Richard Wagner: The Art-Work of the Future (1849): Chapter 2
Derrick Everett
While man involuntarily moulds his life according to the notions he
has gathered from his arbitrary views of nature, and embodies their
intuitive expression in religion; these notions become for him in
science the subject of conscious, intentional review and scrutiny.
The path of science leads from error to knowledge, from representation
("Vorstellung") to reality, from religion to nature. In the beginning
of science, therefore, man stands toward life in the same relation as
he stood towards the phenomena of nature when he first began to
separate his life from hers. Science takes over the arbitrary concepts
of the human brain, in their totality; while, by her side, life follows
in its totality the instinctive evolution of necessity. Science thus
bears the burden of the sins of life and expiates them by her own
self-abrogation; she ends in her direct antithesis, in the knowledge of
nature, in the recognition of the unconscious, instinctive, and
therefore real, inevitable, and physical.
Therefore the character of science is finite, while that of life is
endless; just as error is of time, but truth is eternal. But that alone
is true and living which is sentient, and hearkens to the terms of
physicality (Sinnlichkeit). Error's crowning folly is the arrogance of
science in renouncing and condemning the world of sense (Sinnlichkeit);
whereas the highest victory of science is her self-accomplished
crushing of this arrogance, in the acknowledgment of the teaching of
the senses.
The end of science is the justifying of the unconscious, the giving of
self-consciousness to life, the re-instatement of the senses in their
perceptive rights, the sinking of caprice in the willing of necessity.
Science is therefore the vehicle of knowledge, her procedure mediate,
her goal an intermediation; but life is the great ultimate, a law unto
itself. As science melts away into the recognition of the ultimate and
self-determinate reality, of real life itself: so does this avowal win
its frankest, most direct expression in art, specifically in the work
of art.
It is true that the artist does not, at first, proceed directly; he
sets about his work in an arbitrary, selective, and mediating mood. But
while he plays the go-between and picks and chooses, the product of his
energy is not as yet the work of art; nay, his procedure is more like
that of the scientist, experimental, a process of trial and error.
Only when his choice has been made, when this choice was born from pure
necessity, when thus the artist has found himself again in the subject
of his choice -- as perfected man finds his true self in nature -- then
the art-work comes to life, as a real thing, an independent and
immediate entity.
Therefore the art-work itself, i.e. its immediate physical portrayal,
in the moment of its liveliest embodiment, is the only true redemption
of the artist; the removal of every trace of busy, purposed choice; the
confident determination of what was hitherto a mere imagining; the
enfranchisement of thought in sense; the satisfaction of the life-need
in life itself.
The art-work, thus conceived as an immediate vital act, is as such the
perfect reconciliation between science and life, the laurel-wreath
which the vanquished, redeemed by her defeat, reaches in joyous homage
to her acknowledged victor.
(Tr. W.A. Ellis, with some corrections and changes for readability)