Third Lecture

This is what Nietzsche felt at first when he became a man in the 1860s. He then turned to that which could lead him beyond this pain experienced in the innermost depths of his soul through external perception, beyond this worldly suffering. He searched everywhere for elements in world culture and human development that could help him rise above the great inner pain he experienced in his interactions with the world. And two things came to him: First, he immersed himself in the wonderful musical world and artistic worldview of Richard Wagner. He sought with all his soul to immerse himself in the way Richard Wagner, leaving the outer world behind, rose to a world to be created by man, which makes use of everything that humanity has ever created in its myths and so on in order to transcend immediate outer existence. And for Friedrich Nietzsche, this was connected with the second element, with Schopenhauer's philosophy, of which Richard Wagner himself had become a follower after his Feuerbach period. In Schopenhauer's philosophy, Nietzsche found the confirmation that the perception of the external world can really only inspire pessimism. For him, it confirmed that what the soul must experience cannot be found in the external world, not in the world of blind will, that man must therefore rise above what external observation can provide through something he himself has created. For Friedrich Nietzsche, it was a relief to hear from Schopenhauer, on the one hand, that the human world of ideas, which in accordance with his era could only provide an imperfect, painful picture of the world, was actually only an illusion, and that what is not illusion, the will, has basically no compelling force for man, so that man has a right, as it were, to rise above the blindness and folly of the will in the world through illusion.