Feuerbach, and calls upon us to approach reality again through subjective feeling, as Erda calls upon Wotan to do in yielding the Ring of consciousness to the Giants in order to flee the curse of consciousness, the curse on the Ring:
“The individual … makes use of endless expedients in order to grasp the world as a whole: these expedients, in all their most manifold complexities, are … ‘concepts’ … : so proud do we deem ourselves in our ability to grasp a whole by means of concepts that, believing we have the whole, we involuntarily forget that what we have is merely a concept, in other words our pleasure comes simply from an instrument of our own making, while in the meantime we have strayed further than ever from the reality of the world. But the man who in the long term can find no real pleasure in the madness of this self-delusion … will finally recognize the need to approach reality once again in total consciousness and with the aid of feeling [i.e., music].” [606W-{1/25-26/54} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 302]
[P. 302] “… reality … can be grasped … only if we recognize that the essence of reality lies in its endless multiplicity. This inexhaustible multiplicity which incessantly reproduces and renews itself can be apprehended, however, by feeling [music], which perceives it simply as a separate, ever-changing phenomenon: this sense of change [Erda’s “All things that are, end!”] is the essence of reality, whereas only what is imagined is changelessly unending [such as the Valhallan gods’ alleged immortality]. Only what changes is real: to be real, to live – what this means is to be created, to grow, to bloom, to wither and to die; without the necessity of death, there is no possibility of life … . [P. 303] (…) But in order to make such a consummation possible, we must abandon completely our search for the ‘whole:’ the whole reveals itself to us only in the individual manifestation … . How is this marvellous process most fully achieved? Ask Nature [Erda]! Only through love [feeling, or music]! [607W-{1/25-26/54} Letter to August Roeckel: SLRW, p. 302-303] [See also 1059W and 1115W]
This futile quest for the whole - which according to both Feuerbach and Wagner is the basis for human history - is the foundation of both scientific and technological man’s quest to transform the world into his personal property, and to know all things, such as the unchanging laws of nature, and religious man’s quest for union with what he regards as the eternal, immutable, supernatural basis of the ephemeral world. Erda in a sense seems to be warning Wotan that if he co-opts Alberich’s Ring power to create and sustain the illusory realm of the gods, Wotan will be predestined not only to failure but to destruction. While Alberich limits his greed for possession and power to that which it is possible to attain, if not as a single man than as collective, historical man, Wotan, as the representative of man’s belief in the supernatural, seeks satisfaction where it can never be found, because its object is illusory. This is the basis for religious man’s existential dilemma, which I have called the wound that will never heal, following Wagner’s lead. And Alberich’s curse on his Ring is that all who seek the absolute power and knowledge and omnipotence and omniscience of God, will never obtain it, but instead will unwittingly bring about the destruction of their god(s), by destroying faith in them. For historical man is predestined to acquire the knowledge of his true origin and place in nature, to bring Alberich’s Hoard of knowledge from the silent depths of the unconscious to the light of day.
