Nietzsche, Freud, love-death

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> Thanks. I think that rather than "Free Will" Nietzsche saw the religious
> ethos as a life-denying impulse, a herd-instinct or slave-mentality. 

Well  yes, a herd mentality, and like morality, science,
metaphysics, a lie, an illusion. But not rather than "Free
Will."

 "We realize the impossibility of any liberum arbitrium
(Free Will) or intelligible freedom."  	--WTP BK.1.8

Even the creation of, the invention of, the will of the lie
or the will of illusion that Free Will is possible is not
freely created according to N. 

Man creates these illusions not from free choice or because
he has free will but as a necessary consequence of what he
is. 



This may be of interest when we get to the generations of 37
and 98 and when we read Chapter 11 of the novel V. 

Metaphysics, morality, religion, science---in this book
these things merit consideration only as various forms of
lies...man must be a liar by nature, he must be above all an
ARTIST. And he is one: metaphysics, religion, reality,
science---all of them only products of his will to art, to
lie, to flight from "truth", to negation of "truth." 

--WTP BK.3.853 

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.

Yes, I hope you will elaborate. 

"The wisest man would be the one richest in contradictions,
who has, as it were, antennae for all types of men--as well
as his great moments of grand harmony--a rare accident even
in us!" WTP BK.2.259

 Both P and N, like Freud,  present Man in conflict, a
conflict that is fundamental, basic, innate.  In N,
illusions arise, as all phenomena,  from an elemental
conflict of basic forces or instincts. These instinctual
conflicts cannot be resolved, no dialectic is possible
either. Early on, Freud too worked with basic or
ego-instinct conflicts, hunger for instance, and object
instincts, such as love (we find these in V.), but more
importantly (I know of no evidence that TRP read Nietzsche,
does anyone?, but he read deeply in Freud to write GR, he
mentions the return of the repressed in the Luddite essay
too, I think?) Freud revised, refined, (Oh those dusty old
Greeks again) his theory making the fundamental conflict
that of the instinct of Life, or Eros, and the instinct of
Death, or Thanatos. Here in Chapter 4 of V. P includes
Tchaikovsky's R&J Overture, "the eternal drama of love and
death...", and as Cowart notes in The Art of Allusion, all
of the operatic allusions in V., with the exception of Don
Giovanni, are variations on this theme. P, as is his habit,
often with sardonic and subtle irony bends and distorts the
"texts" (poems, operas, dramas, ballets, and so on) to his
purposes and then after, almost like Homer or Milton, after
parading them all on stage, love-death Romantic, Love-Death
Tragic, and so on, the stage becomes the War, the great War
where all these love-deaths are multiplied ten million fold.
P's metaphor for the love-death theme is "a single melody."
In N the creative God is replaced by an eternal recurrence:
"the whole music box repeats eternally its tune which may
never be called a melody."