ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on bad conscience and guilt in the Genealogy according to which bad conscience takes various forms and gradually transforms into various forms of guilt: bad conscience and guilt thus lie on a gradual developmental spectrum. Bad conscience seems to take two basic primitive forms. The first concerns the very early psychology of 'those millennia before the history of man'. In the second form, bad conscience tied itself to the customs of the community and was experienced when one transgressed the ethics—the morality of custom—of one's community. Friedrich Nietzsche's claim that the man of ressentiment invented bad conscience is a bit misleading given that bad conscience in its very infancy is merely internalized cruelty, it turns out that, as it grows and achieves its mature form, bad conscience does indeed become an expression of the man of ressentiment.
