Nietzsche and Freud - Please Join discussion

From The Genealogy of Morals, "... there is no 'being' behind doing, acting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction imposed on the doing -- the doing itself is everything"(29).

Sometimes a passage bends my ear away from the page like a stimulant, and I am roused toward impulsive thought. Suchlike happened to me upon reading this quotation. Here is the affliction:

"Spirit" - the term has a lot of philosophical baggage. Even as a materialist, however, I do not believe it is completely an empty term, so long as we recognize it does not refer to a supernatural or metaphysical entity. It is also not merely a euphemism for the neurobiology and other physical mechanisms underlying beliefs and behaviors (though it is that as well). As I see it, "spirit" is the emergent phenomena, the expression of these physical mechanisms at the scale of our perception, at the scale of the individual (which Nietzsche believes is an illusion). "Spirit", like "individual", is a useful term for emergent phenomena, so long as we don't succumb to the illusion, as Nietzsche says, that it is a discrete entity possessing free will. In some sense, matter and "spirit" are one thing (I think George Berkeley made a similar claim). We do not fully know why we believe what we believe and do what we do; and the answer will not be found in the realm of abstract reason, but in our real, raw materiality.

"The subject (or, to adopt a more popular idiom, the soul) has, therefore, been perhaps the best article of faith on earth so far, since it enables the majority of mortals... to practice that sublime self-deception -- the interpretation... of the way they simply are, as merit" (30).

spirit = soul = subject = individual = matter

What do you think of Nietzsche's idea that actor/acting/action are really one thing?
What about his idea that the "subject" is an illusion "imposed on the doing"?
What does "spirit" mean to you?

Re posts 1 and 2:

I am currently researching the issue of free will in preparation for Chapter 1 ("Is Ethics Possible? The Question of Free Will") of my forthcoming book provisionally titled Reason and Human Ethics. See my preliminary bibliographic outline here. My Goodreads "Free Will" book list is here. See also my reviews of William R. (W. R.) Klemm, Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will ( here), Sam Harris's Free Will ( here ), and Daniel Dennett's Freedom Evolves ( here).

I am currently reading (almost finished) W. R. Klemm's Atoms of Mind: The "Ghost in the Machine" Materializes (n.p.: Springer Science+Business Media, 2011). I will probably post a review of it on Goodreads by the end of this week. Klemm is a distinguished neuroscientist with decades of study, investigation, and writing on the neuroscientific basis for consciousness and free will (among other neuroscientific topics). He is a materialist who thinks that consciousness and free will arose out of the material (evolutionary) aspects of the brain. He has a difficult (for the layperson) technical theory as to how this works and how it arose in the course of evolution.

Several other books listed in my preliminary outline and in my Goodreads list are also of interest, including but not limited to those by Terrence Deacon and Jeremy Sherman (another fascinating, albeit also technical, explanation of the evolution of consciousness and free will), physicist Henry Stapp (arguing a quantum physics basis for free will), Jeffrey Schwartz (showing how free will operates in psychiatric case studies), and Norman Doidge (ditto, from the perspective of neuroplasticity).

It will likely take me several additional months of reading before I will be prepared to write my chapter on free will. It will probably be a few years before the book is finished and published.

Nietzsche was good at bon mots, but he knew nothing of modern neuroscience, most of which has developed over the last several decades.

Following up on my preceding post, I have now reviewed here W. R. Klemm, Atoms of Mind: The "Ghost in the Machine" Materializes (n.p.: Springer Science+Business Media, 2011).