dissatisfied with the nature of things, so he has invented an “other world” of redemption from this one, Valhalla. This single-minded adherence to one, coherent truth, based on an honorable effort to grasp nature objectively, will be one of the signal characteristics of the coming secular, scientific world order, for which Hagen. Alberich’s proxy, will stand as metaphor. Wotan, on the contrary, as the representative of the dying mytho-poetic world-view, and therefore dependent on consoling illusions, is two-faced and hypocritical in comparison to Alberich, a fact Wotan has now admitted.
Both Feuerbach and Wagner provide considerable evidence for this reading. Apropos of Wotan’s complaint that only Alberich could produce a truly free hero, Feuerbach notes that only the thinker, that is, the objective scientist, is free and independent:
“Only he who thinks is free and independent.” [52F-EOC: p. 39]
One of the key distinctions of Alberich and Hagen from Wotan and his proxies the Waelsungs and Bruennhilde, is that Alberich and Hagen, in their embrace of lovelessness and objectivity for the sake of power, are isolated and alone, and wish to remain so, whereas Wotan, even in his lust for power, can’t bear to give up love, and Wotan’s proxies live for love, for sympathetic relationships with others. This distinction lends a special significance to Feuerbach’s following, more detailed description of the freedom which belongs especially to the cold, objective thinker:
[P. 66] “To be able to be solitary is a sign of character and thinking power. Solitude is the want of the thinker, [P. 67] society the want of the heart. We can think alone, but we can love only with another. In love we are dependent, for it is the need of another being; we are independent only in the solitary act of thought.” [68F-EOC: p. 66-67]
Wagner will go to great lengths in Twilight of the Gods to present Hagen as an isolated, lonely figure, who has an allergic abhorrence of the passionate self-deceptions to which his half siblings, the Gibichungs Gunther and Gutrune, and even the hero Siegfried, are committed.
And, to clinch our argument that Wotan considers Alberich’s son Hagen free in a sense that neither Wotan nor his proxies can ever be, namely, that they are lying to themselves and neither Alberich nor Hagen, who affirm the real world (affirm Erda’s knowledge), are deceiving themselves, Cosima recorded Wagner’s following definition of freedom:
“ ‘Free’ means ‘true,’ someone who has no need to lie … .” [1057W-{1/22/81} CD Vol. II, p. 605]
While Alberich and Hagen have no need to lie because they accept the one world we have, Wotan’s hero Siegfried will be free only by default: he will have no reason to consciously lie because his self-deception, i.e., his unwitting perpetuation of Wotan’s sin against Mother Nature’s truth, will be unconscious. In other words, he will not be conscious of lying to himself, any more than religious man is until an objective mind like Alberich points it out to him. This is Siegfried’s point of vulnerability, his Achilles heel, as it is Wotan’s, which is why Siegfried, like Wotan before him, will succumb to Alberich’s curse of consciousness, though Wotan supposed that Siegfried’s innocence would make him invulnerable to it.
