“If the faith of the present day no longer produces such flagrant deeds of horror [i.e., the oppression of heretics, as in the Catholic Church’s Inquisition], this is due only to the fact that the faith of this age is not an uncompromising, living faith, but a sceptical, eclectic, unbelieving faith, curtailed and maimed by the power of art [the music-dramatist Siegfried’s loving relationship with his muse of inspiration, Bruennhilde] and science [Hagen].” [170F-EOC: p. 323]
And finally, Wagner sums up Feuerbach’s argument by ascribing the mind’s highest “power” to science, and the mind’s enjoyment (aesthetic pleasure), or rather, the aesthetic reinterpretation of the objective world known to science, to art:
“Science is the highest power of the human mind; but the enjoyment of this power is art.” [470W-{49-51 (?)} Notes for ‘Artisthood of the Future’ (unfinished); Sketches and Fragments: PW Vol. VIII, p. 350]
The whole point of Wotan’s confession to Bruennhilde was that Wotan was becoming too conscious of his dependency on Alberich’s Ring-power, i.e., that Wotan had realized not only that his very longing to transcend himself and his own nature in a hero freed from the gods’ laws and protection could ultimately be traced back to Wotan’s fear of the end, and his egoism, but also recognized that the realm of the gods was itself dependent upon, and the product of, Alberich’s Ring-power. Wotan knew this subliminally, and it was in any case implicit in the derivation of the initial segment of the Valhalla Motif, #20a, from Alberich’s Ring Motif, #19. It is as if Alberich’s Hoard of knowledge is always imminently at risk of rising from the silent depths to the light of day to force its abhorrent truths upon man’s consciousness, and subvert his ideals. It was for this reason that Wotan told Bruennhilde in despair that he found, with loathing (“Ekel”), always only himself in all that he strove to bring about (i.e., all that he strove to do to redeem Valhalla from Alberich’s threat), and that Wotan therefore could never create a free hero. But in his confession he asked himself what use his “will” – i.e., Bruennhilde – could be to him, since he can’t create a free hero. And by inseminating the womb of his wishes Bruennhilde with this futile longing she figuratively gave birth to this hero Siegfried, the hero in whom, as we shall see, Wotan can feel redeemed from the bitter truth, but who in fact will prove to be no more a free agent than Wotan was himself. This was the use Wotan made of his will, and it was through this means that, as Wotan has said just now, Erda’s wisdom, the source of Wotan’s existential fear of the end, wanes before his “will,” Bruennhilde.
So Wotan – religious man’s longing for transcendence of reality – lives on not in Alberich’s son Hagen, but in Wotan’s grandson Siegfried, the artist-hero. Wotan does not fear the end of the gods because belief in gods must lose its power to control the thinking of the most thoughtful men, in order to free artist-heroes from serving religion, and free them ultimately also from religious belief’s vulnerability to scientific, secular thought, represented by Alberich’s heir Hagen. The gods (Wotan’s head, Mime) must go down to destruction as a concept, a faith, for Siegfried to redeem the gods from destruction as feeling, or love. The escape hatch which Wotan’s own collective unconscious, Bruennhilde, offers as an alternative to his nihilistic impulse to self-destruction, which might otherwise wholly consume now disillusioned religious men (who had previously staked their life’s meaning on redemption in heaven, i.e., on Freia’s golden apples of sorrowless youth eternal, as Loge put it when chastising the gods for putting all their eggs in one basket), is
