transcendental beings, suggesting a dependence on self-deception and repression of troubling truths which threatens to become conscious:
“… the veneer of personality and selfhood is constantly broken from below by the thrust of animal life, and it is sometimes difficult to resist the view that all our reasons are really rationalizations, ways of representing actions that were wrung from us by the inexorable needs of the animal as though they were products of free deliberation, aimed at the good and issuing from the will. … we have only the vaguest idea how this came about, and by what trick it was that the moral being superseded the animal, and tamed its instincts to a higher law. It is as though, by an enormous collusive effort, people are able to draw a collective veil over their animal natures, and address each other entirely as if appealing to concentrated centres of purely rational choice.” [P. 257-258]
“This vision of the essentially compromised nature of freedom is embodied by Wagner in the person of Wotan.” [P. 258]
I place emphasis on this particular source of discord between my allegorical reading, which Scruton maintains is both too abstract and too dependent on an allegory that Wagner allegedly outgrew as he composed his Ring music, and Scruton’s proposition that his symbolical reading captures the Ring’s ultimate meaning where mine doesn’t, precisely because not only the authentic meaning of the Ring is at stake, but the meaning of life itself (of which Wagner’s Ring is an artistic distillation). I believe Scruton was initially uniquely sympathetic to my allegorical reading because my notion that the Ring’s plot dramatizes the historical transformation of at least Western civilization from the practice of near universal religious faith, into a scientific and secular, and therefore increasingly post-religious society, in which inspired works of art offer a feeling of the sacred and of redemption which religious belief no longer can, corresponds with his conception of Wagner’s Ring as a prime example of such a work of redemptive art in a post-religious context. But a breach in our outlook was inevitable on the single point of greatest moment to Scruton, that in his view the Ring dramatizes Wagner’s discovery of the sacred in man, in the transcendent “I” in its relation to other transcendent human beings, and that my materialist Feuerbachian assumptions subvert this positing of the transcendent “I,” reducing it to a spiritless object among many other equally insignificant objects in Nature. Never mind that Wagner’s Ring and Tristan and Isolde and his final music-drama Parsifal can be understood as dramatizations of this overarching Wagnerian plot, in which formerly religious man is forced by his own acquisition of world-and-self-knowledge to concede that he, even in his religious longing for transcendent value, is ultimately a product of, or object in, Nature, Scruton holds the line in positing the sacred “I” as irreducible to natural law in some sense. And I confess not only that Wagner, like Scruton, shared a desire to hold this line, but I do also. Scruton is absolutely correct in his assumption that I believe lies behind his book and his other writings and talks on Wagner’s art, that Wagner created virtually all of his canonical operas and music-dramas out of an impulse to hold the line in preserving the dignity of human life against the reductive tendencies of modern science, and he’s astute in devoting his remarkable book to demonstrating how this impulse is central to our understanding of Wagner’s Ring.
However, after a lifetime of deep, persistent meditation on Wagner’s art, in my understanding Wagner’s raison d’être as an artist was deeper and considerably more involved and troubled than
