Second Essay – “Guilt,” “Bad Conscience,” and the Like

110 While the first essay explains the relatively straightforward process by which the priestly caste established the morality of pity through spiritual revenge, the second essay covers a wider range of historical processes in a patchwork manner. The ultimate point of the essay is to establish how the phenomenon of “bad conscience” developed as a symptom of mankind’s socialization. However, to explain this development Nietzsche finds it necessary to cover the origin and nature of many related concepts such as memory, contracts, justice, punishment, cruelty, values, and deification. His portrayals of these concepts are so rich and original that a dissertation could be dedicated to each one of them alone. Since my intention is to explain how this second essay contributes to his larger theory of morality, I will focus on those parts of the essay that bear the most relevance to morality, and I will explain aspects of the other concepts only when it is necessary to do so. There are two themes of this essay that are particularly pertinent to Nietzsche’s theory of morality. The first involves the role the so-called “morality of mores” played in the molding of men into entities that could form stable communities. The second involves the divergent ways in which moralities can deal with the bad conscience and, in particular, the way in which the morality of pity has adopted and thrived upon the bad conscience. The explanations that Nietzsche makes regarding morality in the second essay bear no direct relation to the slave revolt in morality he describes in the first essay. Therefore, a reading of the first essay is not needed to understand the second essay, and vice-versa. Yet, both of the essays attempt to explain the morality of pity from different angles, thereby providing a more comprehensive understanding of that morality. Thus, it 111 will be important to consider how these essays complement each other as we examine their separate explanations for the same phenomena.

Nietzsche’s ideas about the “morality of mores” are intertwined with his explanation of how man evolved along with his socialization. He starts the essay by stating: “To breed an animal with the right to make promises—is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man?” (GM, 57) This claim reflects a belief that men were originally not capable of performing an important cooperative task, namely making promises, and it implies that such men had to develop that capability so as to live and interact with one another effectively. Nietzsche accounts for men’s original inability to make promises by describing forgetfulness as an overwhelming “faculty of repression” that prevented men from remembering what they promised (GM, 57). Accordingly, he claims that mankind’s major step toward making promises was to breed “a memory, with the aid of which forgetfulness is abrogated in certain cases” (GM, 58). Furthermore, he claims that “man himself must first of all have become calculable, regular, [and] necessary” so that the future would be more predictable and, consequently, the environment for making promises more hospitable (GM, 58). Nietzsche cites the “morality of mores” as a central means by which both of these ends—the development of memory and the regularization of man—were achieved. While he provides a meaning for this morality in On the Genealogy of Morals, he points to a few aphorisms in Daybreak for elaborations of it. The ninth aphorism of that book, as discussed in the previous chapter, defines morality simply as obedience to customs and portrays morality as a social device that compels men to standardize their behavior along 112 certain socially acceptable lines. As I take his identification of morality with obedience to customs as a universal definition for morality, his term “morality of mores” in On the Genealogy of Morals means morality qua morality (or morality, generally speaking) for all intents and purposes. If there is anything about his use of “morality of mores” that differs from “morality qua morality,” it is just that the morality of mores is an especially strong form of morality that long ago commanded men to obey a great many precise customs. However, it is expressed in such a way mainly to emphasize that his definition of morality depends on the idea of mores, or customs, and to stress the difference between morality qua morality and any particular form of morality, such as the morality of pity.

From what we have learned about Nietzsche’s definition of morality, his insistence that it makes men conform to social standards and therefore become more regular is readily understandable. His claim that it aids men in the formation of a memory is less so. The way in which morality does this is through a particular type of morality, one that governed men when they were just beginning to establish social units. Nietzsche claims that “pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics” and therefore the morality that aided the development of memory was one that condoned the infliction of pain and suffering (GM, 61). Within a discussion of the ancient creditor-debtor relationship in which men are naturally inclined to seek recompense in any form from others who have hurt them, he portrays a “morality of voluntary suffering” (to use a term borrowed from Daybreak) that facilitated the ability of ancient creditors to exact payments from their debtors. These creditors and debtors were not necessarily those of the financial sense to 113 which we are accustomed. He means debt very broadly as anything that may be owed to another (and speaking even more broadly, anything that provides justification for revenge). Repayments for primordial men, on the other hand, were consistently exacted in a particularly crude manner as “recompense in the form of a kind of pleasure—the pleasure of being allowed to vent one’s power freely upon one who is powerless” (GM, 65). Morality aided in the formation of a memory by giving men an incentive to keep promises through the creation of a climate in which men were encouraged to exact repayments through cruel, painful means. As such, it was responsible for equipping man with the ability to make promises and live in a community successfully, although it did so by using means that shock the modern consciousness. Nietzsche’s description of mankind’s development of a memory and sensitivity to fulfilling one’s obligations is necessary for his next moral theme, because these two things, as we will see shortly, were required for mankind to view their ancestors in a particular way. The second moral theme of the second essay concerns the bad conscience itself. Nietzsche describes the bad conscience as “the serious illness that man was bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever experienced—that change which occurred when he found himself finally enclosed within the walls of society and peace” (GM, 84). He claims that the socialization of mankind constituted such a violent break from man’s condition in the wild that his “old instincts for freedom” remained while simultaneously becoming “disvalued and ‘suspended’” by the demands of society (GM, 85, 84). Since these “old instincts had not suddenly ceased to make their usual demands” yet could not express themselves in their natural, hitherto normal ways, they “had to seek new, and as it were, subterranean gratifications” (GM, 84). These gratifications constituted the “internalization of man” as instincts formerly discharged outwardly were forced to discharge internally (GM, 84). These instincts included “hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction” (GM, 85). Therefore, internal discharges involved the soul “mak[ing] itself suffer out of a joy in making suffer” (GM, 87). Thus arose in mankind the so-called “will to self- maltreatment,” a perverse tendency of men to hurt themselves so as to satisfy certain drives at the expense of their overall well-being (GM, 88).

How this will to self-maltreatment manifested itself in the bad conscience, however, requires further explanation. Nietzsche claims that “within the original tribal community…the living generation always recognized a judicial duty towards earlier generations” (GM, 88). By this he means that the tribe held “the conviction…that it is only through the sacrifices and accomplishments of the ancestors that the tribe exists— and that one has to pay them back with sacrifices and accomplishments” (GM, 89). As such, Nietzsche establishes a creditor-debtor relationship between community members and their ancestors. He contends that this relationship became more important, or “the fear of the ancestor and his power” increased, “in exactly the same measure as the power of the tribe itself increas[ed]” (GM, 89). With this increase in fear came an increase in the ancestor’s stature until he was finally “transfigured into a god” (GM, 89). This god was then further transfigured into a monotheistic and universal god as communities and their traditions mixed. In such a manner came the “advent of the Christian God…accompanied by the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness on earth” (GM, 90). Furthermore, a “moralization of these concepts,” in which the actual reason for the tribe’s feeling of debt is lost, solidifies “the conception of irredeemable penance” (GM, 91). Therefore, a community ends up with a powerful yet ambiguous feeling of debt that it experiences as guilt because it can never repay it.

Nietzsche suggests that this development of guilt could never have occurred without the internalization of instincts described above. He characterizes the entire development of the bad conscience as a process wherein man “seized upon the presupposition of religion so as to drive his self-torture to its most gruesome pitch of severity and rigor” (GM, 92). For that reason, the creditor-debtor relationship between members of a community and their ancestors was merely an opportunity for man to inflict suffering upon itself by finding itself “guilty and reprehensible to a degree that can never be atoned for” (GM, 93). Furthermore, Nietzsche uses the seizure of this opportunity to explain the emergence of Christianity, and consequently, the morality of pity, As such, he claims that “the delight of the selfless man, the self-denier, the self-sacrificer…is tied to cruelty” (GM, 88). Therefore, the morality of pity is portrayed as the culmination and greatest embodiment of the internalization of man and the feeling of guilt. The uniqueness of the morality of pity in this regard is emphasized by Nietzsche’s comparison of it to Greek morality. While the Christian god was invented to sublimate the feeling of guilt, the Greek gods were used “precisely so as to ward off the ‘bad conscience’” (GM, 93). Instead of viewing themselves as in debt to their gods, the Greeks viewed their gods themselves as the ones guilty for the wickedness and evil on earth. They envisioned their gods as judging mankind’s mistakes as “foolishness, not sin” 116 thereby resisting the notion that they should feel guilty about themselves and their actions (GM, 94). Thus, Greek morality somehow managed to resist the impulse to internalize their instincts and generate self-inflicted suffering.

Nietzsche condemns the morality of pity for not resisting the internalization of instincts but rather succumbing to the impulse toward bad conscience. While in other respects not adverse to cruelty and suffering, he clearly shows displeasure for the sort of self-inflicted suffering involved in the creation of the bad conscience. For example, he calls the bad conscience “the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man” (GM, 93). He attributes this sickness to the guilt men develop toward their natural, presumably selfish and active inclinations. Consequently, he calls for an attempt “to wed the bad conscience to all unnatural inclinations” (GM, 95). His concern here can be related to the advocacy of selfishness, and the campaign against selflessness, in his previous works. Viewing man as a being who naturally expresses selfish inclinations by exerting power over others, he criticizes anything that inhibits such an expression. Thus, he blames the morality of pity for producing an “‘evil eye’ for [men’s] natural inclinations” (GM, 95). Considered along each other, the first and second essays attempt to explain the existence of the morality of pity in two separate ways. The first essay attributes the existence of that morality to a ressentiment-driven slave revolt that entailed an inversion of values through a process of spiritual revenge. The second essay explains the morality of pity as a product and embodiment of the impulse toward bad conscience. It seems odd that both explanations simultaneously apply to the same phenomenon. Given his description of the bad conscience as a sickness that grew in the earliest days of 117 civilization, it is striking to think that it may have culminated in its greatest form two thousand years ago at precisely the same time the Jews felt the need to invent Christianity to exact revenge in a power struggle. However, the application of both of these explanations appears logically consistent as the impulse toward a morality of pity could have been driven by both a spirit of ressentiment and a looming desire for self-inflicted suffering. If we are to accept the simultaneous validity of these two explanations, we can view their compound effect as solidifying the morality of pity so thoroughly as to make it exceedingly difficult for modern man to imagine any other type of morality.