Toward the end of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, Tristan tears a bandage from his body and thus allows the life to flow out of himself. For Wagner, the act represents Tristan’s free embrace of a sacrificial death, the decisive testimony of his love for Isolde and his desire for a union so absolute that it can be realized only in death. In Wagner’s depiction of erotic love as a kind of sickness unto death, Roger Scruton finds not just a masterpiece of music, but also a remedy for what ails the modern world—a “morbidly unheroic world,” dominated by “cost-benefit calculation,” which tempts us to regard our own existence as nothing more than a “cosmic mistake.”
The remedy for our temptation to banal self-interest and despair is, in the surprisingly Kantian language Scruton deploys, for us to “live as if a heroic love were possible, and as if we could renounce life for the sake of it.” The central problem with Scruton’s ambitious thesis has to do with the Kantian way in which he frames our redemption through art. The difficulty
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