ABSTRACT
Bad conscience, Nietzsche tells us, is a ‘serious illness’ generated by the fact that primitive proto-human beings ended up being ‘imprisoned within the confines of society and peace’ (Genealogy, Essay II, §16). Such beings were creatures of the passions: they were used to acting on their drives but were now obliged to curtail them. Consequently, ‘the poor things were reduced to relying on thinking, inference, calculation, and the connecting of cause and effect, that is, to relying on their “consciousness”, that most impoverished and error-prone organ!’ (Genealogy, Essay II, §16). Consciousness came to the fore in the domain of the development of human culture. However, from this it did not follow that the instincts disappeared. On the contrary, they now had to find new paths to discharge themselves: ‘All instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards – this is what I call the internalization of man: with it there now evolves in man what will later be called his “soul”’ (Genealogy, Essay II, §16). Thus, the instincts were turned back on the human being itself. Obliged to exist within the social straitjacket of convention and custom, ‘man impatiently ripped himself apart, persecuted himself, gnawed at himself’ (Genealogy, Essay II, §16). Being endowed with bad conscience, in other words, means feeling bad about oneself, suffering from one’s own existence (guilt). That is why the person dominated by bad conscience is all too prone to selfloathing. An increasingly rich inner world was created by this event: man suffering from himself created the ‘bad conscience’ as a consequence of ‘a forcible breach with his animal past, a simultaneous leap and fall into new situations and conditions of existence, a declaration of war against all the old instincts’ (Genealogy, Essay II, §16). This event is ‘momentous’, for it changes ‘the whole character of the world […] in an essential way’ (Genealogy, Essay II, §16): humanity is an animal that has ceased to be as one with the rest of the animal kingdom. This is an accident (a result of the dice throw of chance), and a moment of ‘promise’, for it implies an as yet unfulfilled potential in humanity to become something more than merely animal. Nietzsche notes that two assumptions are made by this theory
(Genealogy, Essay II, §17). First, the change in circumstances that created bad conscience was not a matter of gradual evolution but ‘a breach, a leap, a compulsion, a fate which nothing could ward off’ (Genealogy, Essay II, §17). Second, the ‘shaping’ of the human population, which according to the account he offers in the Genealogy begins with
the violence of transferring the human animal into society, also concludes violently with the invention of the state. The ‘oldest “state”’ that emerged was a tyranny, which worked on the raw material of humanity until it rendered it ‘not just kneaded and compliant, but shaped’ (Genealogy, Essay II, §17). Society and state, in other words, began with an act of violent oppression, not with a contract, as the classical liberal theorists (such as empiricist philosopher John Locke) argue. Primitive populations were invaded by ‘some pack of blond beasts, a conqueror and master race’ (Genealogy, Essay II, §17) and subordinated by them. These conquerors, however, are not the ones in whom bad conscience grew. Rather, they are its precondition: bad conscience ‘would not be there if a huge amount of freedom had not been driven from the world, or at least driven from sight and, at the same time, made latent by the pressure of their hammer blows and artists’ violence’ (Genealogy, Essay II, §17). The tyranny of invasion, the coercion of populations by their conquering force marks the beginning of bad conscience. The same ‘force’ that motivates these ‘artists of violence and organizers’, that builds states, is turned back on itself to make bad conscience (Genealogy, Essay II, §18). It is thus a result of ‘that very instinct for freedom (put into my language: the will to power)’ (Genealogy, Essay II, §18). Human instincts, now imprisoned along with the human body in state and society, turn in on themselves and thus create an inner world, a realm of subjectivity. Man now suffers from himself. Bad conscience, it follows, is ‘active’, not reactive: it creates an inner realm of meaning, imagination and beauty as a means of compensating for the inability of the drives to express themselves externally. Selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice: all these belong to this realm and emerge from this condition. Bad conscience is thus an expression of humanity suffering from itself as a result of being made to be social (Genealogy, Essay II, §19). It is expressed in nausea, and is hence a ‘sickness […] but a sickness rather like pregnancy’ (Genealogy, Essay II, §19), for out of it comes the rich intellectual and creative potential that characterises modern humankind, exemplified by the sovereign individual and the Dionysian man.
