Category Archives: Arthur Schopenhauer

Friday video/From the archives: Beckett/Wagner

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Waltrud Meier as Isolde in the Heiner Müller production of Tristan und Isolde at Bayreuth.

A few years ago (in 2008 to be precise) I wrote the below essay after seeing Dieter Dorn’s production of Tristan und Isolde at the Met. A much shorter version of this essay appeared on 1 April 2008 at the Guardian theatre blog.

I’ve appended two videos to the essay — the Liebestod from the 1993 Heiner Müller Bayreuth production, sung by the extraordinary Waltrud Meier, and the first part of Samuel Beckett’s Play, as directed by Anthony Minghella for the Beckett on Film project — to offer an interesting comparison and contrast.

On the face of it, there couldn’t be two more different theatre artists than Richard Wagner and Samuel Beckett — the first the egomaniacal, nineteenth-century composer and theorist who had giants and gods banging about the stage in forests and faux-Olympias like Valhalla to thundering orchestral music in five-hour-long operas; the second the spare, self-effacing master of essences who, towards the end of his career, turned out plays — often quiet, approaching silence — that rarely exceeded twenty minutes.

Beckett himself cared very little for Wagner (or for Mahlerian histrionics for that matter; Schubert’s songs were more his style). But the production of Tristan und Isolde by Dieter Dorn which was recently restaged at New York’s Metropolitan Opera with Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner suggests there may be more to the comparison than meets the eye. After the Ring cycle of operas and Die Meistersinger, this opera and Parsifal expressed essences of suffering, desire and renunciation — the same essences that provided the matter for Beckett’s own last plays. And, apart from the extraordinary opportunities and challenges that these works provide for their performers (Voigt and Heppner won a ten-minute standing ovation for their work), there’s just as much, if not more, to say about the theatre practice that these works represent.

Wagner was always a man of the theatre first. “Everything he did was determined by his need to create theatre,” said the editors of an anthology of Wagner’s prose work, and by the time Bayreuth was built, Wagner, like Beckett, found it necessary to direct his own music-dramas. But there was more. Both Beckett and Wagner recognized Arthur Schopenhauer’s contribution to aesthetic philosophy and exemplified this same philosophy in their stage work.

For Schopenhauer, music was the highest of the arts because it most effectively permitted the description of the ultimately indescribable Will that lay beyond the world of earthly appearances. In music’s abstraction lay its power. The words of a libretto (or, for Beckett, of a playscript) made this communication, this description, more precise, and for Schopenhauer, the lyrical, tragic drama was second only to music in its ability to communicate these descriptions.

There was, in addition, the idea of the gesamtkunstwerk: the theatre work as a distillation of all the arts. Wagner did not live to see the implementation of electric light in the theatre, which, in the hands of designers like Adolphe Appia, made abstraction tangible. Wagner’s production practice in the 1860s was heavily invested in the realistic theatre practice of the era: the naturalism of historically-accurate sets and costumes as exemplified by the work of Saxe-Meiningen. (It’s still done, as Sir Peter Hall demonstrated in his Ring cycle of several years back.) As effective as Tristan und Isolde was when it premiered in Munich in 1865, it didn’t seem to come into its own until Appia’s theory — which was heavily indebted to Wagner’s more metaphysical operas – became current in the 1920s. With the abstraction of the Impressionists, Matisse and Picasso, shape and color became more evocative of the poetic currents that lay beneath photographic realism. Appia demonstrated that this was true in the theatre just as much as on the canvas.

In the post-war era, Bayreuth’s directors Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner seized on Appia. The Tristans produced there were shorn of naturalistic and realistic costumes and sets; instead, geometrical shapes on a bare stage were flooded with electric light. At about the same time, Beckett’s first plays were being performed in Paris — plays that also depended for their effect just as much on the painterly ability of the director and designer as the performers. Here, too, there was little more than a nod to realism. For Beckett’s 1961 production of Waiting for Godot in Paris, sculptor Alberto Giacometti designed a tree that was made with wires and plaster: an obvious construct, a mere suggestion of a real tree. Even these scenic elements became less and less common in Beckett’s later work, until 1972′s Not I presented a mere pair of lips, spotlit at center stage. The theatrical event is reduced to its essence: a speaking mouth.

Dorn’s production for the Met marries Beckett’s stage practice to Wagner further. There is a nod to Beckett’s conception of colorless existence in the gray floor of the raked stage, and in the three pure-white cycloramas that are gathered into a very visible vanishing point upstage center, a vanishing point that suggests the unity and nothingness for which the two lovers yearn. (This is not unlike the “very pompier trompe-l’oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance” that Beckett specifies in the stage directions for Happy Days.)

In the foreground of this stage image there is in Tristan, as in much of Beckett, physical stasis, a lack of physical activity. The Day/Night duet that makes up most of the second act of Tristan is performed by the characters in a deep blue light, the lovers wrapped into one seeming unified and motionless object at center stage, nearly impossible to see in the darkness – and the audience, too, is bathed in this darkness for 45 minutes, as the lovers reject day for the night which finally allows them unity. Instead, it is what we hear — the words and the music — that constitutes, for the opera, the dramatic event. As in either act of Godot, there is little more than talk for nearly an hour, but in Wagner this talk is filled with sublimely beautiful music, and in Beckett, devastatingly lyrical speech. Over a century of Tristan performances and half-a-century of Godot performances have demonstrated the profound power of such a theatrical essentialism.

Instead of working from realistic detail inward to the spirit, Wagner worked from within the spirit outward. “[In Tristan] in perfect confidence, I plunged into the inner depths of soul events, and from the innermost centre of the world, I fearlessly built up its outer form,” Wagner wrote in “The Music of the Future.” “… I have rejected the exhaustive detail which an historical poet is obliged to employ so as to clarify the outward developments of his plot, to the detriment of a lucid exposition of its inner motives, and I trusted myself to the latter alone. Life and death, the whole meaning and existence of the outer world, here hang on nothing but the inner movements of the soul.” This is a practical statement about staging as well as a statement about the aesthetics of composition. As in Wagner’s final operas, Beckett’s dramas from 1962′s Play onward also strip this exhaustive detail to allow the motives themselves expression.

Beckett and Wagner share in their theatrical aesthetics the same precision of soul. They do so through a spare essentialism: the rooted power of theatre based in simple rituals of performance. A little unexpected, perhaps. But theatre makes strange bedfellows, and not just after the opening night party.

For more about Wagner’s relationship to Schopenhauer and philosophy in general, I guide you towards Bryan Magee’s excellent The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy.

Via YouTube: Waltrud Meier sings the Liebestod at the end of Act III of Tristan und Isolde, from the Heiner Müller Bayreuth production, filmed in 1995:

And, again from YouTube, the first half of Anthony Minghella’s film of Samuel Beckett’s Play:

Quotes: Arthur Schopenhauer

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Comparing his own work to that of his mentor, Samuel Beckett said, “Joyce is a putter-inner, and I’m a taker-outer.” For Beckett, art was contractive, not expansive: a delving into the self and the repudiation of all that lay outside it. In this sense, the outer world was not merely unnecessary, but might even prove a distraction from facing the abyss of the individual self. While the sublime landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich played a role as inspiration of the earlier work, the later work narrowed and narrowed to a Giacometti-like emphasis on the individual: space outside it literally “negative.”

I myself have never been too affected by either the grand canvases of astronomical photography or the breakthroughs of neuroscience: they do not offer the truths, the essence, of the insights that an unsparing critique of the individual consciousness produces. Astronomical photography and neuroscientific discipline offer merely grander conceptions of the represented world, and belong entirely to its empirical experience: the thing-in-itself remains unexplored and unexamined. Not the galaxy, but the face; not the brain, but the spirit — these are the proper subjects for art and philosophy. But because these photographic and scientific distractions are so attractive, they are more accessible to the simple, like any shiny objects are to children or animals. Describing this, Arthur Schopenhauer emphasizes that the true journey is to the interior of the self and what we can know of the world-as-will through it, not a trek to the limits of a science that provides pretty pictures:

People have tried in different ways to get us each to grasp the immeasurable size of the universe, and have used the opportunity to make edifying observations, for instance concerning the relative smallness of the earth and indeed of human beings, and then again, by contrast, concerning the greatness of the mind in such a small creature that can conceive, grasp, and even measure the size of this universe, etc. Fair enough! But when I consider the immeasurability of the world, the most important thing about it is that the essence in itself, whose appearance is the world (whatever else it might be) cannot in its true self be stretched out and divided in endless space in this way, but this infinite extension belongs instead only to its appearance, while it itself is present whole and undivided in every single thing in nature, in all of life; thus we lose nothing if we stop with any given individual, and true wisdom is not to be attained by measuring the boundless world or, what would be more to the point, by personally flying through endless space; but rather by completely investigating some given individual and trying to fully know and understand its true and distinctive essence.[1]

Footnotes
  1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 154. [↩]

Art as philosophy, philosophy as art

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At the beginning of his 2001 book The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, Beckett’s friend and publisher John Calder writes:

Voltaire considered himself to be a novelist, a poet, a dramatist and a writer of opera libretti, but we think of him today largely as a philosopher. The same fate may overtake Samuel Beckett, because what future generations can expect to find in his work is above all an ethical and philosophical message; the novels and plays will increasingly be seen as the wrapping for that message. This will [in] no way detract from the originality and daring of the stage works nor from the power and craftsmanship of the fictions. They were however written for a purpose: to make us face, head-on, the realities of the human condition; and nowhere does he offer us a hopeful message, only a positive attitude and an injunction to face those realities with courage and dignity.[1]

I was reminded of this passage as I reached the midpoint of the new Cambridge University Press translation of The World as Will and Representation this weekend. If Beckett’s work might be seen as a philosophy wrapped in the guise of art (imaginative prose and drama), then Schopenhauer’s might be seen as a work of art wrapped in the guise of a philosophy (expository prose). This perspective may provide one explanation for Beckett’s continuing appeal to philosophers, and Schopenhauer’s to artists. As Calder suggests, the generic form of this content partakes of a certain oscillation of any given work among various forms, in this case the imaginative and the expository. Schopenhauer’s work has its longeurs and repetitions, like Beckett’s, like that of any artist who works in forms that express a problematic relation to time. The title of Ulrich Pothast’s book on Beckett and Schopenhauer, The Metaphysical Vision, points to the same kind of oscillation. There is metaphysics and there is art: and they may be separate or fused.

I have written before of the architectonic structure of Schopenhauer’s main work (not dissimilar to that, in its power and sublimity, to Beethoven’s Choral Symphony), and he is widely considered to be one of the most accomplished prose stylists of 19th-century Germany in whatever form. It is also relevant to note Schopenhauer’s valuation of aesthetic work as a means to renunciation and resignation as superior to that of the philosophical treatise, the genre in which he pursued his project. The pursuit of philosophical ends through aesthetics, as Calder conceived Beckett’s enduring reputation, is mirrored by that of the pursuit of aesthetic ends through philosophy, which permits both Beckett and Schopenhauer to maintain significant footings in both genres. As Pothast notes, it’s not as if Beckett conceived of his project as putting Schopenhauer’s philosophy on stage or in the novel, and Pothast argues that as Beckett’s career went on it resembled Schopenhauer’s metaphysics less and less. I think the first part of his note is quite true but the second is not necessarily true, but even if it were, it only indicates that the work of no philosopher or artist constitutes a final end, but only a dynamic of concerns that evolve and change through an artist’s work.

That some philosophers and artists have elective affinities with each other is a lesson that Schopenhauer’s enduring influence on artists, and Beckett’s enduring appeal to critics and philosophers, demonstrates perhaps better than any other philosopher. Any mental or creative dialogue that an artist or a philosopher maintains through a lifetime must include a dialogue with the dead, and the communication of these affinities within groups of like-minded writers and artists permits of revision and reconsideration. Schopenhauer famously refuted what he considered Kant’s missteps in an extended appendix to WWR, but there’s no reason why an artist may not also participate in this revision and consideration as well.

To take one example particularly relevant to my own project, Richard Wagner was the first major artist to have his life’s work stopped and radically revised in the middle of his career as a result of a reading of The World as Will and Representation. It was through Schopenhauer’s work that this reconsideration occurred, but Wagner also revised his mentor. In his important new book Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, Laurence Dreyfus cites an 1858 letter to Mathilde Wesendonck in which Wagner, then at work on Tristan und Isolde, does just this:

It is really a matter of proving — something no philosopher has done, not even Schopenhauer — that the recognized redemptive path to the complete pacification of the Will is through Love, and in fact not an abstract human love but rather by means of sexual love, that is, a love germinating in the attraction between man and woman.[2]

It is also important to note here Dreyfus’ gloss on Wagner’s letter:

Far from being doomed to failure and eternal disappointment as in Schopenhauer’s clear exposition, Wagner’s notion of sexual love becomes a means to assuage the gnawing desires of the Will-to-live. Even Schopenhauer admitted in his second volume that there is a difference between understanding renunciation as a philosopher and practicing it as an ascetic mystic, a statement that undercuts the effect of his philosophical conclusions … . Perhaps Wagner intended to air a legitimate criticism of Schopenhauer’s unconvincing pseudo-Buddhist account of renunciation. But as soon as one examines the composer’s assertion about sexual love, its logical inconsistency becomes glaring. For if sexual desire (according to Schopenhauer) embodies the essence of the Will-to-live, it is nonsense to allow sexual love to pacify the Will. It is like giving whiskey to cure an alcoholic, or pornography to treat a sexual obsessive.[3]

True enough, and Dreyfus here has stumbled upon a central paradox of Schopenhauer’s conclusion — that is, how can the will be turned by a helpless vehicle of that will, the human individual, against itself? The paradox is insoluble except through an appeal to mystery and mysticism — but it is this mystery and mysticism itself which constitute the possibility of any kind of true, redemptive aesthetic experience as well. That it is logically inconsistent, as Dreyfus notes, perhaps makes The World as Will and Representation poor philosophy (though only if philosophy must abjure any appeals to a mysticism and mystery — and this does not necessarily mean God or purposiveness — which is beyond human understanding). But that does not make it bad art — indeed, in its openness to aesthetic and imaginative possibility, it makes it very good art indeed. And it confirms that Kant, Schopenhauer and Wagner can all ascertain new forms and understandings of experience from each other’s work without ignoring the weaknesses and mistakes of each.

The avenue is two-way, and one day I would like to hear a concert of the attempts that philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Theodor Adorno made in musical composition (I understand that Adorno’s is quite good). It is instructive to note that great philosophy that aspires to the condition of art has similar effects in the best critics and expositors of that philosophy. Bryan Magee concludes his magisterial The Philosophy of Schopenhauer not with a summation chapter, but with a poem — as if expository prose could not contain the enduring value and appeal of Schopenhauer’s work to that writer. More recently, David Ian Rabey’s two-volume survey of Howard Barker’s career is as much philosophy and art as it is literary criticism, as James Balestrieri noted upon the publication of the first volume: “Rabey mobilizes powerful metaphors, almost as responses in kind to Barker’s lines, in sentences that have the quality of muscular poetry. …  At the border between criticism and theatre, Politics and Desire stands opposite Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues, challenging critical boundaries of theatre, and inviting us to experience the catastrophic throes of tragic transformation.” All of this argues for the possibility, indeed the value and the necessity, of an art which strains towards philosophy, and a philosophy which strains towards art.

Footnotes
  1. John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. London: Calder Publications, 2001, p. 1. [↩]
  2. Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 71. [↩]
  3. Ibid. [↩]

Tragedy as propaedeutic

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The subtitle of David Becker’s essay in the most recent issue of the Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch, “Schopenhauer on the Meaning of Tragedy: Vision and Blindness,” seems to interpret Schopenhauer’s radical reconception of modern tragedy as a mistake on the part of the philosopher, though Schopenhauer’s radicalism inheres in that very (only seeming) error. In his otherwise timely and insightful study, Becker, after considering both ancient Greek and Shakespearean forms of the genre, writes:

… “modern” (certainly Shakespearean) tragedy, in common with its ancient predecessors, manifests a belief in the existence of an overarching moral and spiritual order to the universe, which the tragedy of the individual merely confirms.

Yet it is precisely the aspect of tragedy that Schopenhauer, unsurprisingly, cannot see. If one believes in a world ruled by a fundamentally malevolent and irrational “force,” then of course one cannot credit tragedy with the affirmation of a divine order and harmony. Hence, Schopenhauer was blind to those aspects of tragedy, both ancient and modern, which affirm the coherence and moral order of the universe. He not only rejected such a perspective, he completely failed to see its presence in tragic drama.[1]

Schopenhauer can only be said to have been “unsurprisingly” blind, indeed, if his conception of tragedy did not reflect his conviction that the universe has no coherence or moral order — but this was in fact a correlate, if not definition, of Schopenhauer’s worldview. It is a failing not of Schopenhauer’s tragic aesthetic but of previous forms of tragedy that they failed to recognize this amoral chaos; instead, both Shakespeare and the ancients took refuge in the definition of the world, as Becker puts it, as a “Cosmos, rather than a Chaos, a realm of ultimate order and rational law.”[2] Lacking that order and law itself, the Will cannot be fully recognized or absorbed in these earlier forms of tragedy, for its chaos and blind lawlessness cannot be reconciled in the phenomenal world, if at all.

In the second part of the essay, which considers Schopenhauer’s conception of life as illusion, as a “veil of Maya,” Becker considers the differences between the ancient and the Shakespearean modes of tragedy, at the same time underscoring the essential rationale of tragedy as a preparation for contemplation and resignation. He helpfully suggests that the onstage action must be a reflection of the terror and pain in which the human individual finds him or herself, inescapably, in the phenomenal world, but that the onstage action cannot itself represent that contemplation or aesthetic salvation that lies beyond it:

For Schopenhauer, the question of the true nature of our existence takes us beyond tragedy. Greek tragedy can bring us to the point where we fully comprehend the futility of our striving for happiness, and the inevitability of the destruction of the individual. Modern tragedy, according to him, takes us further, to the point where we may glimpse, as if through a glass darkly, not merely the futility of life but its fundamentally illusory nature. We are thus prepared for the final step, which must be achieved philosophically rather than by means of similes and metaphors of art. … Schopenhauer understood art in general, and tragedy in particular, as propaedeutic — that is as paving the way for the ultimate transcendent knowledge which only philosophy can impart. It points beyond itself, to that which it cannot name. … [Tragedy] leads to a higher state of awareness, not that of mere peaceful contemplation, but of full and total renunciation of the Will itself. … [Tragedy] can take man only so far along the path to his ultimate salvation. What lies beyond is not susceptible to any form of dramatization, or indeed conceptualization, of any kind. It is beyond the realm of communicable experience.[3]

One of the necessary forms that aesthetic experience takes is that of disinterest from the experience being contemplated: We are no more Oedipus or Agamemnon themselves than we are Ian or Cate of Blasted or, for that matter, Vladimir and Estragon of Waiting for Godot. Instead they represent to us our condition, and any question of identification of spectator and spectacle is rendered not only moot, but leads to a particular kind of blindness itself: in identifying with these characters, either through empathy or sympathy, we are blinded by these characters’ very own perceptual limitations. Only in rare moments do these characters glimpse a truth behind the veil, as Vladimir does, very briefly, at the conclusion of the Beckett play, in which he also describes that Schopenhauerian conception of life as a dream from which we must awaken:

Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be? (Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again. Vladimir looks at him.) He’ll know nothing. He’ll tell me about the blows he received and I’ll give him a carrot. (Pause.)  Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone is  looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause.) I can’t go on! (Pause.) What have I said?

If Schopenhauer was in error, it was indeed an error of omission, but the omission was of one of the paths to a form of salvation aside from that of aesthetic contemplation or saintlike asceticism — that of erotic ecstasy. It is a curious lacking from a philosopher who considered eroticism and desire as the primary phenomenological trace of the noumenal will; as such, the integration of an erotic element to tragedy would more completely fulfill Schopenhauer’s conception of dramatic tragedy as the form which best reflects the station of mankind in the universe — not to result in a Dionysian embrace of a “will-to-life” itself, a new kind of blindness, but to negation of the individual and repudiation of the suffering world — and provides human beings with the most powerful concoction of that propaedeutic, a counsel to repudiation.

Footnotes
  1. Becker, David: Schopenhauer on the Meaning of Tragedy: Vision and Blindness. In Schopenhauer-Jahrbook 91 (2010). Würzburg: Verlag Könighausen & Neumann, p. 24. [↩]
  2. Ibid. [↩]
  3. Ibid., p. 29. [↩]

Quotes: Arthur Schopenhauer

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Arthur Schopenhauer, c. 1818.

The below three quotes from Arthur Schopenhauer succinctly encapsulate both the essence of tragedy and the necessary compassion that the experience of tragedy in the theatre should engender. It is notable that tragedy should not lead to Aristotelian catharsis (the product perhaps of the second form of drama described in the first quotation below), but to a recognition of the profound suffering of each individual human being, and what ethic and morality to which that recognition should lead. They have relevance not only to the work of Samuel Beckett, but to the work of William Shakespeare, Sarah Kane and other tragedians as well.

Drama in general, as the most perfect reflection of human existence, has three modes of comprehending it. At the first and most frequently encountered stage it remains at what is merely interesting: we are involved with the characters because they pursue their own designs, which are similar to our own; … wit and humor season the whole. At the second stage, drama becomes sentimental: pity is aroused for the hero, and through him for ourselves. … At the highest and hardest stage, the tragic is aimed at: grievous suffering, the misery of existence, is brought before us, and the final outcome is here the vanity of all human striving. …[1]

At the moment of the tragic catastrophe, we become convinced more clearly than ever that life is a bad dream from which we have to awake. To this extent, the effect of tragedy … is the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can afford us no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our attachment to them. In this the tragic spirit consists; accordingly it leads to resignation.[2]

The conviction that the world, and therefore humanity too, is something which really ought not to exist is in fact calculated to instil in us indulgence towards one another. … From this point of view one might indeed consider that the appropriate form of address between people ought not to be “monsieur,” “sir,” etc., but “Leidensgefährte,” “soci malorum,” “compagnon de misère,” “my fellow-sufferer.” However strange this may sound, it … reminds us of what are the most necessary of all things: tolerance, patience, forbearance and charity, which each of us needs and which each of us therefore owes.[3]

These quotations can be found in Gottfried Büttner’s essay “Schopenhauer’s Recommendations to Beckett,” which was published in Samuel Beckett Today: Endlessness in the Year 2000, pp. 114-122. The complete essay is downloadable here.

Footnotes
  1. Essays and Aphorisms, translated by R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 1970, p. 164. [↩]
  2. The World as Will and Representation, Volume II, translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1969, ch. 37. [↩]
  3. Essays and Aphorisms., p. 50. [↩]