What Wotan describes as his “youthful love’s delights” here is Wagner’s metaphor for the time when man’s ancestors were still only impelled by animal instinct or feeling (say, the Rhinedaughters), not reflective thought involving language. This youthful love faded during the evolutionary transition from instinctive feeling to reasoned thought, which produced that power which man gains by acquiring that objective knowledge by virtue of which man wins control over his world:
“Starting with an infinitely confluent fund of Feeling, man’s sensations gradually concentrated themselves to a more and more definite Content; in such sort that their expression in that Ur-melody advanced at last, by Nature’s necessary steps, to the formation of Absolute Word-speech.” [535W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 281]
[V.2.2: C]
Wotan now describes how he, collective humanity, with the aid of mankind’s artistic cunning, represented by Loge, unwittingly, unconsciously deluded himself, through religion’s illusions, into believing that he could preserve the innocence of feeling, of love, in the face of the mind’s advancement in that knowledge which wins man worldly power. This is the basis of his self-doubt, the contradiction at the root of his ambition:
Wotan: Unwittingly false I acted unfairly, binding by treaties what boded ill: cunningly Loge lured me on but vanished while roaming the world. – (#81) Yet I did not like to give up love; in the midst of power I longed for love’s pleasures.
Wotan’s troubles (represented here by #81) began, in other words, when he thought he could safely follow Froh’s suggestion and enjoy the Ring’s - consciousness’ - power, without sacrificing love, in effect striving futilely to reverse the natural course of evolution from preconsciousness to consciousness. Wotan (as the Feuerbachian collective, historical man) admits here – to his own unconscious mind, Bruennhilde - that in the social contract, which includes religion’s illusory claims and promises, he unwittingly, involuntarily, unconsciously deceived himself (and therefore deceived all men, since all are subsumed under Wotan). He admits also that unlike Alberich, who was prepared to entirely renounce the satisfaction of subjective, instinctive impulse, for the sake of the power objective thought would bring, Wotan, even while drawing advantage from Alberich’s power of thought, wished to retreat from its bitterest consequences back to the pleasures of subjective feeling, or music, as Wagner puts it below:
“But that Melody to whose birth we now are listening, forms a complete contrast to the primal Mother-melody; … we may briefly denote its course as an advance from Understanding to Feeling, from Word-speech to Melody: as against the advance from Feeling to Understanding, from the Mother-melody to Word-speech.” [536W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 284]
