Nietzsche's Bad Conscience
On the Genealogy of Morality, Essay II
26 March 2024
In Genealogy, Nietzsche explores the origin and evolution of morality in Western society. Nietzsche suspects that conventional ideas of morality, based on altruistic values, do not help us thrive. He argues that, in early societies, the concept of "good" was associated with the qualities of the ruling class, i.e. strength, aggression, and ambition. The oppressed class, however, despised the ruling class, and developed a new concept of "good" that was based on their own qualities, i.e. meekness, humility, and compassion. Their effort successfully undermined the ruling class's values, and the new concept of "good" became the dominant moral code thereafter. This slave morality, as Nietzsche calls it, extends to modern society, and has had catastrophic consequences. People, obsessed with being "good" in the oppressive sense, are denied any outlet for their natural instincts, including aggression and cruelty, and are forced to repress them. This repression leads to guilt, mental anguish, suffering, depression, self-harm, and, in the extreme case, a desire for death. Nietzsche extends his criticism of slave morality to asceticism, claiming that the ascetic ideals are just as unhealthy as the ideals of the oppressed class, because they similarly encourage people to reject their natural instincts, and to withdraw from life.
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Guilt, bad conscience, and related matters. Nietzsche begins by discussing promises. In order to keep promises, we need to develop a conscience. Conscience is the awareness of one's responsibility to keep his promises. A person with a conscience knows to keep his promises, and to repudiates those who break theirs, which implies a sense of superiority over others. This sense of superiority is well founded because a person with a conscience is someone who has transcended the customs of his society, and is able to act and express himself freely based on his own values. He is more "sovereign" than his peers, who admire his freedom and willpower. He has better judgement, because he understands the origin and purpose of the customs of his society. It is for these reasons that the sovereign individual is granted the "prerogative to make promises", because society trusts him to keep his word. He is also inclined to keep his promises, because doing so affirms his position of superiority over his peers.
Nietzsche then discusses "bad conscience", which is based on guilt. A person with a bad conscience keeps his promises not out of duty, but out of fear of punishment. Promises have to be remembered, and one thing people remember well is pain. Therefore, by juxtaposing the two, it is possible to develop a conscience in a person, and to compel him to keep his promises to act in a certain way, and then threatening him with pain in case he breaks them. Nietzsche writes that this form of "bad conscience", based on guilt and punishment, is rooted in the more basic ideas of credit and debt. He points out the etymological connection between the German words "schuld" and "schulden", meaning guilt and debt, respectively. Under this view, a person incurs a debt when he makes a promise. If he breaks the promise, he is expected to pay it back, in the form of pain, to the promisee, the creditor. The creditor, in turn, gets the pleasure of seeing the debtor suffer. The same principle applies at the societal level, where "the community has the same basic relationship to its members as the creditor to the debtor." A person lives in a community, and enjoys the benefits of communal living: shelter, protection, peace, and company. He makes pledges, or promises, to the community to follow its laws and customs. If he breaks these promises, the community, the cheated creditor, makes him pay up by punishing him.
Nietzsche suspects that the pleasure derived from seeing others suffer is a natural human instinct. Such an instinct may seem obscene today, but he points out that historical events often included violent components, such as public executions, and makes the claim that civilisation was healthier when people were not ashamed of this part of their nature. Such feelings of shame grew out of the priestly moral code that teaches us to repress our natural instincts. Nietzsche does not doubt the cruelty of punishment, but he argues that the pain of punishment is in no way more intense than the pain of shame over one's own instincts. The former is sensible, we can see it, whereas the latter is invisible, directed inward to the sphere of the imaginative and spiritual. Since people are unable to see the source of their shame, they resorted to inventing gods and images to explain their suffering. This led further to other deceptive practices such as the masking of weakness through apparent strength, and the invention of "evil" to explain the existence of suffering. Nietzsche caveats that, yes, ancient societies also possessed their own fair share of gods and images, but human cruelties then were framed as festivals for the gods, something that was, in the final analysis, celebrated.
Therefore, it is possible to develop "bad conscience", or guilt, in a person by threatening him with pain. However, Nietzsche questions the effectiveness of this method. He writes that often criminals don't feel guilty when they are punished. Instead, punishments become something of an inconvenience to them, a kind of nuisance that they have to deal with. Rather than thinking, "I shouldn't have done that," they think to themselves: "How can I avoid getting caught next time?" Punishments also make them feel more alienated, and they become even more resistant to the ruling class's power. They grow more critical of the ruling class's actions, and begin to question their actions, undermining their authority and legitimacy.
Nietzsche traces the origin of our bad conscience to the time when we started to form political associations. Human beings are naturally aggressive, we conquer and dominate others because it is part of our natural desire to do so. However, as we began to live in larger groups, we started to suppress our natural instincts of aggression, because violence and cruelty are destabilising and disruptive to communal living. We started to think about how to live together, how to act in relation to one another, and how to maintain peace and order. All this thinking is very unnatural to the human animal, Nietzsche writes. We put in place systems that apply pressure on our natural instincts. We can no longer act as we please, for fear of punishment. With no outlet for their expression, our instincts are turned inward, in a process Nietzsche calls the "internalisation of man". The inner grows and expands, gaining depth, breadth and height in proportion to the degree that the external is suppressed. The turning inward of our aggressive instincts is the source of our bad conscience, of our guilt, and it has led to tremendous mental anguish and suffering. We shame ourselves for our natural instinct to inflict violence and cruelty, and we hate ourselves for it. Our "worse and most insidious illness" is our sickness of ourselves. Nietzsche writes that our bad conscience did not immediately grow out of the act of conquering, but it was only later when people started to form larger political associations, where systems such as the legal and penal systems were necessarily put in place to maintain order and stability. It's an ugly picture, Nietzsche agrees, but we shouldn't be discouraged by it. The force that drove our ancestors to conquer and create political associations is the same force that gives rise to our bad conscience, only that in the former it is directed outward onto others, whereas in the latter it is directed inward onto ourselves. Nietzsche calls this force the "will to power", and claims that is is also the source of our capacity to imagine and idealise. In other words, the "will to power" is the source of beauty itself. This explains why people engage in altruistic acts, and why we are willing to sacrifice ourselves for others, because in doing so, we are denying our own ugly nature.
Nietzsche then describes how his theory of bad conscience fits into the context of religion. First, he uses the idea of credit and debt to explain the emergence of the abstract concepts of gods. In tribal societies, there is often a conviction that the present generation could not have existed without the deeds and sacrifices of the ancestors, which leads to a feeling of indebtedness. This debt is repaid through rituals of sacrifice, which became more elaborate as the tribe grew larger and stronger. Therefore, in the most powerful tribes, where the feeling of debt, and of dread, is the strongest, the ancestors become so revered that they become worshipped as gods. These primeval gods continue to exert their influence even as tribal societies evolve into more complex societies, and it culminated in its most abstract form in the Christian God. However, as "bad conscience" emerges, we started to feel guilty, and think to ourselves that we will never be able to repay our debt to God. This is the basis of the Christian doctrine of the original sin. Also part of the Christian doctrine is the idea that God pays the debt for us, out of his love for us. Nietzsche is highly skeptical of this view. Instead, he explains what he thinks is actually happening. The formation of large political associations lead necessarily to the creation of civil laws that suppress our natural instincts. We then feel guilty and ashamed at ourselves for our tendencies to be violent and cruel. The symbol of the Chrstian God, who is perfectly benevolent, stands in stark contrast to our own ugly nature, and becomes the perfect instrument for self-torture. We feel inadequate compared to God, and we berate ourselves for it. Even today, as societies grow more secular, the persistent sense of guilt and shame over our natural tendencies reveals the deep extent to which Christian morality has ingrained itself within our culture.
Nietzsche wonders if we will ever be able to turn the situation around. We will need to reconnect with our natural instincts, and to find ways to express them, so that we can overcome our bad conscience. Nietzsche cites the example of the ancient Greeks, who worshipped various gods that represented their own natural instincts. Whenever a tendency to be violent or cruel arose, they would attribute it to the influence of a particular god, which leaves them free to act on their instincts without feeling guilty.