“ … man’s will is also contained in his essential being; he cannot break with his nature; even the wish fantasies which depart from it are determined by it; they may seem to go far afield, yet they always fall back on it, just as a stone thrown into the air falls back on the ground.” [250F-LER: p. 164]
And here we have Wagner’s variation on Feuerbach’s theme:
“… Thought, the highest and most conditioned faculty of artistic man, had cut itself adrift from fair warm Life, whose yearning had begotten and sustained it, as from a hemming, fettering bond that clogged its own unbounded freedom: -- so deemed the Christian yearning, and believed that it must break away from physical man, to spread in heaven’s boundless aether to freest waywardness. But this very severance was to teach that thought and this desire how inseparable they were from human nature’s being: how high soever they might soar into the air, they still could do this in the form of bodily man alone. In sooth, they could not take the carcass with them, bound as it was by laws of gravitation; but they managed to abstract a vapoury emanation, which instinctively took on again the form and bearing of the human body.” [439W-{9-12/49} The Artwork of the Future: PW Vol. I, p. 138-139]
But what did Alberich mean when he said that if he sinned, he was only against himself? When Alberich renounced love he was renouncing man’s inner self, his subjective feeling, in favor of accurate, unbiased knowledge of the outer, real world (which includes his knowledge of his own body and brain, understood objectively). Alberich, in other words, sinned against himself in the sense that he sinned against that innermost, subjective man of feeling which Feuerbach said is our God. Alberich has to conquer that inner feeling to see the world clearly, to affirm nature objectively. As Feuerbach said, reason is Nature’s god, man’s knowledge of nature, its truth, while the heart (love, the inner man of feeling which Wotan could not bear to renounce) is man’s God, man’s subjective truth:
“Reason is the truth of Nature, the heart is the truth of man. To speak popularly, reason is the God of Nature, the heart the God of man … .” [148F-EOC: p. 285]
And Wagner echoes Feuerbach to the extent that he acknowledges reason affirms nature:
“Reason (vernunft) is man’s knowledge of nature, as it were the faithful mirror of nature in the human brain: reason can know naught else than nature: a knowledge beyond nature were madness.” [477W-{49-51 (?)} Notes for ‘Artisthood of the Future’ (unfinished); Sketches and Fragments: PW Vol. VIII, p. 368]
And note, Wagner describes any knowledge which claims to transcend nature (such as religious belief) as madness. And this madness, this hubristic quest to transcend the limits of the world and our nature, is the essence of Wotan’s sin against all that was, is, and will be.
There are some who might protest against any identification of Alberich with Mother Nature, Erda, on the basis that Alberich’s greed is regarded as somehow unnatural and excessive, while Erda’s wisdom is conceived as virtually metaphysical or divine. But Wagner eventually came to see
