Abstract
Ludwig Wittgenstein inverted and transposed Richard Wagner's operatic pathos. He knew Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersinger of Nuremberg) by heart and used to whistle the melodies. Die Meistersinger is no comic historical opera, as proclaimed by Wagner, but treats the issues of genius, artistic criticism, and the growth of art — with a flavor of nationalism and politics. Wagner's opera provides many triangles within Peirce's interactive categories — patriotism, nationalism, anti-semitism; Mythology, Volk, Kultur; irrationality, factuality, rationality; emotionality, reality, objectivity; abduction, induction, deduction; extratext, intertext, metatext — and the three points of Firsts, Seconds, and Thirds may be related in and outside the configuration of Die Meistersinger. To analyze the affinities between the philosopher and his musical talents, Wittgenstein brought out the intersemiotic translation between a meaningful sentence and a musical theme, performed side by side in opera. Wittgenstein was Wagner inside out. Wittgenstein's philosophical language is an emblem of master-song reason, but did he resound the Mastersinger's operatic sound in his philosophical-narrative work, or only in his carnivalesque travesty of Wittgenstein's whistling — a wordless game transformed into a musical art?
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