GRGR (15): Good & Evil (was Enzian...)

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Lorentzen / Nicklaus wrote:
> 
> rj schrieb:
> 
> > Imo "evil" doesn't inhere in human nature: morality is simply a product
> > of cultural conditioning. Witness the different attitudes to murder and
> > retribution amongst different cultures, and even the changing foci of
> > morality through the history of Western Christianity.
> 
>   Sounds like Nietzsche's "There are no moral phenomena, but only moral
>   interpretations of phenomena".
>                                                    KFL


Yes, Nietzche or the Sophist Protagoras---the father of
relativism. Or Michel Foucalt, another sophist. Nietzche is
known for his perspectivism--"The sigh of the search for
knowledge, Oh my greed!," but I don't think this applies to
Pynchon, but rather to  rj's inescapable limitations of
personal (pre) conditioned perspective. In any event, 
Nietzche, despite his "surface and sign world," in Beyond
Good and Evil, for example, rejects the Sophistic reality
with a direct allusion to the creed of the sophistic
philosophers and the most telling statement of the sophistic
ethic, "man is the measure of things---Protagoras.

Here's what Nietzche says: 

"the definite should be worth more than the indefinite, and
mere appearance worth less than "truth"--such estimates
might be, in spite of their regulative importance for US,
nevertheless mere foreground estimates, a certain kind of
NIAISERIE which may be necessary for the preservation of
just such beings as we are. Supposing, that is, that not
just man is the "measure of things..." 

			Nietzche, Beyond Good and Evil


What I find in Nietzche and the  so called "Neo-Nietzcheans"
is Freudian conflict. And I believe that Pynchon rejects
this irreconcilable conflict in favor of a dialectic
(religious dialectic, directly opposing Freud and CO.). The
best example I can think of is Pointsman's "Yang AND Yin." 

"Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and
pursuit, is thought to aim at some good..."