human action. Feuerbach’s following observations concern God (say, Dark-Alberich as opposed to Light-Alberich, Wotan) as man’s antithesis, as the heartless, objective understanding (i.e., Alberich wielding the power of the Ring):
“God as the antithesis of man, as a being not human, i.e., not personally human, is the objective nature of the understanding. (…) The understanding knows nothing of the sufferings of the heart; it has no desires, no passions, no wants, and, for that reason, no deficiencies and weaknesses, as the heart has. Men in whom the intellect predominates, who, with one-sided but all the more characteristic definiteness, embody and personify for us the nature of the understanding, are free from the anguish of the heart, from the passions, the excesses of the man who has strong emotions; they are not passionately interested in any finite, i.e., particular object; they do not give themselves in pledge; they are free. (…) The understanding is that part of our nature which is … not to be bribed, not subject to illusions … . It is the categorical, impartial consciousness of the fact as fact, because it is itself of an objective nature. (…) Only by the understanding can man judge and act in contradiction with his dearest human, that is, personal feelings, when the God of the understanding – law, necessity, right, - commands it.” [48F-EOC: p. 34]
Wagner feared that such an objective understanding of man and his place in the world would encourage expression of man’s inherent and universal egoism, i.e., what “is,” rather than love, i.e., what “ought” to be. He saw acknowledgment of the primacy of egoism behind what for him was the inevitable and inexorable decline of human civilization to the level that the only value acknowledged as a basis for society would be self-interest, which Wagner describes as inimical to all spiritual aspiration, all idealism:
“The crime and the curse of our social intercourse have lain in this: that the mere physical maintenance of life has been till now the one object of our care, -- a real care that has devoured our souls and bodies and well nigh lamed each spiritual impulse. This Care has made man … a thrall of commerce, ever ready to give up the last vestige of freedom of his Will, so only that this Care might be a little lightened.” [411W-{6-8/49} Art and Revolution: PW Vol. I, p. 57]
Alberich’s sadism toward his own kind in Nibelheim seems to be Wagner’s dramatization of his following insights, that living objectively within the truth of the natural world, and accepting man’s mundane status as a mere animal with all that logically follows from this admission, requires us to renounce any notion of transcendent love and compassion, since it is unnatural:
“ ‘A human being should not feel pity,’ R. says. ‘Nature doesn’t want it; he should be as cruel as the animals; pity has no place in the world.’ “ [812W-{2/8/72} CD Vol. I, p. 456]
And here Wagner provided a striking instance of his terrible insight into the sadism and cynicism of the powerful, inspired by a story about the Zulu King Chaka’s cruel imagination:
“R. relates to me the biography of the Zulu King, the killing of the cows when his mother died, so that the animals might know what it means to lose a mother, and he ends with the words: 'No animal is as cruel as a human being, it is only the human being who takes pleasure in tormenting;
