consciousness of who he is and of all that Wotan loathed in his own nature, minus consciousness also of Wotan’s fearful foresight of the god’s doom, knowledge which Brünnhilde holds for Siegfried and from whose potential wounds she protects him (at the front, from Wotan’s paralyzing foresight of the end). This not only explains Siegfried’s unconsciousness and fearlessness but also explains what Kitcher and Schacht and Scruton find so troubling about Siegfried not only in his treatment of Brünnhilde, but in his ruthless treatment of Mime, since Mime incarnates all that Wotan found so abhorrent in his own nature, and Siegfried is Wotan reborn. Siegfried’s contempt for Mime is therefore Wotan’s instinctive repulsion for his own corrupt nature.
Since Wagner informed King Ludwig II of Bavaria that Wotan is reborn in Siegfried in the same manner that the artist’s original intent is reborn in his work of art but remains hidden within it [693W - {11/6/64} Letter to King Ludwig II of Bavaria, SLRW, p. 626-627], and also stated that part of the wonder of his musical motifs of reminiscence and foreboding was that they were particularly suitable for a music-drama involving reincarnation because they would inform the audience of the past lives of his protagonists where the protagonists themselves remained unconscious of their past lives [640W - {5/16/56?} ML, p. 528-529], and since, finally, Wagner construed Brünnhilde as, among other things, a symbol for his musical motifs’ wonder, my allegorical reading wholly justifies Scruton’s following observation:
“But … [Siegfried’s] missing consciousness is supplied at another level by the music, which shows a person realizing himself as a free individual by his own efforts alone (which is after all what Wotan required of him) while entirely at the mercy of forces that are hidden from his gaze.” [P. 285]
As Brünnhilde told Siegfried in Siegfried Act Three, Scene Three, what Wotan thought (the fearful fore-knowledge of the gods’ inevitable doom which Wotan imparted to her in his confession, and his longing to either avert it or at least cease to be conscious of it), she felt, and what she felt was her love for Siegfried. In other words, Brünnhilde, embodiment of the wonder of Wagner’s musical motifs, has transfigured and redeemed the guilt in Wotan’s confession of world-history by sublimating what Wotan thought into feeling in Wagner’s motifs of remembrance and foreboding, and it’s this seeming miracle which grants metaphysical birth to the fearless artist-hero Siegfried, born of music (man’s aesthetic sense), who doesn’t know who he is (is freed from Wotan’s conundrums) because Brünnhilde knows this for him. What’s hidden from Siegfried’s conscious gaze, thanks to his unconscious mind Brünnhilde, is his implication in Alberich’s Ring Curse of consciousness, the curse that destroyed Wotan. And yet Alberich’s Ring Curse and Wotan’s desperation to redeem himself from it is the hidden source of Siegfried’s unconscious artistic inspiration, via his muse Brünnhilde.
Scruton, asking himself (like Kitcher and Schacht) if perhaps he’s missed something of Siegfried’s true significance and therefore expressing a sort of after-the-fact impulse to rehabilitate Siegfried’s status that he’s been hard at work demolishing, offers up a new conception of Siegfried as the “Everyman,” whose heroism consists in having experienced man’s universal rites of passage. But even here Scruton suspects something isn’t quite right with his strained attempt to grant Siegfried heroic or at worst sympathetic status. Here’s a selection of passages in which Scruton makes his best case to rehabilitate Siegfried as worthy of heroic status, or at least to explain what Scruton meant when he suggested Siegfried can only be understood as a symbol:
