The following is Feuerbach’s attempt to show that in order for the Christians to promise immortal life to the faithful after death, the human spirit who allegedly inhabits paradise would have to be so disembodied (since man’s body and mind are by nature mortal), so deprived of all those things, including consciousness, which lend life its luster, deprived therefore of all those earthly, bodily things which our imagination must smuggle into paradise to make it worthy of our longing, things which we are required to renounce before considering ourselves worthy of redemption in paradise, that there would be no value in attaining such a paradise:
“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 posit a future life, they negate the actual life.” [20F-TDI: p. 133]
I believe it was this passage in Feuerbach which gave Wagner one of his greatest insights into how to cast off the bonds of the old, traditional Romantic German opera, of which Lohengrin was Wagner’s most evolved example, to construct his revolutionary music-dramas. For Wagner conceives of Siegfried as freed from historical context with its contradictions, so that he may freely express the timelessness of the purely human, mythic being. Furthermore, in Wagner’s thinking, again borrowed from Feuerbach, Siegfried’s art is ageless and therefore immortal in the only sense in which man can enjoy that privilege, since religious faith’s promise of literal immortal life is not only bogus but is motivated by man’s existential fear and egoism. Thus, the Siegfried Wagner describes below is also - unlike Wotan, who is trapped in the bonds of history - fearless. Note that Wagner carries over from Feuerbach’s ruminations the concept that this theoretical, mythic being, shorn of all historical context or natural preconditions, is a “naked individual,” whom Wagner here calls the “naked man”:
[P. 357] “In the struggle to give the wishes of my heart artistic shape, and in the ardour to discover what thing it was that drew me so resistlessly to the primal source of old home Sagas, I drove step by step into the deeper regions of antiquity, where at last to my delight, and truly in the utmost reaches of old time, I was to light upon the fair young form of [P. 358] Man, in all the freshness of his force. My studies thus bore me, through the legends of the Middle Ages, right down to their foundation in the old-Germanic Mythos; one swathing after another, which the later legendary lore had bound around it, I was able to unloose, and thus at last to gaze upon it in its chastest beauty. What here I saw, was no longer the Figure of conventional history, whose garment claims our interest more than does the actual shape inside [Wotan]; but the real naked Man … [Siegfried, who is Wotan reborn, minus consciousness of his true identity and history]. At like time I had sought this human being in History too. Here offered themselves relations, and nothing but relations; the human being I could only see in so far as the relations ordered him: and not as he had power to order them [which recalls Wotan’s complaint that he, lord through treaties, is now bound and enslaved by them]. To get to the bottom of these ‘relations,’ whose coercive force compelled the strongest man to squander all
