Wotan: (contemplating the ring: #20b vari?:) Now I hold that which exalts me, the mightiest lord of the mighty (:#20b vari?)! (He puts on the ring: #19)
The true significance of Alberich’s accusation can only be grasped by looking ahead a bit to Erda's (Mother Nature’s) appearance after Alberich’s exit. Once Wotan has stolen Alberich’s Ring and placed it on his finger, refusing to give it to the Giants in order to redeem Freia, Erda will rise from the earth (as if, by taking possession of the Ring, the very essence of the world rises to consciousness in Wotan) to tell Wotan that she possesses knowledge of all that was, is, or shall be. Erda’s knowledge is the knowledge of nature, the real world which exhibits itself to us in time, space, matter, and energy, and under the laws of causation (or other laws not yet fully understood by the scientific community), which in the Ring can be construed as the scientific equivalent of fate. Alberich’s telling Wotan that Alberich, by possessing the Ring, does not sin against the real world (but only against himself), while if Wotan co-opts Alberich’s Ring he will be sinning against the actual world, is a metaphor for the distinction between Alberich’s relationship with the truth, and Wotan’s relationship with it. Where Alberich has the courage to accept nature’s truth, because only objective knowledge of the real world grants us the means to acquire concrete power, Wotan, the representative of man’s religious or metaphysical impulse, has a false relationship to reality, inventing an “other world” of the imagination conceived as antithetical to the real world. Alberich, in other words, is an optimist in the sense that he affirms the world, while Wotan is what Nietzsche would regard as a romantic pessimist and religious nihilist because he denies the real world, finding it abhorrent, and substitutes for it a consoling, imaginary reality, in which, for instance, men can enjoy sorrowless youth eternal. Figuratively speaking, Wotan’s denial of nature’s truth is a sort of matricide: Wotan, as the embodiment of man’s illusion that gods exist, effectively kills man’s mother, Nature, by repudiating the real world which is ephemeral, existing in the past, present, and future, precisely because it is ephemeral.
To be more specific, Wotan affirms natural feeling but renounces objective knowledge of nature. As Feuerbach put it, God is man’s subjective, inmost self freed from all that is objective:
“The divine being is the pure subjectivity of man, freed from all else, from everything objective … - his most subjective, his inmost self.” [79F-EOC: p. 98] [See also 67F]
According to Feuerbach, when man involuntarily invented the gods (who are in some religions overlords of all or just part of nature, in others even the creators of nature), man’s imagination and ignorance of the truth co-opted nature’s power and transferred it to the gods (just as Wotan co-opts Alberich’s power). What had been the object of our observation and provider of our physical needs was transformed by our imagination into a person, producing what Feuerbach calls the secret of mysticism, the thauma, the wonder of wonders. [See 338F]
This offence against objective truth is an offence against Mother Nature, in which man’s mind (the Ring), which after all is not only a product of natural evolution, but also evolution’s last step, and therefore the most conditioned product of nature, acquires a pride which deludes it into seeing itself
