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  • Music contra Life
  • Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Editor and Publisher (bio)

Music like literature and the other arts plays an important role in life. For many, it is a source of entertainment, enjoyment, and pleasure. For others though such as the late Miles Davis, its role in their lives is much greater: something closer to a life-giving force, rather than merely a pleasant diversion. One has an intimation of this power when the musician summed up his life with the statement, "Music has been my life"—a statement wherein one feels both the potential of music to give life as well as to take it away.

Still, in spite of the power of music over life, almost nothing has been written about it in the philosophical tradition. The most significant comments on the topic come from Friedrich Nietzsche, particularly in 1888, the last (and most) productive year of his life, a year in which he wrote five books: The Case of Wagner, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and Twilight of the Idols, the book where he made the famous comment, "Without music, life would be an error."

But Nietzsche's thoughts on the relationship between music and life go much deeper than just this line now featured on t-shirts. In the fall of 1888, the philosopher stayed in Turin, Italy. During his stay, he went through his older writing going back as far as 1877 and selected pieces that reflected his position on the composer, Richard Wagner. The pieces, often shortened and clarified, were to become his final book, Nietzsche contra Wagner—a book that would not be published until many years later, that is, in 1895 in volume eight of his collected works.

Nietzsche wrote the preface for Nietzsche contra Wagner on Christmas of 1888 and then early the next month he became insane, after which, his friend and former colleague, Overbeck, transported him back to Basel, Switzerland from Turin. He was then committed to the asylum in Jena, Germany, but shortly thereafter released to the care of his mother in Naumburg, Germany. When his mother died in 1897, his sister moved him to Weimar, Germany, where he died on August 25, 1900.

Nietzsche contra Wagner leaves little doubt about his position on the composer. "We are antipodes," writes Nietzsche in the preface, a position that he contends will not be a popular one with German readers. "I have readers everywhere," says Nietzsche, "in Vienna, in St. Petersburg, in Copenhagen and Stockholm, in Paris, in New York—I do not have them in Europe's shallows, Germany."

His critique of the music of Wagner in this work and others is interesting both for what it is (a "physiological" one) and for what it is not (an "aesthetic" one). In fact, in the preface he alludes to this by saying that the book is "an essay for psychologists, but not for Germans." Though Nietzsche "admire[s] Wagner wherever he puts himself into music," "[t]his does not mean that I consider this music healthy." In brief, Nietzsche contends that the music of Wagner is not only unhealthy, but also that the composer himself is a "sickness."

In The Case of Wagner, published in September of 1888, and the last book that Nietzsche would see to publication before his breakdown, he is direct and clear about the effect of Wagner and his music on our health:

I am far from looking on guilelessly while this decadent corrupts our health—and music as well. Is Wagner a human being at all? Isn't he rather a sickness? He makes sick whatever he touches—he has made music sick

Later, in the same section of The Case of Wagner, Nietzsche reflects further on the relationship between sickness, health, and life:

To sense that what is harmful is harmful, to be able to forbid oneself something harmful, is a sign of youth and vitality. The exhausted are attracted by what is harmful: the vegetarian by vegetables. Sickness itself can be a stimulant to life: one only has to be healthy enough for the stimulant.

Health for Nietzsche involves a certain type of resilience, one that allows some people to "instinctively...

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