The Goodness of Guilt
What then of 'moralization'? A simple but unremarked characteristic of 'moralizing' a concept is making it fit to take its place in an overall conception of the morally good. This suggests that in the final step of Nietzsche's narrative 'feeling guilty' and 'having a bad conscience' become part of what the morally good person does or is. Earlier in the narrative human beings cannot be said to have regarded the self-cruelty and self-punishment into which they fell as anything particularly good per se. Suffering in this way began as an enforced psychological adaptation, then became a kind of burden or sickness. There were good, even spectacularly good, consequences of internalization: Nietzsche mentions the development of the inner mental life, creativity, beauty, and the promise of self-overcoming (GM II. 16, 18). But implicit in his account is that no one prior to Christianity conceived self-cruelty or self-punishment as a good per se.
It is, I suggest, the supposed goodness of feeling guilty that Nietzsche thinks requires metaphysical underpinning. This provides a clearer sense in which moralization of guilt presupposes an 'entanglement with the concept of god', as Nietzsche says in section 21.2s It is a good thing to punish myself
26 Note that Nietzsche writes 'Schuld gegen Gott': guilt against or in the face of God. So the 'before' in the English translation 'guilt before God' does not in itself connote any temporal priority of guilt.
27 Risse (2005: 46—7) has countered criticisms by saying that the guilt-consciousness that arises solely with the belief in the Christian God is 'existential guilt', as opposed to the more ordinary responsive attitude which he calls 'locally-reactive guilt', guilt felt concerning some particular act of putative transgression by the agent. In these terms, however, Nietzsche's account is best read as explaining the origins of locally reactive guilt in internalization and the debtor-creditor relation, and the subsequent intensification of locally reactive guilt into existential guilt by means of the Christian metaphysical picture.
2s Ridley (2005b) and Risse (2005) disagree as to whether 'moralization' of the concept Schuld presupposes beliefin the Christian God; yet both take the moralization in question to be the transformation of indebtedness into guilt feeling. I have followed Ridley in arguing that that transformation does not require belief in God. But I take moralization to be something that happens to guilt feelings further down the track, and to be a process in which the concept of God is indeed implicated.
if I deserve punishment in principle and essentially. And the Christian conception of the self and its place in the world—the infinite all-valuable divine order and the pernicious animal self in perpetual transgression against it—provides the guarantee of punishment's being wholly deserved. Moralization is the elevation offeeling guilty into a virtue, its incorporation into what the morally good individual is or does, into a conception of the kind of person one should want to be, by means of the rationalizing metaphysical picture in which the individual's essential instinctual nature deserves maltreatment, because it stands in antithesis to an infinite creditor.
Why is the self-punishment offeeling guilty construed as a good? Because our natures are conceived as evil. Why are our natures conceived as evil? Because of their animal drives towards aggression and cruelty. But what is feeling guilty? An outlet—or again an inlet—for these same drives. If we find the story credible, we may incline towards a wry smile at the expense of the inflated Christian conception of the good. And if, as Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo, a new truth becomes visible in his essay, it must be a version of his 'opposites' point from Beyond Good and Evil: 'what gives value to that good and honorable thing, bad conscience, has an incriminating link to what looks like its evil opposite, the drive towards inflicting cruelty; perhaps they are even essentially the same'.
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