, and this time even confined to my chair, from which I am not allowed to get up, so that in the evening I have to be carried to bed. Yet it is only an outward affliction, which I have even come to regard as decisive for my general health, inasmuch as my condition even fills me with the hope that, from now on, I may be able to continue with my work undisturbed, whereas it was above all the interruption that I suffered which made my recent bouts of illness so unbearable. - At such periods my intellect is always very active; plans and ideas occupy my imagination in the liveliest fashion. This time it was philosophical problems which engaged my attention. During recent weeks I have been slowly rereading friend Schopenhauer’s principal work, and this time it has inspired me, quite extraordinarily, to expand and - in certain details - even to correct his system. The subject is uncommonly important, and it must, I think, have been reserved for a man of my own particular nature, at this particular period of his life, to gain insights here of a kind that could never have disclosed themselves to anyone else. It is a question, you see, of pointing out the path to salvation, which has not been recognized by any philosopher, and especially not by Sch., but which involves a total pacification of the will through love, and not through any abstract human love, but a love engendered on the basis of sexual love, i.e. the attraction between man and woman. It is significant that in reaching this conclusion (as a philosopher, not as a poet, for as such I have my own material) I have been able to use the material of the concepts which Sch. himself provides. The presentation of this argument will take me very deep and very far; it involves a more detailed explanation of the state in which we become capable of recognizing ideas, and of genius in general, which I no longer conceive of as a state in which the intellect is divorced from the will, but rather as an intensification of the individual intellect to the point where it becomes the organ of perception of the genus or species, and thus of the will itself, which is the thing in itself; herein lies the only possible explanation for that marvellous and enthusiastic joy and ecstasy felt by any genius at the highest moments of perception, moments which Sch. seems scarcely to recognize, since he is able to find them only in a state of calm and in the silencing of the individual affects of the will. Entirely analogous to this view, however, I have succeeded in demonstrating beyond doubt that in love there lies the possibility of raising oneself above the individual impulse of the will to a point where total mastery over the latter is achieved, and the generic will becomes fully conscious of itself, a consciousness which, at this level, is necessarily synonymous with total pacification. All this will become clear even to the inexperienced person, provided that my presentation of it proves successful. The result, however, will inevitably be very important, and fill in the gaps in Schopenhauer’s system in a thorough and satisfactory fashion. We shall see if ever I feel inclined to do anything about it. -
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 227