music) and to the unspoken secret she keeps for Wotan, the contents of his confession, by leaving Brünnhilde asleep on a mountaintop surrounded by a protective ring of fire only Siegfried can penetrate. Music, which is felt, not thought, obviously doesn’t - like religious belief - stake a false claim on truth which can be contradicted by facts, nor does it propose any truth, since music is non-conceptual. This is what Brünnhilde meant when she told Siegfried in Siegfried Act Three Scene Three that what Wotan thought (i.e., as expressed in his confession), she felt, and what she felt was her love for Siegfried. What Wotan confessed to Brünnhilde would remain forever unspoken in words, through her is only spoken aloud as music. But music’s persuasive power, if associated with a false yet flattering proposition or a consoling fiction, can make falsehood and fiction feel as if they’re true.
Feuerbach also proposed that since religious belief (once it’s understood to be only man’s self-deception) can ultimately be taken merely as poetry or fiction, it can free itself of its burden of staking a false claim to truthfulness, which makes it vulnerable to correction by science, by accepting its status as secular art, a fiction (or, as Wagner also put it, a game, or play). In this scenario religion, a belief system formerly predicated unconsciously on self-deception, can live on in the age of science as secular art if the artist doesn’t consciously insist on the truthfulness of his art but accepts its status as a fiction or a game. Significantly, Wagner described his special kind of music as “playing” with the world. So Wagner took what was merely implicit in a few remarks by Feuerbach, which seemed to contradict Feuerbach’s primary thesis that in the new post-religious world objective science and subjective art would inherit the world and join together to create an earthly secular utopia, and ran with it as the basis for his characterization of Siegfried and Brünnhilde. Wagner, in other words, exploited an apparent contradiction in Feuerbach’s materialist philosophy and dramatized in his Ring this conflict between man’s religio-moral-artistic-musical impulse (love), what man feels ought to be true, and his will-to-power expressed through objective scientific knowledge and power politics, i.e., what is true. All of the Ring’s sympathetic protagonists are clearly advocates of the religio-moral-artistic-musical impulse (even if only unconsciously), or love.
Wagner dramatized his disillusionment in his original Feuerbachian hope that social revolutionary action in behalf of justice and truth and sympathy, embodied in his Ring by Siegmund’s compassionate heroism, could redeem the world, in Wotan’s renunciation of his beloved Siegmund and reluctant participation in Siegmund’s death. And Wagner dramatized his renunciation of outward political action and also of religious faith (the gods) as means to redemption in favor of turning inwards towards the subjectivism of his own art as a substitute for lost faith in the promises of religion and politics, in Wotan’s confession to his daughter Brünnhilde, who identifies herself as Wotan’s Will, in The Valkyrie Act Two Scene Two. The mortal, secular artist-hero Siegfried, who ostensibly owes nothing to the gods (religious faith), falls heir to Wotan’s legacy of religious feeling of the sacred, the longing for transcendent value in a secular age (embodied by inspired music, represented by Wotan’s daughter Brünnhilde), when Wotan, archetypal exponent of man’s religious impulse, has had to renounce involvement in the world, leaving his daughter Brünnhilde to be woken by Siegfried. Scruton didn’t grasp that it’s Siegmund, not Siegfried, who’s Wagner’s metaphor for the Feuerbachian political or social revolutionary who fails, while Siegfried, in his relationship to his muse of unconscious artistic inspiration Brünnhilde (Wotan’s soul, his inwardness), is Wagner’s last refuge of rebuttal to what Scruton describes as Feuerbach’s shallow optimism. My allegorical reading of Siegmund as the social revolutionary Wagner outgrew, and
