Cruelty that Turns Back
The Second Treatise of the Genealogy, entitled ' ''Guilt'', ''Bad Conscience'', and Related Matters', has been comparatively poorly served by extended commentary.1 The treatise admittedly follows a winding path even by Nietzsche's standards, but I hope to reveal a central train of thought from which its many byways branch off. The central train of thought is that having a bad conscience or feeling guilty is a way in which we satisfy a fundamental need to inflict cruelty. This is achieved by turning the exercise of cruelty inwards, upon the self rather than others, and by interpreting such cruelty as a legitimate form of punishment of oneself.
In Ecce Homo Nietzsche sums up the Second Treatise as follows:
The second inquiry offers the psychology of the conscience—which is not, as people may believe, 'the voice of God in man': it is the instinct of cruelty that turns back after it can no longer discharge itself externally. Cruelty is here exposed for the first time as one of the most ancient and basic substrata of culture that simply cannot be imagined away.2
Not the voice of God, but a human instinct. Each of the Genealogy's three treatises, I would argue, illustrates a point that Nietzsche makes towards the beginning of Beyond Good and Evil: 'The fundamental belief
1 It is perhaps symptomatic of the slight attention GM II has generally received that the introduction of the excellent edition by Clark and Swensen (1998) includes only a single paragraph of commentary on the essay, contrasted with a whole section devoted to each of GM I and GM III. Some recent exceptions to the general neglect are: Ridley (1998, chs. 1—2; 2005b); Risse (2001, 2005); May (1999, ch. 4); Leiter (2002, ch. 7); Soll (1994); Havas (1995, ch. 5).
2 EH, 'Genealogy of Morals'. My emphasis on the word not is introduced to reflect the emphasis present in the German text.
of metaphysicians is the belief in oppositions of values.' Metaphysicians ask: 'How could anything originate out of its opposite?' But, Nietzsche counters, 'It could even be possible that whatever gives value to those good and honorable things has an incriminating link, bond, or tie to the very things that look like their evil opposites; perhaps they are even essentially the same' (BGE 2). The First Treatise provides a good example of this: morality is founded on a fundamental opposition between 'good' and 'evil', but that essay locates the origin of the moral description 'good' in just the same kind of drive to dominate as is abhorred under the description 'evil'. In the Second Treatise likewise we start with morality's tacit assumption that cruelty is an evil thing, whereas feeling guilty and having a bad conscience about one's actions, especially those that spring from natural instincts, is something good: the opposite of cruelty, and therefore (by a metaphysician's false inference) something with a different or higher origin. The essay tells us that feeling guilty or having a bad conscience is a more perverse and disguised way of inflicting cruelty. Feeling guilty is insidiously, incriminatingly, related to cruelty, and is even the same as it is in essence.
The Second Treatise is structured around two central thoughts concerning cruelty and its 'turning back' against the self. The first, which Nietzsche calls 'an old powerful human-all-too-human proposition' (GM II. 6) might be put as follows:
(A) Because of an instinctive drive, human beings tend to gain pleasure from inflicting suffering.
We might call this the 'pleasure-in-cruelty' thesis. The second thought, which I shall state also in my own formulation, posits a psychological process which Nietzsche calls Verinnerlichung or internalization (see GM II. 16):
(B) When the instinctive drives of a socialized human individual are prevented from discharging themselves outwardly, they discharge themselves inwardly, on the individual him- or herself.
Nietzsche's 'own hypothesis' concerning the origin of'bad conscience', a pivotal hypothesis of the whole essay, makes use of both these thoughts and might be expressed thus:
(C) Because human beings have an instinctive drive that leads them to gain pleasure from inflicting suffering, human beings subjected to the restrictions of civilized society, and so constrained to internalize their instincts, satisfy their instinctive drive by inflicting suffering on themselves.
In Nietzsche's own words: 'Hostility, cruelty, pleasure in persecution, in assault, in change, in destruction—all of that turning itself against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of ''bad conscience''' (GM II. 16). We might pause to consider the idea of experiencing pleasure in making oneself suffer. Nietzsche does not need to claim that human beings feel pleasure in undergoing suffering. That might also be true sometimes, but, if it is, Nietzsche does not use it here. He relies on the proposition that human beings find pleasure in inflicting suffering on themselves. We are gratified as instigators, agents, of suffering in his account, not as its recipients. The relevant proposition thus has the same interesting form as one of Nietzsche's pithier epigrams in Beyond Good and Evil: 'Anyone who despises himself will still respect himself as a despiser' (BGE 78). Being despised is unpleasant and distressing, and being despised by oneself instead of another presumably does not alter that fact; but in so far as one identifies with the subject of the despising relation, to some extent split off from oneself as its object, one can stand in a positive affective attitude to oneself, that of respecting. Compare the thought in GM II. Self-inflicted suffering is, like any suffering, a painful and negative experience. But a pleasure or gratification is possible for one who identifies with the inflicter of suffering, to some extent split off from him- or herself as the suffering object.
A pre-echo of this position is found in Daybreak 113:
the ascetic and martyr [...] feels the highest enjoyment by himself enduring [...] precisely that which [...] his counterpart the barbarian imposes on others on whom and before whom he wants to distinguish himself.The triumph of the ascetic over himself, his glance turned inwards which beholds man split asunder into a sufferer and a spectator [my emphasis] [...] this is a worthy conclusion and one appropriate to the commencement: in both cases an unspeakable happiness at the sight of torment!
Here the ascetic enjoys as spectator 'precisely that which' the barbarian enjoys inflicting on others: the two are the opposite ends of a single continuum or 'ladder'. The barbarian enjoys seeing another suffer, the ascetic enjoys seeing a sufferer suffer, but the sufferer is himself. Asceticism is a more sophisticated form of enjoying-seeing-suffering, and to sustain it one must be 'split asunder', identifying with the spectator of suffering rather than merely with the sufferer. That this passage talks of spectating suffering rather than inflicting it, as I have done so far, does not affect the essential point. Both the pleased spectator and the pleased inflicter are cruel. And in the Genealogy's Second Treatise, Nietzsche often treats them in one breath. His original statement of the point I expressed as (A) is 'Seeing-suffer feels good, making-suffer even more so' (GM II. 6), and he further plays up the role of spectatorship by dwelling on cruelty 'as festival' and on the public enactment of punishments. I shall retain the formulation given in (A) because, as I shall argue, in the inward turn from ordinary cruelty to bad conscience around which the whole of the Second Treatise coheres, it is pleasure in inflicting suffering on oneself that must be present.
Finally, is it plausible that Nietzsche would hold that the drives ofhuman beings are so constituted that there is such a pervasive tendency towards pleasure in being cruel? He elsewhere makes clear his view that human beings do not have a basic drive towards pleasure as such—compare the unpublished note in which he says, 'What man wants, what every smallest part of a living organism wants, is an increment of power. Striving for this gives rise to both pleasure and unpleasure.'3 The constancy of the need to inflict cruelty therefore has a deeper explanation in the supposed truth that 'above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power'.4 And in the Second Treatise, Nietzsche confirms that the force that leads to acts of dominance and state-building 'is basically the same force that here—inwardly [...] creates for itself the bad conscience [...] namely that instinct for freedom (speaking in my language: the will to power)' (GM II. 18). So simply as living creatures we seek to discharge our strength, and when the opportunity to discharge it outwardly is denied, we discharge it inwardly. Our earlier (A) and (C) should therefore be replaced by
(A') Because of the instinctive drive of all living things to express power, human beings tend to gain pleasure from inflicting suffering.
(C') Because human beings have the instinctive drive of all living things to express power, which leads them to gain pleasure from inflicting suffering, human beings subjected to the restrictions of civilized society, and so constrained to internalize their instincts, satisfy their instinctive drive by inflicting suffering on themselves.
3 WLN 264 (n. 14 [174] (1888), previously pub. as WP 702).
As Ivan Soll has argued, psychological hedonism, 'the theory that the deepest motive of all human behavior is the attainment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain',5 is false for Nietzsche, and to be replaced by the doctrine of will to power. Pleasure is merely a by-product, the subjective result of the natural discharge of power. This, however, does not prevent Nietzsche from emphasizing the pleasure involved in inflicting suffering and the transference of this pleasure to the case of self-inflicted suffering. The vocabulary of pleasure, joy, satisfaction, or feeling good in relation to cruelty is prevalent throughout the essay.6
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