“This antagonism – not to esteem what we know, and not to be allowed any longer to esteem the lies we should like to tell ourselves – results in a process of dissolution.” [Nietzsche: note from 6/10/87 collected in The Will to Power: P. 10]
And what is more, Nietzsche locates this destructive nihilism squarely in Wagner’s Ring: “Art and the preparation of nihilism: romanticism (the conclusion of Wagner’s Nibelungen).” [Nietzsche: note from 1885-1886 collected in The Will to Power: P. 8]
Feuerbach described this nihilistic longing for world-end as the very essence of Christianity, the consequence of its renunciation of nature and its truth:
“Faith does not limit itself by the idea of a world, a universe, a necessity. (…) Faith in the real annihilation of the world … is therefore a phenomenon belonging to the inmost essence of Christianity … .” [96F-EOC: p. 128]
And here is a typical example of Wagner’s take on man’s religious impulse to seek world-end because the real world, what “is,” will not support religious man’s notion of what “ought” to be:
“[Speaking of the existential dilemmas which beset modern man, Wagner described their source as:] The restless inner discord of this Man, who between ‘will’ [i.e., the ideal] and ‘can’ [the real] had created for himself a chaos of tormenting notions, driving him to war against himself, to self-laceration and bodiless abandonment to the Christian death … .” [497W-{50-1/51} Opera and Drama: PW Vol. II, p. 169]
This sentiment could well be applied to Wotan himself, who seeks the end of all things because he can’t reconcile his ideal with the real.
Wotan’s nihilistic self-loathing, and his bid to rid himself of all his false, futile hopes and dreams rather than try any longer to perpetuate them in the face of the horrific nature of the world, is summed up in Wagner’s following reflection on the possibility that human existence is meaningless:
“At supper he again became absorbed in reflections as to whether the sum of existence … might not in fact have an ethical purpose, as has indeed been finely surmised. ‘Or are we really just here to eat grass? It’s possible.’ “ [1110W-{12/12/81} CD Vol. II; P. 768]
A large part of Wotan’s catastrophic nihilist urge to self-destruction is his final conclusion that, while he, though loving, could not create a free hero of redemption, Alberich, though loveless, has evidently produced a free hero in his son (Hagen, whom we won’t meet until Twilight of the Gods). Alberich’s son Hagen will be free in a way that Wotan’s Waelsung heroes are not, because Alberich, unlike Wotan and his progeny, is not dependent on self-deception, but accepts the real world as he finds it, and acquires power through the means the world actually presents to him. In other words, he will be free in a limited sense, free from illusion. Alberich has nothing to lose in admitting the truth about the world, so his consciousness is in this sense coherent, unified and single, whereas Wotan, though living in the real world, and a product of the real world, is
