Wagner in Nietzsche's Life and Works
Richard Wagner figured into Nietzsche's life in profound ways. Nietzsche grew up without his own father and, very largely, without any significant male influence. While his mentor in philology, Ritschl, seems to have filled this void somewhat and while Schopenhauer, who had already died by the time Nietzsche found his work, seems to have been admired on somewhat similar grounds, Wagner was the ideal candidate for a "father figure." Wagner was the exact age that Nietzsche's father would have been had he not died when Nietzsche was four years old.
The Birth of Tragedy is full to overflowing with Wagner, something that Nietzsche came to regret later. Even the "untimely" essay, Wagner in Bayreuth, continues (mostly) the uncritical admiration of Wagner's creative projects. Nevertheless, the two lives went in quite different directions through the mid-to-late 1870s. Nietzsche suffered greatly with the loss but, at the same time, developed increasingly strong critical reasons for his position on Wagner. We can see some of this by "reading between the lines" in his works from 1876 through 1884, but Nietzsche did not mention Wagner by name in any critical writing while Wagner remained alive. Wagner's death in 1883 cleared the path. The Case of Wagner and Nietzsche contra Wagner were the result.
It is interesting to observe that no philosopher, that I know of, at least, has ever implied that belief in his/her particular metaphysical theory would actually change the form of experience. Or perhaps it would be better to say "whatever we actually experience." Going out and kicking a rock does not deny the Idealism of George Berkeley just because it actually hurts one's foot. The problem does not lie in what we experience but rather in what we attempt to say about experience. Language is the problem.
Unfortunately, we tend to "live" within the world that we express. An easy way to explain this is to observe that we "think" in language and that what we call "consciousness" is thinking. Hence, our conscious life depends as much upon our language as it depends upon our sensations. Nietzsche's chief philosophical methodology is to question language. What actually stands behind a particular case of language use? Language makes things appear simple; that, indeed, is its role. Nietzsche suggests that everything is far more complex than we ever realize. We have to begin by tearing down simplistic structures; only then can we proceed by constructing structures of greater complexity.
One example of this is our general concept of "shared experience." It is, perhaps, the grounding assumption for the creation of language. When another individual in our experience utters a word, we identify a word-meaning coordinate with the assumption that a reference point exists in "our shared experience." The concept of "shared experience," then, is one of our most primitive assumptions and, clearly, it has motivated Western metaphysics on the grounds that the "real," in some sense, must be that of which we share our experiences. Nietzsche's primitive assumption of chaos, on the other hand, must be understood as a fundamental denial of human experience being shared. There is, consequently, neither basis nor motive for belief in the "real."
While all of this may sound philosophically outrageous, the ironic twist is that most of us have good empirical evidence to the effect that experience actually isn't shared! That is, if we push language to enough detail and carry our relationships far enough along, we begin to discover contradictory experiences that can only mean that other people experience situations quite differently. As Nietzsche remarks in BGE, #24, "In what strange simplification and falsification man lives!" What we "know," that is, what we can express and depend upon, is necessary for self-preservation. No matter it is erroneous (in the sense of having no real basis). The whole problem, for Nietzsche, lies within the fact that we so easily fall into the trance of this simplicity and forget the complexity. But why not just enjoy this simplistic fantasy? Unfortunately, if Nietzsche is right, simplistic systems usually end up being life-denying; they have a way of collapsing into themselves. If, on the other hand, the will to power accepts life-positing (Yes-saying) as its fundamental value and if the path to this is sufficiently cleared by tearing down the residues of old values, acknowledging the fundamental complexity and uncertainty of human experience, then an age of free spirited thinkers can emerge.