I was reading in Safranski about the great 1929 debate between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer at Davos. Safranski frames it as a battle between Night and Day. Heidegger's philosophy is a night philosophy. It begins with the gesture to wipe away all facticity--the day world of things and forms--and to enter into that moment of the Nothing out of which any thing emerges. This is the task for Heidegger--to enter into the night and to behold there the creation out of nothing.
Cassirer, on the other hand, is the philosopher of the Day. His most famous work is his multi-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. If Heidegger wants to begin his work from Nothing to understand how forms arise. Cassirer's point of departure is the forms of culture and to work backward to understand that from which they arose. His book The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, mainly about Nicholas of Cusa, had a tremendous impact on me as an undergraduate--more certainly than my exasperated attempt to read through Being and Time. Cusanus, the great exponent of the coincidentia oppositorum has been a hero of the human spirit for me ever since.
The jury's still out on Heidegger, and I think in the piece I paste in below, I explain why. It's a piece I wrote after having seen a Seattle Opera production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, (Jane Eaglen/Ben Heppner) which unexpectedly blew me away. I was surprised that this Night/Day theme was the key to understanding it. Wagner, at least at this point seems to be an advocate of the Night. His defection in Parsifal to be a champion of and integration of Day and Night (my interpretation) is perhaps what caused the Night creature Nietzsche to see Wagner as a traitor to the cause of Night. I understand why N. was upset, but Parsifal, from my point of view, is an advance, not a regression.
This is something I want to talk about in the future. The human challenge is not to find the Night but to live in the Day world in such a way that the Day forms don't become a prison. Our Day world becomes a prison to the extent that is cut off from the Night and is no longer fed by it. It's not easy to find the balance point, and advocates of the Night like N. and H. are quite right about how strong the human inclination to lose oneself in Dayworld cares and things. But whether or not Wagner consciously intended it to be, his Tristan und Isolde is a cautionary tale regarding what happens when one becomes a prisoner of the Night.
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Tristan und Isolde
Seattle, August 1998
I just saw Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. I was both moved and troubled by it. The music, the poetry, the acting, the tension, and that unbearable longing, all found their mark in me. The longing especially.
But I think that there were two moments in particular, and in a different way a third, that really grabbed me. The first was at the end of the first act in that moment right after T & I's having drunk the potion when they both expect to die and instead are initiated into the "mysteries of the Night." [The cause was the servant's switching a love potion for the death potion Isolde ordered her to prepare. The point is that the love potion caused another kind of death, a death to the world of Day and an birth into the world of Eros.]
Most of us have had experiences like that at one time or another--when the spirit brightness of another human being, even if one was dimly aware of it before, blasts into one's awareness like an exploding supernova. And the evocation of that kind of moment was quite effective on stage. The potion did not kill them in the ordinary sense, but they did die to the world of the "Day," namely the shadowland, the mundane, pesky, prosaic world of incarnation where the Night and its mysteries are hidden. In this kind of death they are born into a spirit world where one sees no shadows; one perceives only what is bright and beautiful and eternal in the other.
I went to the preview lecture, and I have to say that I was really annoyed with the guy who gave it. He was entertaining, but he's fundamentally a smartass psychologizer with an anti-Wagner axe to grind. (And the Nietzsche/Wagner dispute reduced to Oedipal terms.) This opera is not about sex, if by sex we mean, as he would have it, simply carnal desire. Carnal desire is only one note on desire's musical scale, and Wagner is clearly not a one-note kind of guy.
In fact the one thing this opera is not about is carnal desire. It is about Eros, which is much, much bigger. It is the cosmic power by which all things are properly joined, and spiritual beings long to be joined with other spiritual beings. The problem for us all is that we moderns and post moderns have all but lost the soul capacity to cognize the mystery. And for us everything from the learned tracts of the sexologists and other intellectuals to so much of what we see on TV and the movies has devolved to the one note of carnal desire; because in all honesty it's the only thing most people experience with any intensity. The opera is important precisely for its not being about carnal desire in this limited sense but for pointing to this other more deeply "erotic" desire that lies behind it. But that's also what's troubling about it, but more about that below.
This blazing forth of Eros between Tristan and Isolde does not come out of nowhere; it was kindled in an earlier meeting,--a meeting of the eyes--which literally disarms Isolde who drops the sword with which she is about to strike Tristan in vengeance. So there's already this thing smoldering, but nobody talks about it because of all the Day-world complications.
So we come upon Isolde some years after her first accidental encounter with Tristan. They are on a ship bound for Cornwall, she having been fetched by Tristan to be the wife for his friend and king, Marke. And is she in a funk. At the beginning she's virtually catatonic. But this gradually turns into raging anger at what she perceives to be her humiliation. Isolde feels humiliated not for any of the reason she articulates--the great Irish princess being married off to some no-name in a backwater duchy. It is rather because she feels unloved by her beloved Tristan, and cannot believe that this one would come to fetch her not for himself but for another.
At the beginning of the first act, I think she still believed that if she could just behold him and he her, to reenact that first encounter, that everything would be all right. But Tristan won't come to her. He gives lame excuses, and she knows they are lame. Isolde has it right--he's shy. He's afraid of being caught in her glance, and is afraid of how that will turn his world upside down. As subsequent events unfold, we see that he was right to be afraid. And so because he stays distant, her frustrated longing links up with her earlier desire for vengeance, and she instructs her servant Bragane to prepare the death potion.
And so eventually he goes down to her, and she starts making up lame reasons for him to drink "atonement," and he knows they're lame, and he knows her intent, and that for him to drink means the end of him and probably her. And while at first he's not crazy about the idea, it dawns on him how hopeless his life will be after Isolde is lost to him as Marke's wife. So might as well, and he does. And she does. And then there's that moment when they just stand there waiting for something to happen. And something does. He goes over to her, and the nuclear reaction occurs, and the two of them are hurtled into the world of Night, and nothing in the world of Day makes sense to them anymore. Complications? What complications? Honor? Vengeance? What was that all about? It was as if they awoke from a dream, a Day dream. And then the horrible realization that they are not going to die; that they must remain in Day world and be impeded from their complete union by the "complications," and Isolde faints away. Holy Moly. That's the first moment.
The rest of the opera is simply about the two of them trying to rid themselves of the shackles of the Day. This is what they sing about in the second act and finally accomplish in the third. Because they have been initiated and now are citizens of the Night, they cannot think according to the logic of the Day. They are incapable of understanding the implications of their actions as they are to be seen in the objective cold light of the sun. What's the worst that could happen to them?--that they'd get caught and killed? Terrific. They'll take the Night any way they can get it. And so they choose imprudently to meet and they sing the poetry of their longing for the complete erotic union of the Night. I don't think it was Victorian stage prudery that prevented them from ravishing one another as the carnal desire proponents would have it. That's not really what T. and I. wanted. They wanted something for which bodies only get in the way.
For me the second great moment of the opera is not what occurs between them during their rapturous tryst--that had its moments, but it also seemed to me to be more of a philosophical disquisition. (Blah, blah, blah... Night. Blah, blah, blah. . . Day. Blah Blah. . . . Alright already, I get it.) What really cut into me was King Marke's having been devastated by the loss of his friend. That shift from their mystical rhapsodizing to his lament was profoundly, deeply moving. The part was so well acted and so beautifully sung, and what makes this opera great is that his character should be so poignantly and sympathetically drawn. His learning of Tristan's betrayal is not, as Melot the spy would have it, an insult to his dignity, but rather the shattering revelation of the loss of his beloved nephew, his ideal, whose spirit brightness he was capable of seeing even in the bright light of the Day world, and now that bright light had become extinguished, and this crushing loss was incomprehensible to him.
Why couldn't Tristan just explain, as Bragane did later, that the potion made him do it? Because to do so was impossible for him; he was too far gone into the world of Night; there was no going back. It was as if Marke's lament was only barely audible, as if from another dimension that had no reality for him any more. It's as if Tristan were thinking as he listened to Marke: "Oh yes. That's how it is for him there. Ah. Poor Old Friend. You ask me why? How can I explain it to you? Come here where I am, come into the Night, and maybe you will understand. But where you stand it is impossible."
And as soon as Marke is done, Tristan is back gazing at Isolde, asking her if she will follow him for good into the Night. He simply could no longer stand his incarnation, and he succumbed to the primal temptation-- to want to become prematurely a god--and to Isolde that's what he's become as she, crazed, describes his apotheosis singing the liebestode as she sits there beside his corpse .
But the truth is that Tristan has become a madman, and this is the disturbing part, and for me the third emotional moment of the evening--realizing that the opera is the story about a kind of delusional madness that comes from overexposure to the Night. There lies the real tragedy of Tristan, and also Isolde whom he drags along with him. It is a beautiful madness, but it is madness all the same. And at the end, it was hard to feel sad for them, because didn't they get what they wanted? But neither did I feel glad; mostly I felt a chill, as one feels when one visits a retirement home and hears one of the poor old soul's wailing.
I don't know. Maybe what they really needed was to get carnal, which they never did--to celebrate the Night mystery as something that happens to them and is to be enjoyed while they are in their bodies. Physical lovemaking is supposed to be about the joining of Night and Day. For some couples it becomes a way into the Night. I think that for Tristan and Isolde it would have been a way back into the Day. A joke or two might have helped as well. That's why Mozart's "Magic Flute" is wiser in treating the same subject. It has humor, and it understands that this experience of Eros, though it comes to us from the world of Night, happens while we're in our bodies and that it is not the end but the beginning; it initiates a work to be accomplished--to bring the Night into the Day and the Day into the Night.
A few days ago by chance while looking for something else, I came across a very interesting book by Charles Williams entitled The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante. I've exerpted some parts that stand in interesting contrast to the Wagner theme. The first part describes the experience. The second part describes the meaning:
[Quoting Dante:] "Love lies asleep in that heart till the beauty of a wise woman (saggia donna) causes it, by desire, to awaken, and so in a woman's heart does the worthiness of a man." "Love is nothing else than the spiritual union of the soul with the object loved." "And since the constitution of the divine nature is shown in the excellences of nature, therefore the human soul unites herself spiritually with them the quicker and the closer as they themselves appear more perfect."
[Williams commenting:] What Dante sees is the glory of Beatrice as she is 'in heaven'--that is, as God chose her, unfallen, original; or (if better) redeemed; but at least, either way, celestial. What he sees is something real. It is not 'realer' than the actual Beatrice who, no doubt, had many serious faults, but it is as real. Both Beatrices are aspects of one Beatrice. The revealed virtues are real; so is the celestial beauty.
There is nothing new or uncommon about this experience; it is in a great many novels and films and plays and songs; our modern songs hold it as much as the lyrics of the metaphysical poets. All that is new is the seriousness with which Dante treats it and the style in which he expresses it. The lady creates in her lover the sensation of supreme content. It does not last. Why not?
Dante, at least, had a perfectly definite answer. Everything desires its own perfection: "in this all desires are appeased and for the sake of this all is desired." Our desires are everlasting, and to see an image of perfection is not the same thing as to be perfect ourselves, which until we are, possession, even the possession of Beatrice, must lack perfection. This is what all the talk of 'the ideal' comes to; the ideal can never satisfy us until we are [ourselves] ideal. He who pursues any hope of satisfaction, without his own conditioning perfection is bound, sooner or later, straight for the Inferno..
Could Tristan's experience and fate be more clearly described? This revelation of the other should rather be a vision of the ideal which inspires us to double our efforts in the World of Day, to bring it and ourselves closer to the perfection for which we were created, not only for our own sakes but to offer it to those whom we love. And it is only in the sunlight that our shadows can be perceived, cognized, and so worked with and transformed. The Day world is the only place where that perfection can be achieved.
Williams makes it clear that the vision of perfection in the other is real--it is not just an intrapsychic projection as the Jungians would have it, but it is only part of what's real. In the Night, one can see only what shines. In the Day it's harder; the shadows of everyone we meet are much easier to see. That is why it's so extraordinary and intoxicating to have experienced another's spirit brightness in ordinary Day consciousness; it's like seeing the Night stars in the full light of Day; it's to know whence we've come and whither we go; it's to know one's own spirit potency as well as that of the beloved. It's to be received as a gift, cherished, always remembered, but not grasped. Grasping was Tristan's problem; it was his own uncognized shadow doing it, and that's the tragedy of this opera. I wonder if Wagner saw it that way.