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Hunger or Superfluity: Wagner and Romanticism

Optional full-text route · Station 31 of 35

Read: Book V, §§366–370, in full, added in 1887. Begin at §366 and stop before §371.
Allow: About 60–80 minutes, including the passages, this guide, rereading, and a short written response. This is an editorial estimate, not a measured reading time. The five sections total about 2,700 words in the free edition; §370 (nearly 1,000 words) and §366 are the longest. If you need two sittings, stop after §368.

Preferred translation: Walter Kaufmann. Free alternative (Thomas Common, The Joyful Wisdom): begin at §366 · §368 · §369 · §370.

Quotations on this page follow Common’s free translation, including his section titles. Kaufmann’s wording differs, and none of it is quoted here; this lesson has not been compared with Kaufmann’s text. Where a word drives the interpretation, this page notes the German, from the Projekt Gutenberg-DE text.

Before you read

Book V, added in 1887, turns to artists, their audiences, and Wagner. These five sections end with §370, “What is Romanticism?,” in which the author of 1887 looks back on his own earlier errors. The Wagner of these pages is Wagner as Nietzsche judged him after the break, not the living Schopenhauerian of §99 (station 11, 1882). Two of these sections were reworked in 1888 for Nietzsche Contra Wagner, which the site’s guide to that book follows; read them here as parts of this book.

The main question: What does the Wagner/Romanticism test explain, and what does it leave open?

Keep using the marks: P, H, V, and ? for Nietzsche’s own hedge only.

What to notice

1. Bodies. §366 asks of a book, “Can it walk?”; §368’s objections to Wagner are “physiological objections.” Watch how often the body is offered as evidence.
2. Speakers. §368 is titled “The Cynic Speaks,” and it ends with a Wagnerian’s reply. Keep both voices.
3. The test. §370 asks of every work, “Has hunger or superfluity become creative here?” Try it on §366 and §368.

Close reading

One way to group the sections

These groups are this guide’s, not Nietzsche’s.

• Books and specialists: §366.
• Art alone and before witnesses: §367.
• The cynic and Wagner: §368.
• Taste and creative power: §369.
• What is Romanticism?: §370.

Books and specialists

§366, “At the Sight of a Learned Book,” begins: “We do not belong to those who only get their thoughts from books.” Its first question about “a book, a man, or a piece of music is: Can it walk? or still better: Can it dance?” A learned book betrays its author’s posture: “every specialist has his hump,” and “every trade distorts.” Every perfection is paid for dearly, on an earth where everything is “perhaps purchased too dear” (German vielleicht; mark ?). Yet the section ends by blessing the specialists for their humps, against the “littérateur,” who “is really nothing, but ‘represents’ almost everything.” The footnote on a golden floor under every handicraft is Common’s, glossing a German proverb. Compare §348 (station 27): there scholarship betrayed a family trade; here it betrays a posture. §366, the learned book

§367 divides all art into “monologic art, or … art before witnesses.” Prayer belongs to the second, “because for a pious man there is no solitude”: “we, the godless, have been the first to devise this invention.” Monologic art “rests on forgetting, it is the music of forgetting.” Mark it P. Keep the distinction for §368. On this guide’s reading, the theatre there is art before witnesses in the mass.

The cynic and Wagner

§368 is titled “The Cynic Speaks” (German Der Cyniker redet): a persona again. “My objections to Wagner’s music are physiological objections.” The speaker’s foot rebels; it needs “time, dance and march.” What does the whole body want from music? “I believe it wants to have relief” (German Ich glaube; mark ?). Wagner, by contrast, “was essentially a man of the stage and an actor, the most enthusiastic mummer-worshipper that has ever existed.” In practice he made attitude the object: “drama and even music can never be anything else but means to that.” In the theatre, the cynic tells a Wagnerian, “we are only honest in the mass; as individuals we lie.” There “one is people, public, herd, woman, Pharisee, voting animal, democrat, neighbour.” State plainly that “woman” stands in this list of mass identities (German Weib). The section ends with the Wagnerian’s answer, in parentheses: “So the fact is that you are really not healthy enough for our music?” Mark it P and V. §368, the cynic speaks

Compare station 11. In 1882, §99 treated Wagner as the most celebrated living Schopenhauerian and faulted his hatred of the Jews as a failure of justice. In 1887, §368 moves the question to the body and the stage. The site’s Nietzsche Contra Wagner guide shows how §368 was reworked in 1888 as the chapter Where I Raise Objections.

Taste and creative power

§369, “Juxtapositions in us,” says that in artists taste and creative power “keep apart in an extraordinary manner”: a musician “could all his life create things which contradict all that his ear and heart” prize. A constant producer, “a ‘mother’ in the grand sense of the term,” perhaps produces works he is not fit to judge (German vielleicht; mark ?): “nobody knows a child worse than its parents.” He offers this as how things seem: “This seems to me almost the normal condition with fruitful artists” (German scheint mir; mark ?). The rule, the section says, applies even to “the entire Greek world of poetry and art, which was never ‘conscious’ of what it had done.” Mark it P. Station 32’s §376 returns to “the maternal species of men.”

What is Romanticism?

§370 is the longest section here and the station’s centre, and it begins with a retraction. “It will be remembered perhaps, at least among my friends, that at first I assailed the modern world with some gross errors and exaggerations, but at any rate with hope in my heart.” The opening is hedged (German Man erinnert sich vielleicht; mark ?). The speaker once read nineteenth-century pessimism as “the symptom of a higher power of thought,” and “German music as the expression of a Dionysian power in the German soul.” “It is obvious that I then misunderstood” what they really were, “namely, their Romanticism.” The section names no book. This guide’s inference is that the earlier views are those of The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and the Untimely Meditations, where Schopenhauer and Wagner were celebrated. Mark the retraction as the 1887 author judging his own earlier work. §370, a retraction

The test follows. Every art and philosophy serves suffering life, but “there are two kinds of sufferers.” Some suffer “from overflowing vitality,” and need Dionysian art and “a tragic view”; others suffer “from reduced vitality,” and seek “repose, quietness, calm seas,” or else “intoxication, spasm, bewilderment and madness.” Romanticism answers the second need. Schopenhauer and Wagner are named as romantics; Epicurus and the Christian are types of the same need. So: “I ask in every single case, ‘Has hunger or superfluity become creative here?’” Even this scheme is called “as it seems to me, rightly preferred” (German wie mich dünkt; mark ?). The desire for change and becoming may be overflowing power, or “the hatred of the ill-constituted.” The desire for permanence may be gratitude and love, an art “perhaps dithyrambic, as with Rubens” (German vielleicht; mark ?), mocking with Hafiz, kind-hearted with Goethe (“Apollonian art”), or the “tyrannical will” of a sufferer who brands his suffering on others, which is “romantic pessimism.” The section ends with its own name for the alternative: “Dionysian pessimism.” Mark it V and H. §370, hunger or superfluity

Notice the method it names: “that most difficult and insidious of all forms of retrospective inference,” “the inference from the work to its author, from the deed to its doer, from the ideal to him who needs it.” It is the method of §§348–349 (station 27), now applied to art. The site’s Nietzsche Contra Wagner guide shows how §370 was reworked in 1888 as the chapter We Antipodes.

A difficulty

Can the test be turned on its user?

§370 asks whether “hunger or superfluity” created a work, by inferring from the work to the need behind it, and it calls that inference “most difficult and insidious.” §368 already shows the inference running the other way: the cynic’s objections to Wagner are “physiological,” and the Wagnerian answers, “you are really not healthy enough for our music.” And §345 (station 26) said that an origin does not settle a worth.

Three readings are possible.

• A sound test. Hunger and superfluity are not origins in §345’s sense but qualities visible in the work itself. The test evaluates; it does not merely explain.
• A reversible test. Any verdict of hunger can be returned, as the Wagnerian returns it. The test decides nothing unless we already know who is healthy.
• A self-applied test. §370 turns the test on its own author first, confessing his earlier errors. Its authority comes from that self-criticism, not from a neutral standard.

Decide which the text best supports. Name one sentence from §370 and one from §368 or §345.

Check your understanding

Try answering before opening each suggested response.

Writing prompt

Write 200–250 words answering:

Apply §370’s question to §368 itself. Did hunger or superfluity make the cynic’s objections?

• Quote no more than two short phrases.
• Keep the cynic’s voice, the Wagnerian’s reply, and your own judgment distinct.
• Say whether your answer depends on knowing who is healthy.

A successful response states §370’s test accurately, applies it to a specific sentence, and says what the test cannot decide on its own.

Continue

Continue to station 32: Our New Infinite →

Read next: Book V, §§371–376. Its question: do limits of perspective entail that views are equal?

Previous station: station 30, §§360–365. Return to the route list in the book guide.

A reading guide from Reading Nietzsche · Revised September 27, 2026.

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