Feuerbach’s notion that it is historical man’s essential nature to seek the truth, and to perfect what experience presents to him as imperfect, to round the circle, as it were. We are by our very nature bound to do this, yet the truth, if ever we could learn it, we might well find unbearable, a point Donington made in the introduction to his seminal Wagner’s ‘Ring’ and its Symbols. [Donington: p. 15] Thus Alberich says that the possessor of his Ring (of consciousness) will be wracked with care, yet those who do not possess the Ring (i.e., who do not yet possess a high degree of consciousness) will be driven by insatiable greed for it. This is not only a description of Wagner’s theory of evolution, that it is the natural drive to move from unconsciousness to consciousness, but this could well be Wagner’s poetical metaphor for historical man’s quest for that knowledge which, once found, will retrospectively make null and void the very value of the quest for it. For Wagner himself said, in a moment of unblinking honesty, that it is man’s inmost nature, his natural necessity, to seek the fateful Nibelung Hoard, which contains the secret of earthly might:
“Though doomed to death by acquisition of the Hoard, each sequent generation strives to seize it: its inmost necessity drives it on, as with necessity of Nature, as day has ever to dethrone the night anew. For in the Hoard there lies withal the secret of all earthly might: it is the Earth itself with all its splendour … .” [370W-{6-8/48} The Wibelungen – Revised summer of 1849: PW Vol. VII, p. 276]
Man’s mind of its very nature has an insatiable need to correct what seems incorrect, to perfect the imperfect, to round the circle, to improve on nature where nature doesn’t satisfy man, and where man can’t obtain any satisfaction at all (as in his futile desire for immortal life), it invents a transcendent world in which what is impossible on earth is possible. This is the basis for all human creativity in both the objective realm of science (which seeks only the possible), and in religious belief and art (which taps man’s imagination to satisfy man’s desires and assuage his fears where nature cannot). And what is true of historical man, what gave him his advantage over all other animals (who remain largely under the domination of non-reflective instinct), man’s need to fill the gaps left in nature, reaches its fullest development in men and women of genius, in whom, as Wagner says, their never-contented mind dominates all their thoughts and actions. [See 560W]
It is this insatiable nature of the human mind, its need to complete what nature presents to it as incomplete, in reality if possible, and symbolically if impossible, which according to Feuerbach gives birth to man’s religious illusion that there must be another, transcendent realm, where our desires that are thwarted here, in the real world, are satisfied:
“ … they [“the Christians”] … conclude that because there is not room enough for man’s mental powers and capacities within the confines of this life, this body – because in this life man cannot fulfill all his desires and potentialities – there must be an eternal, infinite life to come; they conclude that because man wants to know everything, because his thirst for knowledge is unlimited, he will inevitably know everything some day; that because man has not only an infinite capacity for perfection, but also an infinite drive toward perfection and happiness, which can never be fulfilled on this small earth, in this brief life span, in this vale of tears – therefore man, or the human mind, must some day become perfectly ethical and happy, or, as our cautious and cagey rationalists put it, perhaps not absolutely perfect, but at least progressively more perfect ad infinitum.” [301F-LER: p. 265]
