than through acting on spontaneous instinct), is also Wagner’s metaphor for Feuerbach’s notion that men objectively attuned to the bitter realities and limits of nature (as Alberich is), instead of the consolations of religious and artistic illusions, work, rather than pray:
“The man who does not exclude from his mind the idea of the world, the idea that everything here must be sought intermediately, that every effect has its natural cause, that a wish is only to be attained when it is made an end and the corresponding means are put into operation – such a man does not pray: he only works; he transforms his attainable wishes into objects of real activity … . In other words, he limits, he conditionates his being by the world, as a member of which he conceives himself; he bounds his wishes by the idea of necessity.” [94F-EOC: p. 123]
Ultimately, Alberich’s enslavement of the Nibelungs represents the existential angst, the price of “Noth” man pays, for his gift of reflective consciousness, which compels him to gain knowledge of nature by force, and to satisfy his needs by compelling nature to grant them. On this view, if we contrast the Nibelungs’ enslavement with the Rhinedaughters’ pre-fallen play, we can see more clearly that the Rhinedaughters’ celebration of the Rhinegold was Wagner’s image of the lost paradise of preconscious animal innocence, which has been lost through man’s acquisition of the power of conscious thought (the Ring).
There is a further parallel between Wotan’s and Alberich’s differing but similar quests for power which we are now in a position to grasp, for both Wotan’s hope that Valhalla will grant man the honor of eternal renown, and Alberich’s tyranny over the Nibelungs who he forces to labor in the bowels of the earth to serve his greed for those treasures which can produce more and more practical power in the real world, are two expressions of the power of the human mind, Wotan’s being psychological, Alberich’s being actual. As Feuerbach put it:
“Honor, greed, and such are passions, are terribly destructive conditions that border on madness, are diseases, precisely because the human does indeed surrender himself, but he does so to things that cannot include the human self. (…) … the miser … is poor in wealth, is empty in abundance. In this way passion, as a disordered condition, is perverted into the desire to devour the object instead of the desire to let oneself be consumed and devoured by the object.” [16F-TDI: p. 123]
[R.3: G]
Loge, describing himself as Alberich’s kinsman and friend, complains to Alberich of his outrage that Alberich has denied this bond of kinship and friendship and now regards himself as Loge’s enemy, when in fact, as Alberich rightly points out, in that case it is Loge who, in taking up with the gods, has betrayed Alberich:
(Alberich gives Wotan and Loge a long, suspicious stare: #41)
Alberich: What do you want here? (#5)
