As Loge answers (accompanied by #18) with brutal abruptness that this spell to forge the Ring of power is cast easily by him who forswears love’s delights, Wotan instinctively turns away. Loge, quick to note Wotan’s inaptitude for taking the drastic step which alone would make him worthy to possess and employ the Ring and its power, with a not so subtle touch of sadistic pleasure in Wotan’s impotence, informs Wotan that Alberich did not hesitate to make this sacrifice which Wotan finds so repugnant, and fearlessly obtained the magic power he needed to make the Ring (as we hear #37), by, Loge implies, renouncing love. Loge’s point is that while Wotan’s thinking, i.e., religious man’s exploitation of the power of thought, is guided by feeling (love), Alberich, representing man’s impulse to obtain real power through objective knowledge and thought unimpaired by subjective feeling (love), is alone able to forge the Ring of power, or rather, to employ the power of thought to the fullest degree. And the sad truth is that Valhalla is merely a by-product of Alberich’s power of thought, the Ring.
Feuerbach gave expression to what we recognize in our passage above as Wotan’s quandary in the following extracts which distinguish theological thinking from objective thinking. For instance, he notes that though the theists claim they prefer the truth (i.e., the Ring’s power) to consolation (i.e., love), truth’s sole criterion for them is in fact its power to console us (i.e., thought’s power tempered by love):
“ … although in theory the theists place truth above good cheer, in practice the power to provide consolation is their sole criterion of truth or untruth; they reject a doctrine as untrue because it provides no consolation, because it is not as comforting and comfortable, as flattering to human egoism, as the opposite doctrine which derives nature from a personal being who guides the course of nature in accordance with the prayers and desires of man.” [273F-LER: p. 204]
And in Feuerbach’s following remarks we find the philosophic foundation of Loge’s distinction of Alberich from Wotan (Light-Alberich). Love (which Wotan can’t give up, even in his desire for the power which can only be obtained through objective knowledge), Feuerbach says, is the human species’ subjective reality, while reason is our species’ objective reality:
“Love is the subjective reality of the species, as reason is its objective reality.” [138F-EOC: p. 268]
Feuerbach expands his analysis, identifying what he calls the heathen God with the understanding and with pantheism, i.e., the natural world as understood and experienced by us objectively, and identifying the Christian God with the human heart. Reason, Feuerbach says, is cold, while the heart concerns itself with persons:
“The distinction between the “heathen,” or philosophic, and the Christian God – the non-human, or pantheistic, and the human, personal God – reduces itself only to the distinction between the understanding or reason and the heart or feelings. Reason is the self-consciousness of the species, as such; feeling is the self-consciousness of individuality; the reason has relation to existences, as things; the heart to existences, as persons. (…) Reason is cold, because … it does not interest itself in man alone; but the heart is a partisan of man.” [146F-EOC: p. 285]
