Understanding Destiny: Götterdämmerung (Part II)

Ultimately it is the overwhelming hubris of Siegfried's character we saw in the previous post that will be his downfall.

In this part of our discussion and guide to understanding Götterdämmerung, we will see how this has profoundly philosophical implications. Siegfried was supposed to be the first Free Man - unshackled from, and destroyer of, all social or divinely imposed rules or laws. Whereas before him, all humanity are but the playthings of a cruel Destiny imposed upon us by the Gods, Siegfried was meant to be the Master of his own Destiny – the free hero who had dared to free himself of the influence of the Gods by shattering Wotan's spear of authority. Even this so-called Free Man, described by Wotan as being "der freier als ich der Gott (the one freer than I, the God)", turns out to be just another hapless victim of Destiny. Here is what Schopenhauer tells us about the illusory nature of the freedom of will:

But because in self-consciousness the Will is known directly and in itself, in this consciousness lies also the consciousness of freedom. The fact is, however, overlooked that the individual, the person, is not Will as a thing-in-itself, but as a phenomenon of Will, is already determined as such, and has come under the form of the phenomenal. Hence arises the strange fact that every one believes himself a priori to be perfectly free, even in his individual actions, and thinks that at every moment he can commence another manner of life, which just means that he can become another person. But a posteriori, through experience, he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, but subject to necessity; that in spite of all his resolutions and reflections he does not change his conduct, and that from the beginning of his life to the end of it, he must carry out the very character which he himself condemns, and as it were play the part he has undertaken to the end.

From Part I: The World as Will and Representation 

Freud argued that human behaviour was conditioned by a blind, subconscious Id -  a driving force of Nature, that according to Freud was necessarily sexual in nature (libido). You can tell that Freud is little more than a philosophical offshoot of Schopenhauer,  since the Blind Will that drove human nature was also force of nature like electricity (even if the Will unlike the Id is not uniquely sexual in nature).  That blind force of Nature was as much Destiny and Necessity as a thunderstorm. Emotions such as anger and sexual passion erupt out of us like an elemental force of Nature. Which is to say, that the Will is as blind as a thunderstorm, and that which drives us is a compulsive natural force of necessity, so that our Will itself is no more free than a thunderstorm: Freedom of Will is ultimately an illusion.

It is this philosophical wisdom (philosophy comes from the Greek words meaning love of wisdom) that catches up with Siegfried. He too turns out to be little more than a plaything of Destiny. He may not be one of the flies that the Gods toy with, then kill for their sport: he is freer than even the Gods. Yet, he too is another victim of Destiny. That is why Siegfried is, for all his blind hubris, an ultimately tragic figure. He embodies the tragedy of human Destiny itself.

Freedom of Will is a subject that has troubled thinkers since the dawn of time. Marx and Engels too were deeply troubled by it. They constructed a model of history based on the destiny and absolute necessity of dialectical historical development. Yet at the apotheosis of this history they came up with the incredible claim that suddenly mankind will be — deus ex machina — freed of the deterministic forces that shaped humanity and enjoy absolute freedom of will! One is reminded of a story of how a whole lot of political dreamers were envisioning how perfect their historically inevitable Utopia would be, when somebody then asked what if in this Utopia a mother's child were to be accidentally run over by a tram. They all fell silent, in subconscious realisation that humanity can never be free of the tragedy of Destiny. It is the tragedy of humanity itself, and the dystopian tragedy of Siegfrieds Tod.


In the end, Siegfried dies just as his father did: a blind victim of Destiny. It was a Destiny that his hubris blinded him too. He was far too confident in the glorious freedom of his heroic Will, a freedom that according to Schopenhauer, was only ever illusory. The greater the hero's self-confidence, the greater his "self-consciousness" (Selbstbewusstsein) to use Schopenhauer's terms  (Selbstbewusstsein can also mean self-confidence or self-awareness), the more powerful will the impact of the inevitable collision with Destiny be. Herein lies the philosophical (and hence metaphysical) roots of Tragedy in Götterdämmerung.


If the idyllically free masculine heroism of Siegfried was no salvation for humanity, then the next question remains as to what the ultimate salvation from this dark world of the Ring is. It is a dark world where even the greatest of heroes turns out to be nought but the blind plaything of a cruel destiny. Where freedom is a mere illusion. Where even he who is freer than Wotan, the God, turns out to be nothing more than an insect-like plaything of Destiny. It is a world where even the Gods themselves turn out to be little more than the playthings of a higher Destiny that will ultimately consume them.

It is typical of Wagner that it is a woman who awakens to the ultimate Destiny of the Gods and of Mankind. Even the mightiest sword brandishing masculine heroism amounts to nothing in Wagner's world, where the principle that begets Salvation, is feminine - or in Wagner's words, the Eternal Feminine. Wisdom (Sophia Σοφία) is feminine:

the suffering, self-sacrificing woman is the final true and knowing redeemer: for Love is really ‘the Eternally Feminine’ itself.

Sophia (Σοφια): Greek goddess of wisdom. Φιλοσοφια (philosophia) means love of wisdom

If all our heroes before have died the hapless victims of Destiny, such as Siegmund, Sieglinde, and finally Siegfried himself, then Brünnhilde alone knowingly embraces her Destiny. Indeed she attains her highest level of self-realisation (Selbstbewusstsein) when she willingly surrenders herself to the Destiny of the Gods, of humanity and of the universe, that she alone has fully awoken to, and gives the fruits of this Enlightenment to Wotan - thus fulfilling his ultimate wish. Brünnhilde rises up to become the very embodiment of an archaic Φιλοσοφια (Love of Wisdom) - for Schopenhauer, a primordial wisdom as ancient as that of the Verdas, Upanishads, Buddhist Sutras, as well as that of the Ancient Greeks.

The ultimate Enlightenment, it turns out is no more than the completion of Brünnhilde's understanding of what Wotan confided to her in Act II of die Walküre: "To Wotan's Will speaketh thou, say to me what thou willeth - who am I, but not thy Will?" Remember, that Brünnhilde is Wotan's wish-maiden. Even when she disobeyed him, in doing so she had granted him that which his heart had most yearned for.

Now, at the end conclusion of Götterdämmerung, Brünnhilde, the embodiment of Wotan's Will, addresses Wotan once again, and for the very last time.

Alles, alles, alles weiß ich,
alles ward mir nun frei!
Auch deine Raben hör' ich rauschen;
mit bang ersehnter Botschaft
send' ich die beiden nun heim.
Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott! -

Everything, everything I know,
All just now became clear to me!
I even hear thy ravens rustling;
bearing anxiously longed-for tidings
do I send the both of them home.
Resteth, resteth thou God! –

On the words "Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott!" the Wanderer Leitmotiv is heard peacefully dying away. 

The words "bang ersehnter Botschaft" need some explanation. The word "ersehnen" means "to yearn for", and is related to the word "Sehnsucht" (yearning), which you will be familiar to you from much Romantic repertoire. So "bang ersehnter Botschaft" means the message that Wotan yearned for with deep anxiety.  To understand the meaning of these crucial words, we should go back to an earlier post in which we saw how Wagner explained the meaning of the Ring to his revolutionary friend, August Röckel in which he also refers to Wotan as "my jovially self-annihilating God":

Wodan rises to the tragic height of willing his own downfall. This is everything that we have to learn from the history of mankind: to will the inevitable and to carry it out oneself.... 

Surely you don’t seriously suggest this magnificent woman’s symbol of love is precisely this accursed ring, then that is just what I want you to feel, and to realise that this is the most awful, most tragic peak of the power of the Nibelung’s curse: for then you will realise the real need for the whole last drama Siegfrieds Tod. This is just what we still have to go through to reach a full appreciation of the evil of gold.

Brünnhilde awakens to the root of all the evil that has caused all creatures alike to torture one another so wilfully and so senselessly: the craving for gold and power in a loveless capitalist world where everyone blindly lurches from one transient satiation of a gratuitous craving to the next. Greed is good, we are told - it is to be humanity's source of Salvation. Note Wagner's words in the Fatherland Union Paper:

In the coming contest we shall find that society will be maintained by the physical activity of individuals, and we shall destroy the nebulous notion that money possesses any inherent power. And heaven will help us ... dispel the false halo with which the unthinking mind invests this demon money. Then shall we root out the miseries engendered and nourished by public and secret usury, deceptive paper money and fraudulent speculations. This will tend to promote the emancipation of the human race...

The essence of these blind passions and cravings that drives us, for Wagner, is the Blind Will. Here is what Schopenhauer writes about the endless cravings of the Blind Will:

All willing arises from want, therefore from deficiency, and therefore from suffering. The satisfaction of a wish ends it; yet for one wish that is satisfied there remain at least ten which are denied. Further, the desire lasts long, the demands are infinite; the satisfaction is short and scantily measured out. But even the final satisfaction is itself only apparent; every satisfied wish at once makes room for a new one; both are illusions; the one is known to be so, the other not yet. No attained object of desire can give lasting satisfaction, but merely a fleeting gratification; it is like the alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive to-day that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow. Therefore, so long as our consciousness is filled by our Will, so long as we are given up to the throng of desires with their constant hopes and fears, so long as we are the subject of willing, we can never have lasting happiness nor peace.

When Brünnhilde renounces the Ring of the Nibelungs, she renounces the root of all evil in favour of that which negates the blindly destructive Power of the Will: Love. Here is how Schopenhauer presents his vision of salvation through Love (the empathy to see suffering in others - compassion in German is Mitleid or "suffering with"):

[A]s the conclusion of my exposition, [I will] show how Love .... leads to salvation, to the entire surrender of the Will to Live, i.e., of all volition, and also how another path, less soft but more frequented, leads men to the same goal, a paradoxical proposition must first be stated and explained; not because it is paradoxical, but because it is true, and is necessary to the completeness of the thought I have presented. It is this : "All Love (αγαπη caritas) is Compassion."

Thus it may be that the inner nature of holiness, self-renunciation, mortification of our own Will, asceticism, is here for the first time expressed abstractly, and free from all mythical elements, as denial of the Will to Live, appearing after the complete knowledge of its own nature has become a quieter of all volition....True Salvation, deliverance from life and suffering, cannot even be imagined without complete denial of the Will.

Love, as that self-sacrificial act of denying the essential Life Force, one's Will, is that which grants the Gift of Death. 

Schopenhauer also writes of the purifying power of suffering. He also sees this as the essence of the tragic in art and gives examples from Goethe's Faust and Shakespeare's Hamlet:

Thus in most cases the Will must be broken by great personal suffering before its self-conquest appears. Then we see the man who has passed through all the increasing degrees of affliction with the most vehement resistance, and is finally brought to the verge of despair, suddenly retire into himself, know himself and the world, change his whole nature, rise above himself and all suffering, as if purified and sanctified by it, in inviolable peace, blessedness, and sublimity, willingly renounce everything he previously desired with all his might, and joyfully embrace death. It is the refined silver of the denial of the Will to Live that suddenly comes forth from the purifying flame of suffering. It is Salvation.

That, in a nutshell is precisely the process of intense suffering and renunciation of "everything he previously desired with all his might" that Wotan goes through before he joyfully embraces death. That is Salvation, and that is what Brünnhilde will grant him.

It is to this ultimate Salvation that Brünnhilde awakens, as she rises to the final fulfilment of her destiny as Wotan's wish-maiden, by granting him that deepest wish, he most longed for most all, which he awaits for with both trepidation and deep yearning in equal measure: his Death-Wish. It is a Death that Wotan, "the jovially self-annihilating God" has willed himself and embraces. Death is the gift that Brünnhilde grants him out of the deepest Compassion and Love of her heart, as the flames of her Love for Siegfried rise up to the heavens until they engulf Valhalla in a blaze of glory, lighting up the horizon like the sunset: the twilight of the Gods is upon us.

Then as the river Rhine floods over we return musically to where we started from at the beginning of das Rheingold. As the Ring, whose Power is that of Nature itself, is returned to the source from whence it came, the music itself comes full circle and returns to its source. The Ring has come full circle.



Note:


From a full discussion of the Fatherland Union Paper see this thread.