"We, on the other hand, dealing not with the living substance [as Weismann did as regards the soma which only dies in itself and the germ-plasm which recreates and transmits itself beyond itself] but with the forces operating in it [die in ihm tätigen Kräfte], have been led to distinguish two kinds of instincts [Trieben]: those which seek to lead what is living to death, and others, the sexual instincts [die Sexualtriebe], which are perpetually attempting and achieving a renewal of life. This sounds like a dynamic corollary to Weismann's morphological theory." (Freud. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. SE XVIII. 46)
This sounds to me strikingly Nietzschean. On the one hand, Freud raises questions not in terms of substance or morphology, but of force which employs the theory of dynamics/economy/topography. On the other hand, he asks whether there is something other than/beyond self-preservation. Another implication is that, in analogy with biology, "the sexual instincts" mentioned here are extremely crude and primitive [ursprünglich] drives-impulses. In other words, these forces are not what consciousness can control, but rather something competing with each other within the living organism.
The speculative vision Freud offers here is truly vertiginous: it traces human history back to the birth of life in this planet, the moment when the inanimate turns into the animate. This gigantic take on life at the planetary level on the one hand (a genealogy of life) and at the micro level on the other (forces in living organisms) is strangely inhuman, which is, one might say, more appropriate for SF than for science. Indeed in reading and rereading this chapter, I kept remembering Stapledon's speculative ethnography of other universes and other futures, Last and First Men and Star Maker.
Then, it might be not far-fetched to compare Freud's wild but patient imagination predicated on biology to an equally SFish, equally provocative thought experiment Nietzsche offers in the beginning of "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense": "Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ”world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly-as though the world’s axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. There is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately swell up like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought."
