In Scruton’s description of “… another way of seeing the world than the way of science,” and in his celebration of “The moment of free commitment, … when I am fully myself in an act of self-giving … “ as “… the moment that justifies my life … ,” he’s justifiably conflating (though Scruton only intends here to celebrate Siegmund’s and Brünnhilde’s loving acts of self-sacrifice, not Siegfried) the individual act of compassionate self-sacrifice of a Siegmund or Brünnhilde with Siegfried the artist-hero’s inspiration by his muse Brünnhilde, through her love. This is because Wagner posits both Siegmund’s moral heroism and Siegfried’s unconscious artistic inspiration by Brünnhilde as two distinct means to redemption from the prosaic and bleak outlook on man championed by modern science in a post-religious world. These are both “… another way of seeing the world than the way of science.” But that doesn’t mean necessarily that they can’t be understood scientifically. Scruton’s resistance to this reductive, materialist viewpoint, as an insult to the dignity of Man, not only in his The Ring of Truth but in many of his other writings on a variety of topics (I regard it as the key to Scruton’s life’s work in many respects), is perhaps at least a partial reason for his resistance to my allegorical reading of the Ring, in which our ideal identity, the theoretically transcendent being of man, is at stake, and placed very much in doubt.
Scruton and I agree that Wagner’s operas and music-dramas, particularly his Ring, represent Wagner’s attempt to save the essence of religion, its feeling of sanctity, sans belief, in a secular, scientific age, in which man’s older religious view of himself as having a transcendent and free soul competes with the modern scientific view of man as one among many objects in Nature, determined by natural law. Where we differ is that in my allegorical interpretation this is the basis of the Ring’s plot. This is true not only in Wagner’s positing the redemptive, compassionate love of Siegmund and Sieglinde, or Brünnhilde, as the antidote to Feuerbach’s science-based materialist philosophy, but equally in Siegfried the artist-hero’s falling heir to Wotan’s (religious man’s) legacy of longing for transcendent value, Wotan’s feeling, when religion as a mode of thought, a faith, can no longer be sustained in the face of the rise of scientific, secular thought. Wagner dramatizes this allegorically in Wotan’s leaving Siegfried heir to his daughter Brünnhilde, who feels what Wotan thinks, and represents Wagner’s music generally, and his musical motifs specifically. Wotan’s fearful confession to Brünnhilde (in which he acknowledged that the gods - i.e., religion - are predestined to destruction by Alberich’s Ring Curse) has, in other words, been transfigured and redeemed by being sublimated into Wagner’s musical motifs. The Woodbird’s songs, particularly those derived from the Rhinedaughter Woglinde’s Lullaby H4 = #4, namely H138ab = #129ab, are Wagner’s symbol for the Ring’s musical motifs.
In my allegorical reading scientific, secular thought is represented both by Alberich’s Ring Curse (embodied ultimately in Alberich’s son Hagen, whose actions will fulfill the Ring Curse, the twilight of the gods), and by Alberich’s and Wotan’s [Light-Alberich's] gradual accumulation of a hoard of objective knowledge of the earth (Erda), which represents Alberich's Ring Curse being manifested gradually over historical time, our inevitable acquisition of objective consciousness of our world and ourselves which will irrevocably correct and undermine the self-deception of religious belief and all the values which stem from it. It’s this inexorable rise to consciousness of what was unconscious, the essence of Alberich’s Ring Curse, which destroys Wotan, the gods, and all of Wotan’s proxies, including his children Siegmund and Sieglinde, his daughter Brünnhilde and the artist-hero she inspires, Siegfried, which is the soul of the Ring tragedy. Because he doesn’t acknowledge that this is the self-referential essence of the Ring’s plot, Scruton seems blind to, or at least neglects, a large proportion of the Ring’s musico-dramatic substance, which is the basis
