and capacities is merely an anthropomorphism, a popular term for the context in which man has become what he is [Wotan’s subliminal influence on Siegfried]. (…) And explicitly or not, consciously or not, I accept this fate [A Nietzschean sentiment if ever there was!]. I accept the necessity of being a part of my time; what I am by nature, without having willed it, I also will; I cannot wish to be something other than what I am, i.e., than what I essentially am. I may wish to modify certain secondary, accidental traits, but not my essential nature; my will is dependent on my nature and not the other way around; whether I like it or not, whether I know it or not, my will conforms to my nature; try as I may, my nature – that is, the essence of my individuality – does not conform to my will.” [249F-LER: p. 162-163]
“ … man’s will is also contained in his essential being; he cannot break with his nature; even the wish fantasies which depart from it are determined by it [Wotan can’t transcend or redeem himself from the egoistic motives which are the basis even of his longing for redemption from his loathsome nature]; they may seem to go far afield, yet they always fall back on it, just as a stone thrown into the air falls back on the ground.” [250F-LER: p. 164] [See also 348F]
And we may recall Wagner’s observation, previously cited [See 439W], about the nature of “Christian yearning” for transcendence of the body. This yearning, he said, took the form of “… thought, the highest and most conditioned faculty of artistic man, [which] had cut itself adrift from fair warm Life, whose yearning had begotten and sustained it, as from a hemming, fettering bond that clogged its unbounded freedom,” which “believed that it must break away from physical man, to spread in heaven’s boundless aether to freest waywardness.” Wagner, paraphrasing Feuerbach, affirmed that “… this very severance was to teach that thought and this desire how inseparable they were from human nature’s being … ,” and that this was due to the fact that man remains “bound” by the “laws of gravitation.”
And what is it precisely that Wotan finds so loathsome in his own nature that he longs for a hero wholly purged of its corrupting influence? Wotan, as the higher, more fully conscious man (or, what is the same thing, a metaphor for the collective spirit of historical man, who becomes especially conscious of himself in men and women of genius), can’t help seeing further than other men, the full tragic implications of man’s inherent egoism and inability to transcend it. I take the liberty of citing this extraordinary passage again in full, since it so fully captures Wotan’s spirit and current predicament, and, by the way, explains also how it comes about that with a comparatively few musical motifs, which have an almost unlimited capacity for associational reference, Wagner can condense into specific, memorable feelings the most varied array of dramatic events, widely disbursed in time and space, and their implications:
“Now the great, the truly noble spirit [Wotan] is distinguished from the common organisation of everyday by this; to it every, often the seemingly most trivial, incident of life and world-intercourse is capable of swiftly displaying its widest correlation with the essential root-phenomena of all existence, thus of showing Life and the World themselves in their true, their terribly earnest meaning. The naïve, ordinary man – accustomed merely to seize the outmost side of such events, the side of practical service for the moment’s need – when once this awful earnestness suddenly reveals itself to him through an unaccustomed juncture, falls into such consternation that self-murder is very frequently the consequence [Wotan finds his knowledge of his own nature and history unbearable, too horrific to be contemplated consciously]. The great, exceptional man finds
