Exegesis and Critique of Nietzsche’s Conception of Guilt In The Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality
By Stevan Nicholas

In the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals (titled ““Guilt,” “Bad Conscience,” and the Like”), Nietzsche formulates an interesting conception of the origin and function of guilt feelings and “bad conscience.” Nietzsche’s discussion of this topic is rather sophisticated and includes sub-arguments for the ancient equivalence of the concepts of debt and guilt and the existence of an instinctive joy in cruelty in human beings, as well as a hypothesis concerning the origin of civilization, a critique of Christianity, and a comparison of Christianity to ancient Greek religion. In this essay, I will attempt to distill these arguments to their essential points.

Near the beginning of the Second Essay ““Guilt,” “Bad Conscience,” and the Like” of On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche asserts that forgetting is absolutely necessary for “all the nobler functions and functionaries” (2.1) and even the present to be possible. Furthermore, according to Nietzsche, memory, which inhibits the above functions, is not merely an inability to forget, but an active will not to forget (2.2).

Primeval man acquired the faculty of memory, according to Nietzsche, in response to his sudden enslavement at the hands of a master race (2.17). These masters set as their task the imposition of a few general rules of civilized existence (otherwise known as the morality of mores) upon their subjects, who had been “slaves of momentary affect and desire” (2.3) before their enslavement. This project, according to Nietzsche, necessitated the searing of these basic rules into the minds of the populace by means of immensely cruel acts and resulted in the creation of a faculty of memory that was intimately tied to fear (2.3). The master race’s project was, according to Nietzsche, an artistic project in a very real way (2.17). It is important to note that, according to Nietzsche, no moral condemnation was involved in these punishments for transgression of the morality of mores. Rather, transgressors were viewed merely as threats and obstacles in the path to the goal of the state. Thus, transgressors were punished merely out of anger at the injury done, rather than out of moral indignation or attempt to reform the criminal, while the goal of awakening guilt in criminals not only was not held by these rulers, but would have been regarded by them as nonsensical (2.4).

At this juncture Nietzsche puts forth the creditor/debtor relationship as an analogy to the relationship between citizen and state after the latter’s establishment. According to this analogy the citizen and state have entered into an agreement in which the state promises various advantages of civilization, which are numerous and profound, in return for obedience on the part of the citizen. When a citizen disobeys, the state’s punishment is meted out with the cruel anger of an aggrieved creditor (2.9).

Significantly, according to Nietzsche, the arousal of guilt feelings in the transgressor is not an effect of this punishment. Instead, punishment’s only result is to increase the greater prudence and fear of the transgressor. Nietzsche brings forth several pieces of evidence in support of this claim. The first of these is that prisons are far from being collections of guilt-ridden people. This is so, since, according to Nietzsche, the reaction of the criminal in meeting with punishment is “here something has unexpectedly gone wrong” rather than “I ought not to have done that” (2.15). Further, the criminal is actually discouraged from considering his deed bad in itself, since the state commits equivalent deeds in order to apprehend and punish him (2.14). It is also clear, although not stated directly by Nietzsche, that those who do suffer from guilt are those who have transgressed the least -- men such as Saint Augustine, who tortured himself for nearly his entire life over a petty theft committed in childhood. The great success of the master race’s project in creating men more akin to Augustine than to the free criminal is testified to by the eventual decrease in cruelty of punishments in all law codes. This is so, since this decrease in cruelty comes about as a result of the fact that the fearful memory of the populace has grown so strong that those few remaining transgressors cannot harm the establishment and thus can be treated mercifully (2.10).

Nietzsche’s comment on the creditor/debtor relationship leads him to an investigation of that relationship under early law codes. Here Nietzsche draws attention to the fact that many early codes of law called for the punishment of derelict debtors to take the form of torture executed by their creditors. This method of punishment was, as has been noted earlier, constructed neither so as to awaken guilt feelings in the debtor, nor to encourage him to pay his debts in the future. In fact, this could not have been the purpose of such punishment, since it was a matter of indifference whether or not the debtor could have amended his practices in order to be capable of paying the debt. Rather, the purpose of allowing creditors to torture debtors was that the pleasure of inflicting pain on a helpless man was regarded as a genuine compensation to the creditor for his loss (2.6). That the license to inflict pain on another could serve as a genuine compensation is made more intelligible when one considers the age-old practice of holding torturings and executions at aristocratic weddings for the purpose of entertainment, and by a multitude of other examples of festival cruelty (2.6). According to Nietzsche, this ancient, human, all-too-human pleasure in torturing others (or at least seeing them tortured) is so pleasurable because it represents participation in the right of masters. Thus, cruelty is pleasurable because it is a manifestation of the single unifying drive of human beings and of everything in the world: the will to power, or, as Nietzsche also calls it, the will to dominate (2.5, 2.12).

According to Nietzsche, however, the ancient right of the creditor to torture his delinquent debtor already contained significant fetters on the free flow of the will to power, since (with the significant exception of the Roman Twelve Tables (2.5)) most codes limited the amount of injury the creditor was allowed to inflict on his debtor. This constriction of the will to power increases with every supposedly “humanizing” revision of the laws and morality of mores until, finally, the instinctive joy in persecuting and dominating is not merely devalued, but positively condemned in nearly all of its manifestations. The principal ramification of this situation is that, in direct contradiction to Kant, who argued that rational/autonomous self government is the moral ideal, it is precisely the most moral person who is the least free (2.11), since morality explicitly prohibits that which man would most want to do if released from its fetters.

Significantly, although this instinctive joy in cruelty cannot manifest itself in cruel actions toward others due to the fear and prudence fostered by the morality of mores, this drive cannot merely be suppressed, for, according to Nietzsche, “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward” (2.16). Thus, the subjected person turns the same artist’s cruelty that the “blond beasts” brought to bear in searing the morality of mores into the memories of the populace against his/her whole animal, instinct dependent self. Furthermore, this self-torture of the slave is not entirely unpleasant, for the slave takes delight in this “imposing of form upon oneself as a hard, recalcitrant, suffering material” (2.18). If man can be master, creator, and torturer of nothing else, he will be master, creator, and torturer of himself. The primary tool for this cruelty is, according to Nietzsche, “bad conscience,” which is a creation of the subjected, i.e., the debtor, for the explicit purpose of self-torture. No other explanation can, according to Nietzsche, “make less enigmatic the enigma of such self-contradictory concepts such as selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice can suggest an ideal, a kind of beauty” (2.18).

Having, to his mind, adequately explained the origin of guilt in general, Nietzsche next turns to a more specific critique of religious guilt feelings. Nietzsche’s first move in this project is to examine tribal communities. According to Nietzsche, all tribal communities hold the belief that a great debt is owed to the ancestors, since they have made the present possible. As with all debts, this belief is accompanied by fear of the creditor and his power (2.19). Significantly, this acknowledgment of debt is not merely sentimental: it must actually be paid back through sacrifices of food, obedience to the customs set up by the ancestors, etc. Since the number of ancestors, and thus the size of debt, is ever increasing, the suspicion arises that the ancestors can never be given enough. This suspicion occasionally instigates incredible acts of sacrifice in an attempt to erase the debt forever.

Furthermore, this feeling of debt to and fear of the power possessed by the spirits of ancestors must, necessarily, be greater the greater the power of the tribe. Thus, for the most powerful of tribes these ancestors must necessarily have become an inconceivable monstrosity-have taken on the shapes of gods-and inspired equivalently massive fear (2.19). It is also significant that this situation did not cease at the onset of civilization. Rather, the subject people often took on the belief system of their oppressors, and thus also became conscious of a debt to the god/ancestors of their masters (2.20).

This feeling of guilty indebtedness is accompanied by a desire to, once and for all, pay off the debt. In the case of the noblest of men, the ancestors were paid back with interest by heroic deeds and sufferings. Thus, the knowledge of guilt and debt was not a torture to them but instigation to perform great deeds. Perhaps more importantly, this debt is never moralized, never becomes guilt and “bad conscience.” It is different for the men of ressentiment. In their hands this debt presents itself as a great tool for self-torture. One result of the transformation of ancestor debt into implement of torture is that the question, “Can the debt ever be finally repaid?” is met with an emphatic “No.” Furthermore, this debt becomes moralized, and thus becomes guilt and “bad conscience.” Yet another step in this process is the labeling of all of man’s instinctual drives as sinful. This recasting of the prohibitions of the morality of mores is an especially effective self-torture device, since human beings cannot avoid possessing the illicit drives. Finally, “bad conscience” reveals itself as an ideal implement of torture when, in response to infinite moral guilt, an after-life of eternal torment is posited.

In Christianity this self-torture is made psychologically tenable by investing the Christian God, rather than the self or the morality of mores, with the quality of detesting man’s animal self (2.22). Thus, all man’s animal instincts are cast in the form of affronts to the greatest of all creditor ancestor-gods: the “Lord,” the “Father,” the primal ancestor and origin of the world”” (2.22), and, as a result, the true, animal, violent man is regarded as utterly worthless and malignant. This self-loathing is so complete that even the original, tribal, creditor is defamed because of his participation in humanity-Adam is charged with original, inextinguishable, sin (2.21). That this view of the complete worthlessness of man is achieved by an actual will to that conception-prompted by the cutting off of the natural way of expending the joy in cruelty-is, according to Nietzsche, “beyond any doubt, the most terrible sickness that has ever raged in man” (2.22). That this is not the only possible view of man is shown by the Greek belief system, which projected all the guilt of the world onto the gods, rather than setting them up as perfect and perfectly inhuman entities. Thus, the Greeks used their religion as a facilitator of life rather than an instrument for thrusting infinite guilt upon themselves.

It is relevant to note in closing that the compelling nature of Nietzsche’s arguments and assertions as well as the extreme beauty of his style and the immense skill with which he presents his points can, perhaps, cloud the reader’s assessment of Nietzsche’s goals in writing On the Genealogy of Morals in general, and the Second Essay in particular, resulting in the taking of the entire work at face value. Upon careful reading, however, a suspicion arises that Nietzsche’s aim in On The Genealogy of Morals is something other than the presentation of a definitive genealogy. This suspicion is cemented by two major comments by Nietzsche, the first at the end of the First Essay and the second at the beginning of section 17 of the second essay. At the end of the First Essay, Nietzsche calls for the offering of a series of academic prize-essays on the same topic as Nietzsche’s Genealogy, while hoping that “perhaps this present book will serve to provide a powerful impetus in this direction” (1.17, italics mine). When this passage is considered alongside Nietzsche’s comment (2.17) that he is merely putting forth a hypothesis concerning the origin of guilt feelings, it becomes clear that Nietzsche does not consider his book a definitive treatment of the topic. Perhaps, then, Nietzsche’s unorthodox claims are, at least partly, intended to liberate the reader from his/her preconceived notions about morality by displaying the possibility of someone coherently formulating a radically unorthodox view. If this is the case, then, ideally, one or several readers inspired by Nietzsche’s text would take up the project of a genealogy of morality with open minds and see the project through to its conclusion. This possible reading of Nietzsche’s text in no way implies that Nietzsche is presenting the ideas of the Genealogy in bad faith; he certainly believes that they have some truth to them-but perhaps not to the extent that they are definitive. Thus, it is possible that Nietzsche, in writing his polemic, has other goals than the mere straightforward elucidation of a philosophical system. If this view is adopted, many of Nietzsche’s radical notions and unsupported assertions become easier to stomach. Of course, such a softening of the impact of Nietzsche’s claims may destroy the fundamental mind-opening project that lies at the heart of the book, since the shock of encountering such views is clearly essential to that project.

Works Cited:

Nietzsche, Friedrich On the Genealogy of Morals contained in: Nietzsche Basic Writings Of Nietzsche translated and edited Walter Kaufman. New York: The Modern Library, 1992.

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