Nietzsche (is Re: Homer, hyperbole & ad hominem

[jbor]

Thanks. I think that rather than "Free Will" Nietzsche saw the religious 
ethos as a life-denying impulse, a herd-instinct or slave-mentality. But
what I find interesting, and most relevant to Pynchon, is Nietzsche's
perspectival strategy whereby he doesn't openly challenge or posit
philosophical positions with logical disputation, but comes at them from a
range of different disciplines and povs to make his case by exemplification;
and also the challenge he set himself to find a way past the nihilism which
the "death of God" and the end of metaphysics which he announced (following
Schopenhauer) would inevitably bring about.

best

----------
>From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>

> A little Nietzsche for ya now:
>
>
> The Will, says the poet Nietzsche, aims at the expansion of
> power. However, it does not aim from liberum arbitrium, free
> choice, but from necessity, it can do nothing else. In this
> sense the Will to power is opposed to free will: opposed to
> the Free Will of the Christian and the Jew and their priests
> and their God. For Nietzsche, like Freud, Christian Freedom
> of the Will is an illusion. N says that Free Will  is an
> illusion invented by priests to expand their power by making
> Man responsible for his actions and hence liable to
> punishment. This illusion of Free Will  enhances Man's
> feeling of power, but for N, the death of God is also the
> death of this illusion of power, the death also of the
> illusion of God's order and most importantly to our V.V.,
> the death of creativity. The creative God in N is replaced
> by an eternal recurrence: "the whole music box repeats
> eternally its tune which may never be called a melody" and
> the free will of conscious thinking Man is reduced to an
> illusion and surface and sign world, a world made common and
> mean by the consciousness of Man, a world corrupted,
> falsified, reduced to superficialities, and generalizations,
> a world where the instincts and physiological demands are
> the engines of our souls.
>