‘Guilt, Bad Conscience, and Related Matters’, the second essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, is a difficult, winding and far-reaching essay, but its general argument might be summed up like this: guilt is the price humans have paid for entering civilised society. And morality has its roots in power, not justice.
This essay builds upon and diverges from the themes in the first essay. So, if you haven’t seen the video on that, you can watch it here.
I’d also like to preface this video by saying this: this essay is beyond doubt hugely influential philosophically and historically. I also find it very problematic, and while it is full of powerful, insightful and important ideas, you can also see some of the reasons Nietzsche is so often co-opted by the far-right.
With that in mind, I’d find it difficult to produce a balanced, neutral introduction. I will try to do this for the most part, but this will also be a critical introduction, presenting fundamental concepts while alluding briefly to a few points I find problematic.
Nietzsche starts the essay by arguing that one of the fundamental traits that raises humans above other animals is our ability to make promises.
This means remembering to do something, to act a certain way in the future. To be able to say, ‘I will’, and, ‘I will do’.
He sees this as the basis of morality – the origins of responsibility.
Promising, acting, responsibility, they all make up man’s conscience.
Guilt is then born of breaking promises, actual or metaphorical. Pride, on the other hand, grows out of keeping them.
In tribal times, Nietzsche theorises, a promise was like a debt to be paid to a creditor. I promise to do something for you in return for you doing something for me – especially important before money started circulating.
The German word for guilt, schuld, has the same roots as the German word for debt, shulden.
Promises and guilt are then born out of the relationship between the creditor and the debtor.
If I break my promise I must be punished. The tribe or community is galvanised by promises and so the creditor-debtor relationship becomes the basis for social rules and politics as a whole.
In punishment for broken promises a certain pleasure must be extracted by the wronged creditor – the powerful extracting from the powerless – a pleasure to remind the community not to break promises.
Nietzsche says that, ‘to make someone suffer is pleasure in its highest form’. A ‘true feast’. He cites public executions and torture as evidence of this.
It is passages like this where we find Nietzsche at his most problematic. It’s a problem of what I’ll call polemical emphasis, where you can see why his works are so easily co-opted by authoritarians.
That being said, you don’t have to agree with this for the rest of Nietzsche’s argument to hold.
You could say that it was important to see promise breakers punished in some way, without arguing that it was pleasurable, enjoyable. Then again, maybe there is some pleasure in seeing someone get their just deserts. It’s just that today to suffer means to be locked-up, and before it was normal to be tortured.
Either way, Nietzsche writes: ‘A thing must be burnt in so that it stays in the memory: only something which continues to hurt stays in the memory’.
He goes on: ‘a few ideas come to be made ineradicable, omnipresent, unforgettable, “fixed,” in order to hypnotize the whole nervous and intellectual system through these “fixed ideas” – and ascetic procedures and lifestyles are a method for freeing those ideas from competition with all other ideas, of making them “unforgettable.”’
Bad actions must be celebrated, memorialised, sermonised, if society is to remember not to do them.
We then start to see two types of punishment developing in pre-civilizational culture.
When the strong punish the weak, they are level-headed because they are punishing the act, and are not fearful or resentful of the weak – they’re not bothered by the weak man. The strong says, ‘you have broken a promise, you must be punished, but I’m not fearful of you, you don’t mean anything to me, so I’ll punish you and move on. I’m focused on myself’.
But when the weak punishes the strong for breaking promises he is resentful, gleeful at getting his own back – he is a man of resentment, a man of revenge as we saw in the first essay. The weak says, ah, you’ve broken a promise and now I have the community behind me ready to punish, and I also want revenge, I’m fearful of you and want you to suffer so that you don’t try to take advantage of me again.
In ancient times, the promise-breaker was punished, pain was extracted, and everyone returned to their lives.
But with resentment, or slave-morality, we keep strength and power in check so as not to let the strong take power over us.
Nietzsche calls this ‘bad conscience’.
For Nietzsche, all life – plant and animal – develops through the ‘will to power’ – the desire to grow, be stronger, become safer, spread, reproduce – and humans are no different.
This bad conscience, then, this resentment and revenge of the weak over the strong, limits the will to power.
Why? Because once a system of moral codes, language, aesthetics, art, courts, laws, culture arise around it, they contain that seed of revenge, of wanting to limit the power of the strong.
This then becomes psychologised, turned inward, makes us question our actions all of the time. Creates a kind of introverted morality. Makes us all weak.
Nietzsche says punishment of this sort tames us, rather than makes us better.
He says, ‘this is what I call the internalization of man…’.
His argument, if we consider it in the context of the Genealogy‘s first essay, is that our understanding of morality today is based upon the weak protecting themselves against the strong.
This has led to bad conscience.
Bad conscience is conscience turned inwards. An over-questioning, an inner turmoil, an introversion.
If Christian morality is based on weakness and humility, then our consciences are weak too.
Nietzsche wants a morality based on strength so that we can push forward.
I think this is a good place to see both problems and a defence of Nietzsche.
Problematically, his argument doesn’t acknowledge the possibility that slave-morality – limiting one’s power, keeping avarice in check, abhorring greed – is a rational psychological mechanism that lies behind a cohesive and strong community. That it’s completely necessary.
Alternatively, in defence of Nietzsche, it could be argued that he wants a community based on everyone’s strength. That the very structure of a morality based on weakness is one that keeps us weak, whereas one based on strength will make us strong.
He says, ‘Bad conscience is a sickness, there is no point in denying it, but a sickness rather like pregnancy’.
Nietzsche is not saying that we should go backwards to the morality of the strong, but that there is something new to be discovered, a new type of justice, of morality.
He ends with a call to tear down this bad conscience.
He says, ‘this anti-christ, this anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and nothingness – he must come one day…’.
What Nietzsche wants is the possibility for us all to be strong, powerful and moral in some way. And he’s not saying he has all the answers.
The problems I have with this essay are mainly ones of polemical emphasis. The will to power, for example, has nefarious connotations, whether you mean them or not, while power is a nebulous and inexact analytical concept.
Similarly, the possibilities of the powerful enforcing their justice on the powerless is just as much a distortion, an example of bad conscience, as the weak enforcing their justice on the strong. And allusions to pain being better than guilt, swift violence being better than drawn out worry, or the authority of the strong being better than the softness of democracy have obvious and worrying connotations.
To be fair to Nietzsche, these connotations can be seen more clearly in the light of 20th century events than in his period.
It is easy to think of authoritarian regimes when he writes like this. But read with his other works in mind, it is useful to think of Nietzsche as talking about psychology and culture, while always remembering the context of European Christendom, as opposed to our politics and world today. Reading him like this redeems these points somewhat.
All that being said, this essay is extremely important. It inspired much of 20th century philosophy – Heidegger, Foucault, and much of postmodernism. He sets up Freud – unconscious desires. The psychological reading of religion. The dangers of nihilism and a world without religion. There is so much here that it is impossible to overemphasise its importance. Nietzsche wants to draw out, controversialise and problematise what we think of as normal or natural, so as to shine a light on our cultural disposition and find a path forward.
To me, the challenge here is to draw out what’s important while downplaying the speculative parts that may be tainted with Nietzsche’s own biases.
