Marcuse, "Philosophical Interlude"

[Dave Monroe]

Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into
Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966 [1955]).

Nietzsche envisages the eternal return of the finite exactly as it
is--in its full concreteness and finiteness.  This is the total
affirmation of the life instincts ....  The eternal return is the will
and vision of an erotic attitude toward being for which necessity and
fulfillment coincide.  (123)

Eternity, long since the ultimate consolation of an alienated existence,
had been made into an instrument of repression by its relegation to a
transcendental world--unreal reward for real suffering.  Here, eternitry
is reclaimed for the fair earth .... (123)

Death is; it is conquered only if it is followed by the real rebirth of
everything that was before death here on earth--not as mere repetition
but as willed and wanted re-creation.  The eternla return thus includes
the return of suffering, but suffering as a means for more
gratification, for the aggrandizement of joy.  The horror of pain
derives from the "instinct of weakness," from the fact that pain
overwhelms and becomes final and fatal.  Suffering can be affirmed if
man's "power is sufficiently strong" to make pain a stimulus for
affirmation--a link in the chain of joy.  (123)

Nietzsche's philosophy contains enough elements of teh terrible past:
his celebration of pain and power perpetuates features of teh morality
which he strives to overcome.  However, the image of a new reality
principle breaks the repressive context and anticipates the liberation
from teh archaic heritage.  "The earth has all too long been a
madhouse!"  For Nietzsche, teh liberation depends on teh reversal of teh
sense of guilt; manbkind must come to associate teh bad conscience not
with the affirmation but with the denial of the life instincts, not with
the rebellion but with the acceptance of repressive ideals.  (123-4)