Re: Gobineau, the "Bayreuth Circle" and Schemann

Derrick Everett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> I do not entirely understand Wagner's statement that Brahminism (the kind
> of Hinduism practised by the Brahmins, together with their philosophies,
> especially Vedanta) is or was a "racial" religion.  He might have been
> thinking that it was confined to one country, or he might have been
> thinking of the caste system (with the Brahmins at its top) and its
> possible origins [...]  It might be that Wagner's ideas about
> Brahminism were a little muddled, or that he was trying to develop and
> argument that involved stretching the facts.  It would not be the first
> time he did so.

Wagner seems to have relied on Gobineau for his "facts" about the
position of the Brahmins relative to the Dravidians.  But it's
interesting and revealing to note the different way that the two men
reacted to the same set of supposed facts.

In Gobineau's system Brahmins were Aryan and "White", while Dravidians
were "Yellow" and Asian. Gobineau commended the Indian caste system
for keeping the Aryan blood of the Brahmins separate from the Yellow
blood of the Dravidians. Wagner seems to have accepted Gobineau's
description of the relations between  Brahmins and Dravidians, but to
have taken an entirely opposite moral stance. Where Gobineau saw what
he thought was the preservation of the purity and power of a racially
superior people, and approved of this, Wagner saw exploitation and
condemned it.

I think that Wagner had sources other than Gobineau, about Brahminism,
the Indian caste system, the relations of Aryan and Dravidian, etc. So
I suspect that what Gobineau said reflected a standard 19th century
European view of India, consistent with Wagner's other reading about
Indian culture and religion, histories of India, early ethnographies,
travel books, memoirs and so on, must have painted a picture quite
similar to that outlined by Gobineau (who hadn't been to India as far
as I know).  So Gobineau's, and indeed Wagner's, view of Brahminism
and the privilege of Brahmins was probably quite standard.

 
> "Heroism and Christianity" [...] has to be read against
> the background of Wagner's earlier writings and in the context of his
> interaction with Gobineau, with whom he was attempting a reconciliation.

By "reconciliation" do you mean there had been a quarrel between the
two men, that Wagner was seeking to reconcile? Or just that Wagner was
seeking to reconcile his views with Gobineau's as far as possible?

> If anything is clear about it, however, it is, as you say, that Wagner
> meant to reject Gobineau's racism.  Although the essay takes as its
> starting point the hypothesis, "what if Gobineau is right?"
 
I've had a serious re-think about this question: whether the opening
pages of "Heroism and Christianity" endorse Gobineau's ideas about
degeneration through racial intermixing. I don't think it's as clear
as I once did.

Here's my reasoning, FWIW.  

At the beginning of "Heroism and Christianity" Wagner calls Gobineau
"one of the cleverest man of our day" and says his theories have the
"most terrible force of conviction" [from _Religion and Art_, vol 6 of
the Ellis translation of Wagner's prose, page 275].

That looks like an endorsement of Gobineau's views, but in fact stops
just short of that. You can call someone clever without meaning they
are correct, and you can call their arguments terribly convincing,
without necessarily meaning that you're convinced by them.

It's not so unusual to use that kind of careful phrasing about a
friend's book - or their cooking. If a friend of mine wrote (say) a
well-researched and well-argued book arguing that an asteroid is
likely to slam into the earth in the next 300 years, destroying all
life, or at least all mammalian life, I'd be too cheerful to believe
it, and I'd come up with some tech reasons to back me up. But I could
still say, with complete honesty, that my friend was extremely clever
and his arguments had a terrible force of conviction. (And I wouldn't
mention that I personally remained unconvinced.)  Wagner's words are
consistent with that polite approach.

Moreover, it appears that Wagner had Gobineau in mind as his audience
as he wrote "Heroism and Christianity". If we consider the essay as
addressed personally to Gobineau, we can see why Wagner chose his
words carefully.

First, he did not want to attack his friend in public. Gobineau's
friendship was important to him, as a companion of charm and real
intelligence, who partly met the gap left in Wagner's life by the
departure of Nietzsche. Gobineau's other best friend was none other
than that urbane observer of American civil life, Alexis de
Tocqueville. Gobineau was by all accounts a man of considerable
personal charm, who was able to maintain friendships with people who
did not share his views, but who valued his companionship for its own
sake.

Second, the essay appears to be an attempt to change Gobineau's mind,
to convince him to look past his race-based pessimism. So the essay
started by taking Gobineau's ideas as if they were true, and then
attempted to argue Gobineau from his starting point to a new and
non-racial vision of the future of humanity. This is why Wagner
outlined Gobineau's idea, just stopping short of endorsement, but
saying nothing to indicate his disagreement, wither.

This interpretation is supported by internal evidence and by the
_Diary_ entry for Wednesday 21 August, 1881:
"The subject of race comes up again, and R. says he is writing his
article with Gob. in mind."

The words "writing his article with Gob. in mind" most likely meant
that Wagner felt he was addressing Gobineau in particular. Wagner
could have simply meant that the article would discuss Gobineau's
ideas, but why would Wagner bother to make such an inane comment if
that was all he meant? The article was about Gobineau's ideas from the
moment Wagner conceived it. So it seems more likely that the words
"with Gob. in mind" meant "with Gobineau in mind as reader".

(This argument doesn't stand or fall by how you choose to interpret
Wagner's remark. I'm suggesting what seems to be the most likely
reading.)

There is the further consideration that Wagner's immediately preceding
essay, "Know Thyself" presented a case against the very sort of "race
is destiny" ideas that Gobineau propounded, and that Wagner had made
various remarks repudiating such ideas.

Therefore, one can reasonably argue, Wagner did not personally endorse
the racial ideas presented in the opening pages of "Heroism and
Christianity". He merely outlined what Gobineau thought.


Still... I'm usually on the Wagner defence team, but I don't think the
case outlined above is completely convincing. Here's a case for the
other side, that Wagner was in partial agreement with the Gobinist
ideas he set out.

First, I've read and re-read the "Heroism and Christianity" essay
closely, looking for signs of Wagner distancing himself from the
Gobinist ideas he presents in the beginning of the essay. And I've
found nothing of that kind. If there's a passage in which Wagner
winked at his audience and hinted, "I mean that this stuff is
convincing to some people, maybe, but not to me," I missed that hint. 
Wagner said Gobineau was one of the cleverest men around, and his
ideas had the terrible force of conviction. The most natural way to
read those words is as an endorsement. True, Wagner's words stop one
step short of an endorsement, but it's a very short and subtle step.

Second, as well as recording Wagner's repudiation of Gobineau view of
race as destiny in the _Diaries_, Cosima also noted Wagner endorsing,
not Gobineau's ideas in general, but the idea that humanity had put
its future at risk through racial intermixing. References for this
include Sunday 29 May 1881, Wednesday 22 March 1882 and Monday 3 April
1882. A further possible endorsement of this idea occurred on Thursday
1 September 1881.

In fact it seems that Wagner could both reject Gobineau's idea that
race is "what really matters", and at the same time accept Gobineau's
idea that racial intermixing had doomed humanity, though the two
positions are logically incompatible. An example is Monday 14 February
1881:

"Our conversation starts with the article (R.'s latest) and touches on
all subjects, including Gobineau's theory, to which R. links the
remark that it is by no means impossible that humanity should cease to
exist, but if one looks at things without regard to time and space,
one knows that what really matters is something different from racial
strength - see the Gospels."

[By the way the next sentence of that entry is an antisemitic remark.
I've omitted it not to bowdlerise Wagner's antisemitism but because it
isn't relevant to the current issue.]


Overall, my conclusions are as follows. Wagner rejected Gobineau's
theories on race. However Wagner did mostly accept the theory that
racial intermixing had harmed humanity, though he also sometimes
rejected this too. There seem to be two reasons for Wagner's
ambivalent acceptance of this one idea. First, it was a tragic view of
life, and Wagner was emotionally drawn to tragic life-views. Second,
to an interested layman, the idea looked like it was the latest and
best science.

However, the idea was not a source of comfort to Wagner. On the
contrary it troubled him and he wrestled with it in various ways. He
both argued against it, as in "Know Thyself", and then he argued
_around_ it, as in "Heroism and Christianity". Oddly, he probably
believed both positions, that it was true and that it was not true. It
is one of the requirements of a good dramatist that they should be
able to hold and write conflicting and contradictory points of view.
And Wagner was more of a dramatist than a philosopher.


So the opening pages of "Heroism and Christianity" are a complex mix
of ideas from Gobinea that Wagner accepted, ideas from Gobineau that
he rejected, plus ideas imported from Schopenhauer, plus an admixture
of pure Wagner.

Anyone who pulls out one passage from the opening exposition in
"Heroism and Christianity" and says without heavy qualification that
the selected words represent Wagner's own opinion is at best mistaken
and at worst knowingly misleading.

But neither can it simply be ruled that nothing in that exposition
represented Wagner's views.

My rather boring conclusion is that people will have to argue about
specific phrases on a case-by-case basis: "This sentence is probably
only an explication of what Gobineau said. However this other sentence
seems to reflect Wagner's view as well." And so on. You can't
generalise that all of those pages represented Wagner's own views, or
that nothing in those pages did.


A three sentence summary? 

The opening pages of "Heroism and Christianity" consist of Wagner
outlining Gobineau's views: sometimes Wagner seems to endorse what
Gobineau said, and sometimes he doesn't. Unfortunately it is hard to
distinguish which is which. Wagner rejected most of Gobineau's ideas
but did accept, with ambivalence and inconsistency, the idea that
racial intermixing had harmed humanity.

He proposed a solution that was not just non-racist but was overtly
anti-racist: that all races could rise to equality and even lose their
individual racial characteristics through mixing, if this was done in
a way that is informed by the Christian moral virtues of compassion,
world-renunciation, sacrifice and service, and by communal rituals
like communion and, Wagner suggested, certain kinds of art events.
 

A final point about "Heroism and Christianity" is that Wagner
suggested that there would be fewer wars if people moved from the cold
climates in which he thought the bulk of humanity lived to warmer and
more pleasant climates. Of course, various indigenous peoples who
already lived in those warmer climes might have something to say about
that. So in 1882 Wagner failed to have a post-colonialist worldview.
This is regrettable but not surprising in a 19th century European. I
mention it for completeness' sake.


That's nearly finished the discussion of Gobineau's ideas in relation
to Wagner. Wagner's reaction to some of Gobineau's less substantial
issues will be discussed next, followed by a summary of Wagner's
response to Gobineau's ideas. That will be the end of Part 2 of this
survey. Part 3 will concern ideas on race that originated with Wagner,
and how they relate to Gobineau's ideas. Then I'll move to a general
summing up.

Cheers!   


Laon