pro and contra wagner 249Nietzsche himself offers ways of coming to terms with his contradic-
tions, and these will prove to be the basis of his best responses to music.
Moreover, these ways also depend on his opposition to representation-
alism. The worst version of this opposition, however, is his metaphysical
claim that truth and power are essentially equivalent, which relies on
the idea that, for ‘the real philosophers’, ‘Their “cognition” iscreation,
their creation is a legislation, their will to truth is –Will to power’ (ibid.:
2 , 677 ). Truth is here based in much too cavalier a manner on the
‘lordly right to give names’ (ibid.: 773 ), as the means of controlling and
manipulating the world. Nietzsche is, though, sometimes more careful
with regard to the idea of truth as what is created by greater quanta of
power gaining ascendancy over lesser quanta. He asks, for example, ‘By
whatdoes truth prove itself? With the feeling of increased power – with
usefulness – with indispensability –in short with advantages(namely pre-
suppositions of how the truthshouldbe constituted to be acknowledged
by us). But that is aprejudice:asign that it is not a case oftruthat all’
(ibid.: 3 , 813 ). Without such a separation of truth from its ground
any claim to explain truth in terms of something else will be self-
refuting. If power is the basis of truth it is also the basis of the claim
that power is the basis of truth, and we have no grounds for accept-
ing or making the claim. Claims made for strategic reasons can be
true, but they are not true because of the strategic reasons for making
them.
The important aspect of Nietzsche’s view lies rather in its attention
to the performative aspects of communicative action. In the defensible
version of what he says, utterances matter because of how they bring
things to light and affect the ways that people relate to their world,
and this connects language to music. His responses to phenomena like
Wagner therefore need not be understood in representational terms,
as ‘sentences held true’ of Wagner. They can be strategic counters to
one-sided assessments which threaten to rigidify how such phenomena
are responded to, or they can be ways of affecting how one hears the
music. Thereisa dominant later Nietzschean assessment of Wagner –
namely that he is a dramatist, rather than a musician, who loads music
with baggage that it is better off without, in a manner which adds to
the illusions created by metaphysics – but this is probably the least
interesting of his responses to Wagner. Much more interesting is how
Nietzsche’s own texts on Wagner set up contrasts and echoes between
the positions advanced which are more productive than any particu-
lar position itself. Nietzsche becomes in this respect something like a