Know Thyself

By Richard Wagner

1881

Translated by William Ashton Ellis

The Wagner Library

Edition 1.1
 Table of Contents
About this Title
"Know Thyself" - A Continuation of "Religion and Art."
Notes
 About this Title
Source

Know Thyself
By Richard Wagner
Translated by William Ashton Ellis

Religion and Art

Richard Wagner's Prose Works
Volume 6
Pages 264-274
Published in 1897

Original Title Information

Erkenne dich selbst

Published in 1881
Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen : Volume X
Pages 263-274

Reading Information

This title contains 3817 words.

Estimated reading time between 11 and 19 minutes.

Page numbers are indicated using square brackets, like [62], while
footnotes are indicated using parenthesis, like (1).
[264]

"Know Thyself"
A Continuation of "Religion and Art."
(1)

GREAT KANT taught us to postpone the wish for knowledge of the

world to criticism of man's power of knowledge; if we thus arrived at
the most complete uncertainty about the reality of the world,
Schopenhauer next taught us to draw the most infallible conclusions as
to the world's In-itself from a farther-reaching criticism, no longer of
our mental faculties, but of that Will in us which goes before all
knowledge. "Know thyself, and thou hast read the world"—the Pythia
said; "look round thee, all of this art thou"—the Brahmin.

How totally these lessons of ancestral wisdom had been lost to us,
we may judge by their having to be re-discovered after tens of
centuries by Schopenhauer treading in the shining wake of Kant. For if
we view the present state of all our Sciences and Statecraft, we find
them void of any true religious core, and simply wed to a barbaric
babbling, to which two thousand years of practice have given a well-
nigh venerable aspect in the people's purblind eye.

Who ever finds that "Know thyself" applied to any rating of the
world? Not one Historic action do we know, that betrays this doctrine's
influence on the transactors. We strike away at what we know not, and
should we haply hit ourselves, we think another struck us. Who has
not witnessed this once more in the present stir against the Jews, let
us say, when looked at in light of that doctrine? What has given the
Jews their now so dreaded power [265] among and over us, not one
man seems to stop and ponder; or if he goes into the question, he
seeks no farther than the facts and phases of the last ten years, or at
most a few years earlier: nowhere can we trace as yet an inclination to
a deeper search into ourselves, in this case to a thorough criticism of
the will and spirit of all that conglomerate of nature and civilisation
which we, for instance, call the "German."

Yet the movement here alluded to perhaps is more adapted than

any other to set us marvelling at ourselves: in it we seem to see the
late rewakening of an instinct that appeared extinct. A man who some
thirty years ago drew notice to the Jews' inaptitude for taking a
productive share in our Art, and felt impelled to renew that attempt
just eighteen years thereafter, (2) was met by the utmost indignation
of Jews alike and Germans; it became quite dangerous to breathe the
word "Jew" with a doubtful accent. But what once roused the bitterest
ill-will when spoken on the field of ethical Æsthetics, we suddenly hear
cried in vulgar brutal tones upon the field of civic intercourse and party
politics. The fact that lies between these two expressions, is the
bestowal of full right upon the Jews to regard themselves in all
conceivable respects as Germans (3) —much as a blanket authorised
the blacks in Mexico to hold themselves for whites. Whoever weighs
this matter well, even if its real absurdity escapes him, must at least
be highly astonished at the levity—nay, the frivolity of our State-
authorities, who could decree so vast, so incomputable a
transformation of our national system without the smallest sense of
what they were doing.

The formula ran as "Equalisation of the rights of all German

citizens, without regard to difference of 'Confession.'"

How was it possible for there to be Germans, at any time, who

could conceive of all that keeps the Jewish stem so wide apart from us
under the idea of a religious [266] "confession," seeing it was first and
solely in German history that divisions arose in the Christian Church
which led to the State-acknowledgment of various confessions?
However, if only we will turn that "Know thyself" with ruthless energy
upon ourselves, this curiously perverted formula may afford us one of
the principal clues to explanation of the seemingly inexplicable. The
first thing then to strike us, will be the recent experience that our
clerics feel lamed at once in their agitation against the Jews when
Judaism itself is seized by the root, and the patriarchs for instance,
great Abraham in particular, are submitted to a criticism involving the
actual text of the Mosaic books. (4) At once the groundwork of the
Christian Church, its "positive" religion, seems to reel beneath their
feet; a "Mosaic Confession" is recognised; and its adherents are
accorded the right to take their place beside us, to examine the
credentials of a second revelation through Jesus Christ—whom even in
the opinion of the late English Prime Minister they regard as one of
their countless minor prophets, of whom we have made by far too
much ado. To tell the truth, it will fall hard to prove by the aspect of
the Christian world, and the character of the Culture shed upon it by a
Church so soon decayed, the superiority of the revelation through
Jesus Christ to that through Abraham and Moses: in spite of its
dispersion, the Jewish stock has remained one whole with the Mosaic
laws to this very day, whereas our culture and civilisation stand in the
most crying contradiction to Christ's teaching. To the Jew who works
the sum out, the outcome of this culture is simply the necessity of
waging wars, together with the still greater one, of having money for
them. Accordingly he sees our State society divided into a military and
a civil class: as it is a couple of thousand years since he did anything
in the military line, he devotes his knowledge and experience with
great gusto to the civil class, for he observes that this must find [267]
the money for the military, and in that affair his talents have been
trained to highest virtuosity.

Now the astounding success of our resident Jews in the gaining

and amassing of huge stores of money has always filled our Military
State authorities with nothing but respect and joyful admiration: so
that the present campaign against the Jews seems to point to a wish
to draw the attention of those authorities to the question, Where do
the Jews get it from? The bottom of the whole dispute, as it appears to
us, is Property, Ownership, which we suddenly perceive to be in
jeopardy, notwithstanding that each outlay of the State has the look of
aiming more at the insurance of possession than anything else.

If the application of "Know thyself" to our Church's religious

descent would turn out poorly for our case against the Jews, the result
will be no less unfavourable if we investigate the nature of the only
thing our State systems understand by possession, before
endeavouring to secure it from the Jews' encroachments.

"Property" has acquired an almost greater sacredness in our social

conscience than religion: for offence against the latter there is
lenience, for damage to the former no forgiveness. Since Property is
deemed the base of all stability, the more's the pity that not all are
owners, that in fact the greater proportion of Society comes
disinherited into the world. Society is manifestly thus reduced by its
own principle to such a perilous inquietude, that it is compelled to
reckon all its laws for an impossible adjustment of this conflict; and
protection of property—for which in its widest international sense the
weaponed host is specially maintained—can truly mean no else than a
defence of the possessors against the non-possessors. Many as are the
earnest and sagacious brains that have applied themselves to this
problem, its solution, such as that at last suggested of an equal
division of all possessions, has not as yet been found amenable; and it
seems as if the State's disposal of the apparently so simple idea [268]
of Property had driven a beam into the body of mankind that dooms it
to a lingering death of agony.

As the historic origin and evolution of our States seems worth a

close examination in any verdict on their character, since thence alone
do rights and conditions of right appear deducible, so the inequality of
Possession, nay, its total absence in one great section of the State's
constituents as result of the latest conquest of a country—e.g. of
England by the Normans, or of Ireland in turn by the English—should
be matter for explanation and, if need be, for vindication also. Far from
embarking on inquiries of such difficulty ourselves, we have merely to
point out the patent metamorphosis of the original idea of Property by
the legal hallowing of usurpation, and to say that right by purchase
nowadays has taken the place of right by earning, between which two
came right by violence of seizure.
 Clever though be the many thoughts expressed by mouth or pen
about the invention of money and its enormous value as a civiliser,
against such praises should be set the curse to which it has always
been doomed in song and legend. If gold here figures as the demon
strangling manhood's innocence, our greatest poet shews at last the
goblin's game of paper money. The Nibelung's fateful ring become a
pocket-book, might well complete the eerie picture of the spectral
world-controller. By the advocates of our Progressive Civilisation this
rulership is indeed regarded as a spiritual, nay, a moral power; for
vanished Faith is now replaced by "Credit," that fiction of our mutual
honesty kept upright by the most elaborate safeguards against loss
and trickery. What comes to pass beneath the benedictions of this
Credit we now are witnessing, and seem inclined to lay all blame upon
the Jews. They certainly are virtuosi in an art which we but bungle:
only, the coinage of money out of nil was invented by our Civilisation
itself; or if the Jews are blamable for that, it is because our entire
civilisation is a barbaro-judaic medley, in nowise a Christian creation.
[269] A little self-knowledge on this point, methinks, would not come
amiss to the representatives of the Church themselves, particularly
when combating the seed of Abraham, in whose name they still go on
to claim fulfilment of certain promises of his Jehova. A Christianity
which has accommodated itself to the brute violence of every ruling
power in the world might find itself when turning from the raging to
the reckoning beast of prey, outmatched in cleverness and cunning by
its foe; wherefore there is little present hope of special welfare from
the support of either our Church or our State authorities.

However, an inner motive plainly lies at bottom of the present

movement, little as it may be evinced by the behaviour of its leaders
so far. We expressed our belief, above, that this motive was the re-
awakening of an instinct lost to the German nation. People speak of an
antagonism of races. In this sense we should have fresh cause for self-
inspection, as it would necessitate our defining the relation of certain
given breeds of man to one another. Here it would probably have to be
recognised at the outset that, in talking of a German "race," it would
be very difficult, nay, wellnigh impossible to compare it with a race so
strongly pronounced, and still unaltered, as the Jewish. When learned
men debate the relative value of mixed or pure-bred races, for the
evolution of mankind, the decision must surely hinge on what we
mean by man's developmental progress. The so-called Romanic
nations, and the English too, are praised as hybrid stocks that
obviously surpass in Culture-progress the peoples of a haply pure
Germanic breed. On the other hand, if one declines to be blinded by
the glamour of this culture and civilisation, and seeks the welfare of
mankind in its bringing-to-birth of great characters, one finds that
these far rather come to light—nay, almost solely—in pure-bred races;
where it seems that the still unbroken nature-force of Race at first
makes up for every higher human virtue yet unformed, and only to be
won through life's sore trials, by that of pride. This peculiar pride of
race, that still gave us in the [270] Middle Ages such towering
characters as Princes, Kings and Kaisers, may be met even to-day in
the old nobility of German origin, although in unmistakable
degeneration; and that degeneration we should have to take seriously
into account if we wished to explain the fall of the German Folk, now
exposed defenceless to the inroads of the Jews. For this, the proper
course might be to first recall the unexampled devastation which
Germany suffered through the Thirty Years War: after by far the
greatest part of the male population had been rooted out of town and
country, while the female had been violated to no less a degree by
Walloons, Croats, Spaniards, French and Swedes, the relatively little-
injured nobles may scarcely have felt themselves one racial body with
the remnant of this decimated people. That feeling of community we
still find markedly expressed in many a preceding epoch; and then it
was the true patrician families, that contrived to re-illume the proper
spirit after serious diminution of the nation's substance. This we may
see in the revival of Germanic races by new offshoots from the parent
stock, when tribal migration had robbed the home-stayers of their first
heroic clans; we see it in the resuscitation of the German language by
patrician poets of the Hohenstaufen era, after monkish Latin had
become the only medium of gentility, whereas the spirit of their poetry
thrust down to the peasant's hut and shaped one wholly equal speech
for Folk alike and Noble; and once again we see it in the stand against
the outrage foisted on the Germans by the Church of Rome, when the
example of its lords and princes led the Folk to stout defence. 'Twas
otherwise after the Thirty Years War: the nobles found no nation left,
to which to feel their kinship; the great monarchic powers shifted from
the stricter seat of Germany towards the Slavic east: degenerate
Slays, decadent Germans, form the soil of the eighteenth century's
history, a soil to which the Jew might confidently migrate from a
Poland and a Hungary sucked dry, since even prince and noble durst
no longer be ashamed of doing business with him; for—Pride [271]
itself had just been pledged already, exchanged for vanity and greed.

Though in recent days we see these last two traits of character

adopted by the Folk itself—our ancient relatives the Swiss can think of
us no otherwise!—and though the title "German" has thus been almost
coined anew, yet this new-birth still lacks too much, to constitute a
real rebirth of racial feeling, a thing that always finds its first
expression in a settled instinct. Our nation, one may say, has not the
natural instinct for that which suits it, for what becomes it, helps and
furthers it; estranged from itself, it dabbles in foreign manners. On
none other have great and original spirits been bestowed, as on it,
without its having known in time to treasure them: yet if the silliest
news-writer or political cheap-jack but brazens out his lying phrases, it
chooses him to represent its weightiest interests; whilst if the Jew
comes tinkling with his bell of paper, it throws its savings at his feet,
and makes him in one night a millionaire.

The Jew, on the contrary, is the most astounding instance of racial

congruence ever offered by world-history. Without a fatherland, a
mother-tongue midst every people's land and tongue he finds himself
again, in virtue of the unfailing instinct of his absolute and indelible
idiosyncrasy: even commixture of blood does not hurt him; let Jew or
Jewess intermarry with the most distinct of races, a Jew will always
come to birth. Not into the remotest contact is he brought with the
religion of any of the civilised (gesittete) nations; for in truth he has no
religion at all—merely the belief in certain promises of his god which in
nowise extend to a life beyond this temporal life of his, as in every true
religion, but simply to this present life on earth, whereon his race is
certainly ensured dominion over all that lives and lives not. Thus the
Jew has need to neither think nor chatter, not even to calculate, for
the hardest calculation lies all cut and dried for him in an instinct shut
against all ideality. A wonderful, unparalleled phenomenon: the plastic
dæmon of man's [272] downfall in triumphant surety; and German
citizen of State, to boot, with a Mosaic confession; the darling of
Liberal princes, and warrant of our national unity!—

Despite the enormous disadvantage at which the German race (if

so we still may call it) appears to stand against the Jewish, we yet
have ventured to suggest the re-awakening of a German instinct as
one factor in the present agitation. As, however, we have been obliged
to discard all idea of its being a purely racial instinct, we perhaps
might search for something higher: a bent that, merely vaguely
(wahnvoll) felt by the Folk of to-day, would at first appear indeed as
instinct, though really of far nobler origin and loftier aim, and which
might haply be defined as the spirit of the purely-Human.

From the Cosmopolitan proper, if such a man exists in fact, we

probably should have little to expect for the solution of our problem.
'Tis no small thing, to run through the history of the world and yet
preserve love for the human species. Here nothing but a rooted feeling
of kinship with the immediate nation whence we sprang, can serve to
re-knit the strand dissevered by a survey of the whole: here operates
the thing we feel ourselves to be; we pity, and strive our best to hope,
as for the future of our nearer family. Fatherland, mother-tongue: woe
to the man bereft of these! But what unmeasured happiness, to
recognise in one's mother-tongue the speech of one's ure-fathers!
Through such a tongue our feelings and beholdings stretch right back
to early Man himself; no fence and pale there hedge our nobles in, and
far beyond the fatherland at last assigned us, beyond the landmarks of
historic knowledge and all our outer trappings thence derived, we feel
ourselves one kin with pristine Man's creative beauty. Such is our
German language, the only heritage retained intact from our
forefathers. Do we feel our breath fast quitting us, beneath the
pressure of an alien civilisation; do we fall into uncertainty about
ourselves: we have only to dig to the roots in the true father-soil of
our language, to reap at once a reassuring [273] answer on ourselves,
nay, on the truly Human. And this possibility, of always drawing from
the pristine fount of our own nature, that makes us feel ourselves no
more a race, no mere variety of man, but one of Manhood's primal
branches,—'tis this that ever has bestowed on us great men and
spiritual heroes, as to whom we have no need to trouble whether
fashioners of foreign fatherless civilisations are able to understand and
prize them; whilst we again, inspired by the deeds and gifts of our
forefathers, and gazing with unclouded eye, are able to rightly
estimate those foreigners, and value them according to the spirit of
pure Humanity indwelling in their work. For the sterling German
instinct asks and seeks for nothing but this Purely-Human, and
through that search alone can it be helpful—not merely to itself, but to
all that shews the pure and genuine under never so great disguise.

Whom could it escape, that, suffering from the inability to truly

manifest itself in either national or church-religious life, this noble
instinct could but lead a feeble, indistinct, misunderstandable and
scamped existence hitherto? In not one of those parties which aspire
to guide the movements of our political or our intellectual national life,
especially at the present day, does it seem to us, alas! to find a voice;
even the names they take proclaim them not of German origin, still
less inspired by German instinct. What "Conservatives," "Liberals" and
"Conservative-liberals," and finally "Democrats," "Socialists," or even
"Social-democrats" etc., have lately uttered on the Jewish Question,
must seem to us a trifle foolish; for none of these parties would think
of testing that "Know thyself" upon themselves, not even the most
indefinite and therefore the only one that styles itself in German, the
"Progress"-party. There we see nothing but a clash of interests, whose
object is common to all the disputants, common and ignoble: plainly
the side most strongly organised, i.e. the most unscrupulous, will bear
away the prize. With all our comprehensive State- and National-
Economy, it would seem that we are victims to a dream [274] now
flattering, now terrifying, and finally asphyxiating: all are panting to
awake therefrom; but it is the dream's peculiarity that, so long as it
enmeshes us, we take it for real life, and fight against our wakening as
though we fought with death. At last one crowning horror gives the
tortured wretch the needful strength: he wakes, and what he held
most real was but a figment of the dæmon of distraught mankind.

We who belong to none of all those parties, but seek our welfare
solely in man's wakening to his simple hallowed dignity; we who are
excluded from these parties as useless persons, and yet are
sympathetically troubled for them,—we can only stand and watch the
spasms of the dreamer, since no cry of ours can pierce to him. So let
us save and tend and brace our best of forces, to bear a noble cordial
to the sleeper when he wakes, as of himself he must at last. But only
when the fiend, who keeps those ravers in the mania of their party-
strife, no more can find a where or when to lurk among us, will there
also be no longer—any Jews.

And the very stimulus of the present movement—conceivable

among ourselves alone—might bring this great solution within reach of
us Germans, rather than of any other nation, if only we would boldly
take that "Know thyself" and apply it to the inmost quick of our
existence. That we have naught to fear from ultimate knowledge, if
but we conquer all false shame and quarry deep enough, we hope the
anxious may have culled from the above.
 Notes
1

"Erkenne dich selbst" appeared in the Bayreuther Blätter for

February-March (double no.) 1881.—Tr.

See Judaism in Music , Vol. III. of the present series.—Tr.

Decreed by the Reichstag in 1871.—Tr.

It was not very long before this was written, that biblical critics
began to turn their attention from the New to the Old Testament.—Tr.

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