that other self I never see; for the free man has to fashion himself – (#84 chords:; #79:) Serfs are all I can shape (:#84 chords; :#79)!
In the event, we will learn that the closest Wotan will ever come to finding this friendly foe and hoped-for redeemer is the artist-hero Siegfried, who must in some sense undermine faith in the gods, in order to salvage what is worth salvaging from the religious tradition. But releasing his hero from the constraints religious man is under, such as the need to proclaim that an illusion is the truth, is dangerous, since such a free, loving hero may end up, perhaps unwittingly, supporting Alberich’s overthrow of the gods. Feuerbach alludes to this danger in the passage below, in which he describes religious faith as law, i.e., as divinely immutable, while love’s freedom he describes as atheistic, and we may therefore consider this love and its freedom as antagonistic to belief and a threat to the gods:
“Faith makes belief in its God a law: love is freedom, - it condemns not even the atheist, because it is itself atheistic, itself denies … the existence of a particular, individual God, opposed to man.” [134F-EOC: p. 247]
We must now strive to grasp perhaps the most difficult concept in Wagner’s Ring. It is the following: By virtue of repressing unbearable self-knowledge into his unconscious mind, by confessing the knowledge which Erda taught Wotan to his daughter Bruennhilde, Wotan effectively plants a seed in his wish-womb Bruennhilde with this knowledge. It is this seed, Wotan’s confession of his need for a hero freed from the gods’ corrupting influence, and his conviction that this need can never be met, which figuratively gives birth to his longed-for hero Siegfried. Through this means Wotan is, effectively, reborn in Siegfried, minus consciousness of his true origin and identity. For the essence of Siegfried’s heroism will be that he does not know who he is.
We find a basis for this difficult concept in both Feuerbach and in passages from Wagner’s writings which are clearly influenced by these Feuerbachian meditations. For instance, Feuerbach, describing all that man would have to eliminate from the very definition of man in order to produce a being sufficiently free from the laws of physics and biology to be capable of immortal life, disclosed that one would have to purge man of all that links him to the real world, and that all that would be left in such a theoretically immortal being is substancelessness and nothingness, a complete void of being and historical context, in other words, nothing at all:
“Only when history is nothing, only when the naked individual, the individual who is stripped of all historical elements, of all destiny, determination, purpose, measure, and goal, only when the vain, abstract, meaningless, empty individual is something, and therefore only when nothing is something, … only then is there nothing after death, only if the nothing after death is not also something. Thus those peculiar beings and strange subjects who think that they live only after life do not reflect that they attain and make up nothing at all with their afterlife, that as they [i.e., those who believe in the immortality of the human soul] posit a future life, they negate the actual life.” [20F-TDI: p. 133]
