ther the Atheismusstreit that surrounded Fichte, just as his connections with
Deussen and Overbeck relate him to the Tübingen historical theologians and
those who widened philosophical history to include non-Western traditions.
The rebels inhabit the same network neighborhood. If we trace the indi-
rect ties in Nietzsche’s network, we see that he is three links away from
Kierkegaard (his existentialist network cousin, so to speak), two links from
Bakunin’s anarchism, three links from Marx.^6 Nietzsche was by no means a
follower of the ideas found nearby in his network. Creativity is a transforma-
tion of the surrounding cultural capital, often by opposition. It is characteristic
that Nietzsche found his own direction when he broke with Wagner, and that
he developed a position in opposition to Marxian socialism and to its Hegelian
background as well, that is, to the key topics in the network a few links away.
Creativity consists in just such sensitivity to the direction of argumentative
slots open in the intellectual field.
Nietzsche wrote his first work, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of
Music (1872), by combining his classical scholarship with Wagner’s idealiza-
tion of music, thereby initiating critique of the received image of the Greeks
as rationalists. Just as Kierkegaard was sparked off by Schelling, Nietzsche
became creative after making contact with Wagner, just then at the height of
promoting his musical ideology. Eminent composers have networks of their
own, which have been almost completely independent of philosophers’ net-
works; Wagner illustrates a rare instance where the networks touch. He was
the most philosophical of composers. Wagner attempted to elevate opera into
music drama with deep layers of meaning—including, according to Shaw
([1898] 1967), revolutionary political ones, influenced by Wagner’s friendship
with Bakunin. He wrote to educate his listeners and polemicize against his
enemies. He explicitly adopted Schopenhauer, both in general terms and spe-
cifically as exalting music for its access to the will as thing-it-itself.^7 The
sociological key is that Wagner was the biggest independent star on the musical
marketplace; his enormous egotism went along with the liberation from pa-
tronage that came with the expansion of the commercially based middle-class
opera audience. Wagner continuously raised his ambitions, and the costs of his
grandiose productions (as well as of his personal lifestyle as artist-king), and
thus was in need of a patron as well as market supports. Like Goethe in the
literary sphere, Wagner found his niche by combining all the sources of material
support—a royal patron who was willing to treat him as a status equal,^8
together with a mass fund-raising arm that became the organizational core of
the Wagnerian movement. At the moment when the young philology professor
was attracted to the Wagner camp, he encountered a social transformation of
artistic publicity onto an unprecedented plane.
The Wagner discipleship soon weighed on Nietzsche’s creative indepen-
Writers’ Markets: The French Connection^ •^769