> Freud would say that civilization itself was largely built on
> repression
> brought
> on through the development of the civilizing behaviour of societal
> organization.
>
> What I think Nietzsche was getting at was the need for human beings
> to actually
> have an ego, in the Freudian sense, to repress the nihilism of the
> id, which in
> turn would mean the repression/mastery of sadistic tendencies. At
> the same
> time, he argued for the recognition and response to instinct within
> the human
> order.
>
> Communists like Marx would argue that many of humanity's cruelest
> acts are
> products of societies with people brought up, socialized, if you
> will, within
> systems of class domination and brutality. What Freud proposed was
> to adjust
> to these societies and accept them as "the best of all possible
> civilizations"--stop being discontented. What Marx argued was that
> if we
> really wanted to live as freely as our productive capabilities
> promised, we
> should overthrow class society and create a classless one, where we
> wouldn't be
> obliged to suppress the socialization of sadism anymore. The
> producers should
> become the masters of their own social relations.
Freud's ontological and anthropological premises differ from Marx's and from those of the tradition in thought to which Marx belongs.
They are "materialist" in a sense radically different from Marx's "historical materialism." They have no space for the ontologicdal idea of an objective and knowable "good" that defines the "good life" and for the anthropological idea of human being as the potentially fully rational and hence fully free being able ultimately to know this "good" and actualize it in a good life in a good community. In Marx, as in Hegel, this requires the full development of mastery over instinct determined willing and acting, the substitution of "reason" for instinct.
In Freud, in contrast, the ego's control of instinct necessarily produces discontent; it leads away from the highest form of happiness possible for human being.
“The feeling of happiness resulting from the satisfaction of a wild instinctual impulse that has not been tamed by the ego is incomparably more intense than that occasioned by the sating of one that has been tamed. Here we have an economic explanation for the irresistibility of perverse impulses, perhaps for the attraction of whatever is forbidden.” (Civilization and Its Discontents)
According to Freud's final theory of the instincts, one of these instincts is the "death instinct." Reshaped somewhat and fused with the sexual instinct by the functioning of the ego, satisfaction of this instinct is reworked into pleasure in watching and making people suffer.
Nietzsche also makes this pleasure instinctive:
"Watching suffering makes people feel good, making someone suffer makes them feel even better—that is a harsh principle, but an old, powerful, and human, all-too-human major principle, which, by the way, even the apes might agree with. For people say that, in thinking up bizarre cruelties, the apes already anticipate a great many human actions and, as it were, act them out." (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, section 6 <http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/genealogy2.htm>)
Kaufman argues that this should not be read as an argument for a return to desiring and acting out "making someone suffer." Instead, according to him, Nietzsche, like Marx, looks forward to the complete mastery of instinct through the full development and actualization of human "powers" and their embodiment in fully rational self-determined "scientific" and artistic activity within relations of "freindship" in a sense that sublates Socrates, Plato and Aristotle,
On this reading, Nietzsche should not be interpreted as conceiving all ideas of the "good" and of the "good life" as masks for the instinctive pleasure in cruelty. In particular, the "good" as "friendship" is not such a mask. It involves the full mastery of instinct by reason and a consequent "power" to realize true "happiness" ("eudaimonia"). (I take it the answer to James Daly, on this interpretation of Nietzsche, would be that, In so far as the idea of the Golden Rule isn't fully consistent with this idea of "friendship," it too expresses some remaining unmastered instinct for cruelty.)
In "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault, in contrast, interprets Nietzsche as rejecting the tradition in thought about the "good" and the "good life" represented by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel and Marx. In particular, Nietzsche is interpreted as conceiving every "concept of goodness" as an expression of "the endlessly repeated play of dominations" and as endorsing the direct acting out of instinct as the source of the highest form of happiness.
"only a single drama is ever staged in this "non–place ['the Entstehungsherd of the concept of goodness']," the endlessly repeated play of dominations. The domination of certain men over others leads to the differentiation of values; class domination generates the idea of liberty; and the forceful appropriation of things necessary to survival and the imposition of a duration not intrinsic to them account for the origin of logic. This relationship of domination is no more a 'relationship' than the place where it occurs is a place; and, precisely for this reason, it is fixed, throughout its history, in rituals, in meticulous procedures that impose rights and obligations. It establishes marks of its power and engraves memories on things and even within bodies. It makes itself accountable for debts and gives rise to the universe of rules, which is by no means designed to temper violence, but rather to satisfy it. Following traditional beliefs, it would be false to think that total war exhausts itself in its own contradictions and ends by renouncing violence and submitting to civil laws. On the contrary, the law is a calculated and relentless pleasure, delight in the promised blood, which permits the perpetual instigation of new dominations and the staging of meticulously repeated scenes of violence. The desire for peace, the serenity of compromise, and the tacit acceptance of the law, far from representing a major moral conversion or a utilitarian calculation that gave rise to the law, are but its result and, in point of fact, its perversion: 'guilt, conscience, and duty had their threshold of emergence in the right to secure obligations; and their inception, like that of any major event on earth, was saturated in blood.' Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination." <http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/m/jmh403/ nietzsche_genealogy_history.htm>
"Even in the greatly expanded form it assumes today, the will to knowledge does achieve a universal truth; man is not given an exact and serene mastery of nature. On the contrary, it ceaselessly multiplies the risks, creates dangers in every area; it breaks down illusory defenses; it dissolves the unity of the subject; it releases those elements of itself that are devoted to its subversion and destruction. Knowledge does not slowly detach itself from its empirical roots, the initial needs from which it arose, to become pure speculation subject only to the demands of reason; its development is not tied to the constitution and affirmation of a free subject; rather, it creates a progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence. Where religions once demanded the sacrifice of bodies, knowledge now calls for experimentation on ourselves, calls us to the sacrifice of the subject of knowledge. "The desire for knowledge has been transformed among us into a passion which fears no sacrifice, which fears nothing but its own extinction. It may be that mankind will eventually perish from this passion for knowledge. If not through passion, then through weakness. We must be prepared to state our choice: do we wish humanity to end in fire and light or to end on the sands?" We should now replace the two great problems of nineteenth-century philosophy, passed on by Fichte and Hegel (the reciprocal basis of truth and liberty and the possibility of absolute knowledge), with the theme that 'to perish through absolute knowledge may well form a part of the basis of being.' This does not mean, in terms of a critical procedure, that the will to truth is limited by the intrinsic finitude of cognition, but that it loses all sense of limitations and all claim to truth in its unavoidable sacrifice of the subject of knowledge. 'It may be that there remains one prodigious idea which might be made to prevail over every other aspiration, which might overcome the most victorious: the idea of humanity sacrificing itself. It seems indisputable that if this new constellation appeared on the horizon, only the desire for truth, with its enormous prerogatives, could direct and sustain such a sacrifice. For to knowledge, no sacrifice is too great. Of course, this problem has never been posed.'" <http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/m/jmh403/ nietzsche_genealogy_history.htm>
Ted