Some Questions of Interpretation
The Second Treatise raises numerous large-scale issues of interpretation which make it difficult to go into detail beyond the level of the 'missionstatement'. Such issues should not be multiplied beyond necessity, so I shall mention just the following: (1) Is 'bad conscience' a form of the 'conscience' that Nietzsche attributes to the 'sovereign individual' in the essay's opening sections? (2) Are 'consciousness of guilt' and 'bad conscience' two separate phenomena, or one and the same? (3) Is the process of internalization of the instincts which Nietzsche describes as the 'origin of bad conscience' already an instance of'bad conscience' or merely a precondition for it? (4) What is the process of 'moralization' which results in a particularly Christian form of bad conscience towards the end of the essay?
6 See section 5: 'the creditor is granted a certain feeling of satisfaction as repayment and compensation,— the feeling of satisfaction that comes from being permitted to vent his power without a second thought on one who is powerless, the carnal delight ''de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire,' the enjoyment of doing violence'; section 6: 'cruelty constitutes the great festival joy of earlier humanity [...] Seeing-suffer feels good, making-suffer even more so—that is a hard proposition, but a central one, an old powerful human-all-too-human proposition'; section 7: 'this pleasure in cruelty needn't actually have died out: but [...] it would need a certain sublimation and subtilization'; section 16: 'Hostility, cruelty, pleasure in persecution, in assault, in change, in destruction—all of this turning itself against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of''bad conscience'''; section 18: 'this uncanny and horrifying—pleasurable work of a soul compliant—conflicted with itself, that makes itself suffer out of pleasure in making-suffer [...] and we know [...] what kind of pleasure it is that the selfless, the self-denying, the self-sacrificing feel from the very start: this pleasure belongs to cruelty'; section 22: 'a kind of madness of the will in psychic cruelty that has absolutely no equal: the will of man to find himself guilty and reprehensible to the point that it cannot be atoned for'.
Recall that in sections 1 — 3 the 'sovereign individual' is 'the human being who is permitted to promise', in virtue of the memory developed by a prior history of pain-infliction, but also in virtue of the exceptional aristocratic strength to maintain a single will unchanged over time and to 'uphold it even against accidents, even ''against fate'''. The 'consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and fate' Nietzsche calls the sovereign individual's conscience. However, section 4 begins with a question that introduces, seemingly for the first time, the topics contained in the essay's title: 'But how then did that other ''gloomy thing,'' the consciousness of guilt, the entire ''bad conscience'' come into the world?' Taken simply on its own, this sentence suggests clear answers to two of our questions of interpretation, namely (1) Is 'bad conscience' a form of the 'conscience' that Nietzsche attributes to the 'sovereign individual' in the opening sections? Answer: No, it is an 'other' thing. And (2) Are 'consciousness of guilt' and 'bad conscience' two separate phenomena, or one and the same? Answer: They are the same, announced here as a single topic for investigation. Nothing Nietzsche says about the sovereign individual in sections 1 — 3 implies that he or she must feel guilty or suffer from a bad conscience. And nothing from section 4 onwards (the sovereign individual not as such being mentioned again) implies that those who suffer from bad conscience are sovereign individuals.7 Guilt, or bad conscience, is a condition in which we fall well short of any ideal Nietzsche entertains. I suggest that we can grasp the central train of thought of the treatise from section 4 onwards without trespassing further into an elucidation of the sovereign individual.
But are 'consciousness of guilt' and 'bad conscience' the same thing for Nietzsche? A contemporary reader of Nietzsche might well have expected the terms to be more or less synonymous. For example, in his book on the origin of conscience published two years earlier, Ree had written that the knowledge or consciousness which blames us for our own wrongdoing is called 'punishing conscience, also pang of conscience, or guilt-consciousness', adding that 'if one nevertheless wanted to make a difference between pangs ofconscience and guilt-consciousness, it can only
7 Risse gives an account of the development of guilt and bad conscience in GM II, stating (2001: 56) that he does not deal with sections 1 — 3. This is an appropriate division to make, in my view.
reside in duration. Guilt-consciousness is a longer pang of conscience.'8 Later in the Second Treatise, Nietzsche also sometimes appears to treat the two as equivalent:
Punishment is supposed to have the value of awakening in the guilty one the feeling of guilt; one seeks in it the true instrumentum of that reaction of the soul called ''bad conscience,'' ''pang of conscience.'' [...] Precisely among criminals and prisoners the genuine pang of conscience is something extremely rare. [...] But if we think, say, of those millennia before the history of man, then one may unhesitatingly judge that it is precisely through punishment that the development of the feeling of guilt has been most forcefully held back.
It is hard to follow this passage except on the assumption that 'feeling of guilt', 'bad conscience', and 'pang of conscience' are being equated. Then, when using the conception of internalization to give his 'own hypothesis on the origin of the ''bad conscience''', Nietzsche appears content to switch to talk of'this whole development of guilt-consciousness' (GM II. 19). Finally, the 'man of bad conscience' who achieves the maximum of internalization of cruelty tortures himself with the painful feeling of'guilt before God' (GM II. 22).
Recent writers have stated that there is an important Nietzschean conceptual distinction between bad conscience and guilt-consciousness, though there appears no clear consensus across the accounts as to the nature of the distinction.9 At least two commentators, Risse and May, agree that the true target ofNietzsche's critique is bad conscience in its moralized and Christianized form, which is indeed a pervasive feeling of guilt: one feels a mental pain because one represents oneself as perpetually failing to fulfil an obligation or state of indebtedness which one conceives oneself to stand in towards the all-powerful God (an anguished state presented with inimitable eloquence in GM II. 22).
On Risse's account the distinction between bad conscience and the feeling of guilt is as follows. After centuries of Christianity, we now have 'bad conscience as a feeling of guilt', which is the notion Nietzsche wishes to uncover in the essay as a whole, 'but in section 17, Nietzsche talks about an older form of the bad conscience that precedes Christianity and is not
8 Rée (1885: 212). ' See May (1999); Risse (2001); Leiter (2002).
connected to guilt at all. This older form arises through the internalization of instincts and is a remote ancestor of the bad conscience as a feeling of guilt.'1° In sum, for Risse, 'late' bad conscience—Nietzsche's true target for criticism—is identical to the feeling of guilt, while 'early' bad conscience is not yet guilt, but is simply the internalization of cruelty. One might point out, on the other hand, that Nietzsche frequently talks of internalization in various qualified ways as 'the origin of bad conscience' or 'bad conscience in its beginnings', or 'animal's "bad conscience'''," all of which are compatible with internalization's being simply a preliminary and necessary component of bad conscience, not bad conscience as such.12
So it is hard to assert either that Nietzsche consistently distinguishes bad conscience from the feeling of (or consciousness of) guilt, or that he sees bad conscience as consisting simply in internalization of instincts, lacking a further component present in guilt. But rather than pursuing these issues, I shall proceed under the following assumptions: (1) internalization of the drive to express power and hence to inflict cruelty is one crucial component in the genesis of guilt-consciousness; (2) such internalization is not identical to guilt-consciousness proper; (3 ) guilt-consciousness proper is the most fully developed form of bad conscience and the true target of Nietzsche's critique.
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