[“Noth”] alone and with his own weapon (:#83; :#57) might do the deed which I must shun and which my urging urged not on him, though it were wished by my wish alone.
This passage introduces a new motif, #83, generally known as the “Need of the Gods Motif,” or the “Gods’ Need Motif.” It is essentially a compound motif composed of #53 followed by its inversion (and, Dunning says, not by #54 as is so often supposed), overlaying #81. For our purposes we may construe #53’s inversion in #83 as tantamount to #54, as the combination of #53 and #54 represents the entirety of Erda’s, Mother Nature’s, proclamation of her knowledge that all things must end, and that the gods’ twilight is inevitable. It is precisely this fate from which Wotan hopes his hero will redeem the gods. #83 is then the motival embodiment of Wotan’s need for a hero who can emancipate himself from the gods’ law, from the trap set for Wotan by his own actions, that Wotan, lord of treaties, is slave to his treaties (just as Alberich said that the lord of his Ring will be enslaved by it). Wotan therefore needs a hero who can resolve the dilemma represented by #81 – i.e., Wotan’s ever more conscious awareness that truly transcendent freedom of will is an impossibility, and that any hero who is prompted to assuage Wotan’s fear of the end is nothing more than a reflex of Wotan’s craven, egoistic fear - in order to redeem the gods from the doom Erda predicted.
We will find in the event that Wotan’s concept of a free hero is based on Feuerbach’s formulation that the secular artist is freed from the egoistic, practical concerns of religious belief, freed from religious faith’s promise to offer man real, concrete assuagement of his pain, and eternal bliss, within a real, palpable paradise. Art has the advantage that it stakes no practical claim on the truth, but compensates for this by making us feel “as if” paradise had been regained, without offering us actual entrance into a tangible paradise. It is implicit in Wotan’s formulation here that this ideal hero will serve Valhalla’s interests unwittingly, in the natural course of fulfilling his own unconscious, spontaneous impulses. Wotan is, in effect, seeking a hero freed from Wotan’s own fear and egoistic, selfish impulses (freed, in other words, from the Mime-like qualities in Wotan). Figuratively speaking, the secular artist, who produces art because of an inward need, and not for any tangible profit or ulterior motive external to the internal compulsion of his unconscious inspiration, seems freed from egoism in this sense.
Wotan is a slave to his contract with the Giants because he is constrained by the egoistic motives underlying man’s social contract, the contract engraved on his spear of divine authority and law, including religious faith, which is man’s answer to his existential fear. He is constrained, in other words, by his inability to transcend man’s inherent egoism, even within the seemingly ideal world of religious belief and the law-bound society predicated on this belief. Wagner outlines the contrast between the needs of a society dependent upon strict adherence to convention and laws presumed to be divinely inspired, and therefore inherently unalterable, and the freedom of expression of the individual, below:
“In this world of egoistic yearning and dislike arose the Law: in it man was to divest himself of his egoism in favour of a generality [Erda’s objective world, which Alberich affirms and Wotan wishes to deny, but can’t] from which love, i.e. the blessed consciousness of love, had vanished – to wit, Possession. But the Law itself could not make-up for Love, for it was the constraint, the
