Second Essay: ‘Guilt’, ‘bad conscience’ and related matters
The significance of our ability to make promises:
To hold to a promise requires
- a powerful memory–the will that a certain event should not be forgotten
- a confidence about the future and one’s ability to hold to the promise in the future.
This confidence demands that, on some level, we must make ourselves calculable or predictable, and for a people to be predictable, they must share a common set of laws or customs that govern their behavior.
Society and morality thus serve the purpose of making us predictable, which in turn serves the purpose of allowing us to make promises.
“sovereign individual”:
able to make promises, not because he is bound by social mores but because he is master of his own free will.
“conscience”:
Those who faced with the tremendous responsibility of being free to make claims regarding his own future, this sense of responsibility
Guilt and “bad conscience”
similarity in the German words for “guilt” and “debt”
Originally:guilt had nothing to do with accountability or immorality
Punishment was not meted out on the basis of guilt, but simply as a reprisal报应
according to slave morality, punishment is then meted out because, and only because the offender could have acted otherwise. If someone is for whatever reason deemed not to have acted freely (insanity, duress, accident, etc.) they are not punished.
E.g. If someone failed to fulfill a promise or pay off a loan they were in debt to the person they let down, and that debt could be balanced by submitting to punishment, cruelty, or torture. If a creditor could not have the pleasure of getting his money back, he could have the pleasure of harming his debtor.
The memory that is necessary to our ability to make promises was thus “burned in”:
All sorts of cruelty and punishment ensured that we would not forget our promise the next time.
Making others suffer was considered a great joy--a “festival”:
We find the origins of conscience, guilt, and duty in the festiveness of cruelty:
“like the beginnings of everything great on earth, soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time.”
With the cruelty of older cultures, there was also a great deal more cheerfulness.
suffering as a great argument against life, though creating suffering was once the greatest celebration of life.
In ancient times, one would submit to punishment and that would be the end of it. For most of the time, the ancients did not trouble themselves much about what they ought to be doing or about whether they had done wrong. They lived free of moral torments and were thus more cheerful.
If the community is weak, any attack against it is life threatening, and such a threat must be eliminated. A community that is strong enough to resist all sorts of assaults has the luxury of letting offenders go unpunished.
Such a society has overcome its demand for strict justice. We give the name “mercy” to the expression of power in letting an offender go.
Our revulsion反感 against suffering:
a revulsion against all our instincts, and, on the other hand, a revulsion against the senselessness of suffering.
For neither the ancients nor the Christians was suffering senseless: there was always joy or justification in suffering.
We invented gods so that there was some all-witnessing presence to insure that no suffering ever went unnoticed.
Like the origin of humanity itself, there is no point of origin, but just a slow evolution. This point is made particularly clear with Nietzsche’s account of the origin of guilt.
Origin of justice:
reactive affects of revenge and ressentiment are the last to be touched by justice.
Very few can truly be just toward someone who has harmed them. Still, the noble man who lashes out against someone who harms him被欺 is far closer to justice than the man of ressentiment, who is poisoned by prejudice and self-deception自欺.
The concept of justice can only exist in a society that has established laws that can be transgressed: there is no such thing as “justice in itself.”
Something has a purpose or utility is only a sign that a “will to power” is acting upon it.
Things and concepts have no inherent purpose, but are given purpose by the different forces and wills that act upon them.
Even today, punishment does not awaken a feeling of guilt. Punishment arouses the sense of “something has gone unexpectedly wrong” not of “I should not have done that.”
Punishment is treated as a misfortune, and serves to make us more prudent and tame谨慎.
“Will to power”权力意志
Since it is not immediately obvious what is meant by either “will” or “power,” term can be a bit obscure. At the end of section 12, he calls it the “essence of life.” Another clue is provided in section 18, where he uses the term synonymously with “instinct for freedom.”
everyone wants power over everyone else.
The will to power is the fundamental drive that motivates all things. This suggestion might contrast with the suggestion that our fundamental drive is the will to life; that is, the suggestion that above all we pursue self-preservation.
A powerful will is essentially one that cannot be dominated or controlled by any other.
My will is subject to their whims.
If not even the threat of torture and death can’t change my behavior, I must have a very strong will that resists domination at all costs.
Something is meaningful to us:
some will or force is dominating it.
For example, my harming you might be an act of bullying or an act of self- defense.
In the first case, there is a very crude will to power acting, where I harm you for the feeling of power it gives me. In the second case, I am acting out of an instinct of self-preservation. In both cases, the deed itself might be the same, but the will that drives me to act interprets the deed in very different ways. Wherever we find a meaning or an interpretation, there is a will acting to give a deed or a thing that meaning or interpretation.
The act of punishing has always been the same, but the meaning of that act has changed radically. The barbarians of ancient time had very different wills than the modern slave morality endorses. As a result, though the act of punishing and the word “punishment” have remained unchanged, they have been interpreted very differently.
What is significant about punishment:
Not the act itself, but the meaning that we attach to it. Because this meaning is independent of and inessential to the act itself, we could potentially come to understand punishment as meaning pretty much anything.
Because conventional wisdom sees the world in terms of things and deeds rather than forces and wills, we are unable to separate the meanings of punishment from the deed itself, and assume that the deed has always had the same meaning.
while the words “good,” “conscience,” “guilt,” or “justice” have been around for a long time, they have, unnoticed by us, taken on very different meanings depending on the wills that were interpreting them.
A Hypothesis:
bad conscience良心 came about with the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to permanent settlements.
All our animal instincts of life in the wild became useless, and, in order to survive, we had to rely on our conscious mind rather than our unconscious instincts.
Instincts that cannot be released outwardly must be turned inward.
The instincts of hunting, cruelty, hostility and destruction that characterized our pre-historic lives had to be suppressed when we entered into society.
As a result, we turned all this violence in toward ourselves, made ourselves a new wilderness to be struggled against and conquered.
We developed an inner life and bad conscience.
“man’s suffering of man, of himself,”
“man [is] not a goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.”
This assessment relies on the assumption that the transition into settled communities was a violent one, that it was forced upon the majority by a tyrannical专制 minority: the “social contract” is a myth.
Deprived of freedom, the majority had to turn their instinct for freedom inward upon themselves, thus creating the bad conscience. In so doing, they also created the idea of beauty and developed selflessness as an ideal.
The development of the bad conscience:
The sense of indebtedness early tribe members must have felt toward the founders of the tribe. As the tribe became increasingly powerful, there was an increasing debt that had to be paid to these revered ancestors. 德高望重的祖先
Given enough time, these ancestors came to be worshipped as gods.
As “the maximum god attained so far,” the Christian God also produces the maximum feeling of guilty indebtedness. This debt cannot possibly be repaid, and so we develop the concepts of eternal damnation and of all people being born with irredeemable original sin.
The genius of Christianity is then to have God (as Christ) sacrifice himself in order to redeem all our sins: God, the creditor, sacrifices himself out of love for his debtor.
Not all Gods serve to reinforce bad conscience:
Greek gods serve as a celebration of their animal instincts, as a force to ward off the bad conscience.
There might be a way out of the past few millenia of bad conscience and self-torture.
If the bad conscience could be turned not against our animal instincts, but against everything in us that opposes those instincts and turns against life itself, we could turn consciousness toward an affirmation of life and against the “illnesses” of Christianity and nihilism.虚无主义
“past was good, present is bad”:
a return to the savage, cruel, but “cheerful” past before the development of slave morality or bad conscience.
Recent developments in human history as carrying some advance over past societies:
While prehistoric people may have been more cheerful, more free spirited, less mediocre, they also lacked depth. They allowed themselves to be governed by their instincts, and their will to power was always turned outward toward conquest and survival. They had no interest in themselves and made no effort to control themselves or understand themselves.
With the formation of fixed communities, the cheerful barbarians lost the freedom to harm others, to roam free, to obey their instincts.
Unable to direct their will to power outward, they turned it inward and aimed to overcome and conquer themselves. In so doing, they discovered an inner life.
Inner life:
led to the development of slave morality and bad conscience, also we became “interesting,” we developed the concept of beauty, we distanced ourselves from other animals, and so on.
Nietzsche’s objections to contemporary society aren’t meant as an inducement to return to some primeval way of life: he would not have us lose our depth. Rather than going back, Nietzsche wants us going ever forward.
If the inner life is the outcome of the will to power turning inward, then our inner life is essentially a struggle. Nietzsche wants us to win this struggle.
Our will to power must overcome itself completely so that we no longer have a bad conscience or ressentiment. (superman超人理论，参见《查拉图斯特拉如是说》)
The struggle that is our lives therefore makes us interesting, and is a sign that we are walking along this rope.
Nietzsche’s frustration with contemporary society, then, is not that we are headed away from our animal past, but that we are not strong enough to win the struggle.
Bad conscience arises when we see ourselves as something shameful and hateful, and this bad conscience can make us tame and mediocre.
To overcome ourselves we must affirm ourselves, see life, the world, and ourselves as great things, not sins to atone for赎罪. Nietzsche worries that we have come to see ourselves as fixed things, as ends in ourselves.
He counters that we are neither fixed nor things:
we are a jumble混沌 of battling forces, fighting to overcome one another.
If we stay as we are, we are simply a mess, but if we press forward, we can be gods.
