Second Essay — "Guilt," "Bad Conscience," and the Like

The essay opens with what Nietzsche calls the "most paradoxical task" nature has set for itself: to breed an animal capable of making promises. A promising animal must be able to remember across time — to hold its past word as binding on its present self. But the human animal is by nature forgetful; forgetting, Nietzsche argues, is not a failure but an active faculty, a strong digestion of experience. To override this forgetting and build memory requires pain. "If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory." Punishment, sacrifice, mutilation — these are the technologies of memory. The entire history of asceticism is a history of mnemotechnics.

From the technology of memory Nietzsche derives the origin of guilt. The crucial observation is that the German word Schuld means both guilt and debt. The original moral relation, Nietzsche argues, is the creditor-debtor contractual relation — the oldest and most personal relation that exists. When the debtor cannot pay, the creditor takes the body — takes pleasure in the body. The equivalence established is not between money and money but between money and suffering. From this primitive economic logic the whole moral vocabulary of conscience, duty, and sacredness of obligation was raised. Guilt is not a moral intuition; it is an accounting ledger with a torture clause.

The bad conscience enters at the point where society encloses the human animal. The aggressive instincts — cruelty, the joy of destroying, attacking, persecuting — once discharged outward into enemy, prey, or rival. When the social state walls the human animal in, those instincts can no longer find outward targets. "All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward — this is what I call the internalization of man." Bad conscience is cruelty with nowhere to go. It turns on the self. The human animal becomes, for the first time, interesting — interiorized, deep, suffering from itself. Nietzsche does not celebrate this; he diagnoses it. But he does say that without the bad conscience, without this internalization, the human being would never have developed the inner life that the slave revolt made available. The wound produced the depth.