egoism, that man might have a natural (or perhaps unnatural?) impulse toward benevolence which was stronger than his egoistic drives:
“ … R. thinks that … it is not absolutely necessary for the Will just to consume itself; Nature is injudicious, he says, but it has no wish to be sheerly destructive; how otherwise to explain the Will’s delight in genius, in which it sees itself reflected? The possibility exists for a gentler kind of tolerance, for desire not utterly uncontrolled; in India, for example, human beings during a period of adversity could calmly starve along with their domestic animals, without ever thinking of consuming them.” [1008W-{3/10/80}CD Vol. II, p. 448]
In the Ring, however, all hope of finding such disinterested benevolence in man, even in the most noble of men, seems to be lost, with the possible exception of Siegmund and Sieglinde, neither of whom ever betray their love or their noble nature. However, Wotan himself, the Waelsung twins’ father, and representative for Wagner of the human race itself, concludes – in his V.2.2 confession to Bruennhilde - that Siegmund, even in his nobility, is merely a reflection of Wotan’s own loathsome egoism, since Wotan attributes all of Siegmund’s apparent independence of spirit to the very special upbringing Wotan provided to Siegmund, and the frequent instances in which Wotan intervened in Siegmund’s behalf without Siegmund’s knowledge. In the event, we will find that the upbringing Wotan provided to Siegmund is Wagner’s metaphor for the influence of traditional religion upon morality, even long after religion as a belief system has ceased to operate.
This question about the true nature of human motivation is one of the main themes of Wagner’s Ring, and we will return to it again and again as we proceed through the drama.
[R.3: J]
Now Alberich expands on his threat, prophesying the day when even Wotan’s heroes will yield to Alberich’s power, and Alberich will force himself, without love, on the gods’ women (it is not clear whether Alberich means the Valhallan goddesses, or other women):
Alberich: [The following English passage scrambles the order of the German original] (#20c: Rocked in (:#20c) (#20a modulation:) blissful abandon on radiant heights, (#20a:) you eternal free-livers (:#20a) (#19:) scorn the black elf (:#19): - beware! Beware! (#39 &/or 40?:) For when your menfolk yield to my power (:#39 &/or 40?), (#39?:) your pretty women, who spurned my wooing (:#39?), (#47:) shall forcibly sate the lust of the dwarf, though love may no longer smile upon him (:#47). (…)
Note Wagner’s juxtaposition of the Valhalla Motif #20a with #19 as Alberich complains that the free-living gods scorn the black elf. This tells us subliminally that Valhalla, the gods’ ideal realm, an alleged refuge from all dangerous claims of the truth, is a product of Alberich’s Ring-power. Alberich has contempt for the gods’ heedless luxuriating in their false feeling of freedom and autonomy from the constraints of that real world within whose limits Alberich is content to pursue his concrete quest for real power, not least because the gods owe all they are to Alberich himself. It
