Genealogy of Morals: Second Essay: Sections 16–25

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At this point of our inquiry a first provisional expression of my own hypothesis on the origin of "bad conscience" can hardly be avoided. It is not easy to make it intelligible and requires long and earnest attention and consideration. Bad conscience I take as the deep sickness which man had to fall into, when under the pressure of that most radical of all changes to which he was ever subjected, — that change which he experienced when he found himself for ever locked within the ban of society and peace. Precisely as the water-animals must have felt, when forced to the alternative of either becoming land-animals or of perishing, even so in the case of men, those semi-animals happily adapted to wildness, warring, roving and adventure. All at once their instincts were rendered worthless and "unharnessed." They were expected henceforth to go on their feet and to "carry themselves," whereas all along they had been carried by the water; a terrible heaviness lay upon them. For the execution of the simplest functions they found themselves too clumsy; for this new and strange world their old, reliable guides sufficed no longer — the unconsciously-regulating and safely-leading instincts. They were reduced to the necessity of thinking, reasoning, calculating, of combining causes and effects (what misery!), to their consciousness, — their meanest and least reliable organ! I believe that never before on earth did there exist a like feeling of misery, a similar state of leaden uncomfortableness. And, worse still, those old instincts had by no means ceased all at once to make their demands! Only it was difficult and rarely possible for man to comply with their claims. As a general rule, they had to seek for new and, metaphorically speaking, subterranean satisfactions. All instincts which do not discharge themselves outwards will receive an inward direction — this is what I call the internalisation of man. It is only by this process that that grows up to man which later on is called his "soul." The entire inner world of man, being originally thin, as if it were stretched between two hides, has become expanded and extended, has received depth, breadth and height, in the same measure as man's outward discharges have been checked. Those terrible bulwarks by means of which a political organisation guarded itself against the ancient instincts of freedom (punishments are first of all among these bulwarks) effected the result that all those instincts of wild, free and roving man turned inward against man himself. Enmity, cruelty, the pleasures of persecution, of surprise, of change, of destruction — imagine all these turning against the owners of such instincts: this is the origin of "bad conscience." Man who, from a lack of outer enemies and obstacles and because he found himself wedged into the unbearable straits and regularities of custom, impatiently tore, persecuted, gnawed at, maltreated himself, — stirred up man, this captive animal grating against the bars of his cage, intended to be "tamed," this creature deprived of, and pining for its home, the desert, he, who was compelled to make out of himself an adventure, a torture chamber, an unsafe and dangerous wilderness — this fool, this homesick and despairing captive, became the inventor of "bad conscience." And, with it, the greatest and most dismal morbidity was instituted from which mankind has not as yet recovered, the suffering of man from man, from himself: the consequence of a violent breaking with his past animal history, a leaping and plunging, so to speak, into other states and conditions of existence, a declaration of war against the old instincts, on which so far his strength, his pleasure and his terribleness had depended. Let us at once add that, on the other hand, with the fact of the existence upon earth of a self-antagonising, against-self-directed animal soul, something so new, deep, unheard-of, enigmatical, self-contradictory, future-promising was likewise given, that the aspect of the earth had therewith undergone an essential change. And truly, divine spectators were necessary in order to appreciate the spectacle which thereby was inaugurated and of which the outcome cannot as yet be imagined, — a spectacle too fine, too wonderful, too paradoxical for its possibly being a mere meaningless and ludicrous side-show upon some ridiculous star. Man ever since that time has counted among the oddest and most exciting hap-hazard throws practised by the "great child" of Heraclitus, call it as you will, Zeus or chance. Man awakens for himself an interest, a suspense, a hope, almost a confidence that something important is about to happen, that something is in preparation, that man is not an end, but merely a way, an interact, a bridge, a great promise . . . .

Our hypothesis on the origin of bad conscience presupposes first of all that that change did not take place gradually, or spontaneously, and did not represent an organic ingrowing into new conditions, but rather a rupture, a leap, a compulsion, an unavoidable fate against which there was no opposition, and not even any resentment. Furthermore, that the fitting of a mass of people until then shapeless and undefined into a fixed form beginning, as it did, with an act of violence, could ipso facto only be accomplished by a whole series of acts of violence, — and hence, that the first "state" made its appearance in the form of a terrible tyranny, a violent and regardless piece of machinery which kept grinding away till such a raw-material, half men, half animals, was not only thoroughly kneaded and pliant, but also fashioned. I made use of the word "state." It is plain on the face of it what it means — any herd of flaxen-haired robber-beasts, a conqueror and master race, which, organised for war and possessing the power of organisation, will unhesitatingly lay its terrible clutches upon some population perhaps vastly superior in numbers but as yet shapeless and roving. This is the origin of the "state" on earth; the fantastic theory which would have it begin by an "agreement," I should think, is done away with. He who can command, he who is a "master" by nature, he who in deed and gesture behaves violently — what has he to do with agreements! Such beings are not reckoned with; they come as fate will come, without reason, common sense, indulgence, pretext; they appear as a flash of lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too "different" to be even so much as hated. Their work is an instinctive creating of forms, impressing of forms — they are the most involuntary, most unconscious of all artists; — wherever they appear, something new will at once be created, a governmental organism which lives, in which the individual parts and functions are defined and brought into correlation, and in which nothing at all is tolerated unless some "sense" with respect to the whole be implanted in it. They are innocent, as regards the meaning of guilt, of responsibility, of regard, — these born organisers; they are ruled by that terrible artist-egotism which looks stern like bronze and knows itself to be justified to all eternity, in the "work," as the mother knows herself justified in the child. "Bad conscience " has not grown among them, thus much is self-evident, — but it would never have grown at all but for them, that ill-shaped growth; it would be wanting altogether if, beneath the blows of their hammer, their artist-violence, an immense quantity of freedom, had not disappeared from the world, or at any rate from visibility, and become latent, as it were. This instinct of freedom, suppressed, drawn back and imprisoned in consciousness and finally discharging and venting itself only inwards, against self: only this is the beginning of bad conscience.

Let us guard ourselves against thinking lightly of this entire phenomenon for the mere reason that, from the very outset, it is unsightly and painful. For at bottom the same active force which — only on a greater scale — is at work in these perforce-artists and organisers, and sets up states, creates — but on a smaller, pettier scale, and acting inward and backward, "in the labyrinth of the breast" (in the words of Goethe) — bad conscience and erects negative ideals for itself; — that very same instinct of freedom (or, expressing myself my own way, the will to power). Only in this case the stuff upon which this form-creative and violating power acts, is man himself, his entire ancient animal self — and not, as in the case of that other and more ostensible phenomenon, the other man, the other men. This secret self-violation, this artist-cruelty, this lust of giving to one's self as being a heavy, unyielding, passive stuff, a form of burning into it a will, a criticism, an opposition, a contempt, a No, — this dismal and frightfully-lustful work of a voluntarily-divided soul which, because it delights to make suffer, makes itself suffer, — this entire activic "bad conscience" has (my readers foresee the result) at last, being the true womb and cradle of ideal and imaginative events, among other things, brought to light an exuberance of new and startling beauty and assertion and, possibly, even beauty itself . . . . For, indeed, what would be beautiful, if contradiction had not become previously conscious of itself, if ugliness had not previously said to itself: "I am ugly?" . . . . This hint will at least serve to make the riddle less puzzling as to how far in such self-contradictory concepts as unselfishness, self-denial, self-sacrifice an indication of an ideal, a beauty can be given. And one thing, I do not doubt, will be known for the future, — it is the nature of the lust which unselfish, self-denying, self-sacrificing man experiences: this lust is a sort of cruelty. — So much, for the present, on the origin of "unselfishness" as a moral value, and by way of survey of the soil from which this value has grown. It is only bad conscience, only will to self-maltreatment that furnishes the presupposition on which the value of unselfishness hinges.

It is a disease — bad conscience — thus much is certain, but in the sense that the state of pregnancy is a disease. Let us seek for the conditions under which this disease has reached its frightfulest and sublimest climax. We shall see what therewith has made its appearance on earth. But for this purpose a long breath is requisite, and, first of all, we have to recur once again to a former point of view. The relation of the debtor to his creditor, as established on the basis of private law (of which we have already spoken at length), has, a second time and in a manner most memorable in respect to history and most questionable, been interpreted into another relation in which, perhaps, it will seem most unintelligible to us modern men; namely into the relation of those who live at any given time towards their ancestors. Within the original federation of families — we are speaking of primitive times — in every case, the living generation, in its relation to the older, and especially to the oldest generation which founded the family, acknowledges itself to be bound by a juristic liability (and by no means merely by an obligation of feeling; indeed, for the longest period of the history of mankind, the existence of this feeling might be — not without reason — denied altogether). Here the conviction prevails, that the family exists only through the sacrifices and services of its ancestors, — and that these sacrifices and services must be paid back with other sacrifices and services. Thus, a guilt is acknowledged which, moreover, grows continually inasmuch as these ancestors, in their post-existence as mighty spirits, never cease to supply the family with new advantages and advances out of the store of their power. For nothing? But there exists no "for nothing" for those times rude and poor of soul. What, then, may they be given back? Sacrifices (i.e., at first food in its most literal sense), festivals, temples, demonstrations of honour, and, above all, obedience. For all usages are the work and, as such, also the precepts and commandments of the ancestors. Can one ever give them enough? This suspicion remains and grows. From time to time it extorts a wholesale commutation, a back-payment, to the " creditor" in the form of something immense (the notorious offerings of the first born, for instance, — blood, human blood in any case). The fear of the ancestor and his might, the consciousness of debts towards him, increases — according to this kind of logic — exactly in proportion as the power of the family itself increases, in proportion as the family itself grows more victorious, more independent, more intensely feared. The reverse is out of the question! Every step in the direction of degeneration of the clan, every pitiable accident, every indication of degeneration and approaching disintegration always lessens the fear of the spirit of its founder and conveys an ever feebler idea of his prudence, providence and powerful presence. Suppose this rough kind of logic to be carried through, by the fantasy of growing fear the progenitors of the mightiest clans must at last have grown to immense dimensions, and have been pushed into the darkness of a divine awfulness and unimaginableness. The progenitor will, of necessity, become at last transfigured into a God. Possibly here may even be the origin of the gods, an origin to wit from fear! And he who should think it necessary to add: "but also from piety!" would hardly be right with respect to the longest period of man, his foretime. Much more so for the middle period in which noble families are being formed. For these actually paid back with interest to their founders and progenitors (heroes, gods) all those qualities, which in the meantime, have become apparent in themselves, — noble qualities. We shall later cast a glance upon the ennoblement and nobilitation (which is, of course, by no means their "sanctification") of the gods. For the present, let us bring to a provisional close the discussion of this whole development of the consciousness of guilt.

The consciousness of having debts to pay to the godhead, has, as history teaches us, by no means ceased to develop even after the decline of the organisation of the " community" based on blood-relationship; on the contrary, mankind has, in the same manner that it inherited the notions "good and bad" from the family-nobility (together with their fundamental psychological inclination to posit degrees of rank), inherited also the godheads of families and tribes and the oppressive feelings occasioned by unpaid debts and the desire of redeeming the same. (The transition is effected by those large populations of slaves and bondmen, which — be it by compulsion or by submissiveness and mimicry — accommodated themselves to the cult of gods practised by their masters. From them this heritage will flow over towards all parts.) The feeling of obligation towards the godhead kept steadily increasing for several thousands of years, in the same proportion in which the concept of God and the feeling of dependence from God grew and were elevated. (The whole history of ethnical wars, victories, reconciliations, and amalgamations, all that precedes the final regulation of rank of all parts of a people in each great synthesis of races, is reflected in the genealogical confusion of their gods, in the legends relating their wars, victories and reconciliations. The development into universal empires is always a progressus to universal divinities, and despotism with its overcoming of independent nobility will always pave the way for some form of monotheism.) Therefore the rise of the Christian God, as being the maximum-god so far attained, has given rise also to the maximum feeling of guilt on earth. Assuming that we at last have entered a period of the reverse movement, then the steady decline of the faith in the Christian God might lead us to infer with no small degree of probability that the human consciousness of guilt is, at this moment, likewise experiencing a considerable decline; indeed, the prospect cannot be rejected that the perfect and final triumph of atheism might altogether rid and quit mankind of this entire feeling of obligation to its beginning, its causa prima. Atheism and a kind of second innocence are parts of a whole.

So much in the rough and short on the connection of the concepts of "guilt" and "duty" with religious presuppositions. I have purposely so far left out of consideration the specific moralisation of these concepts (the problem of the pushing of them back into conscience or, still more definitely, the complication of bad conscience with the concept of God) and, at the close of the last section, I have even spoken as if this moralisation did not exist at all and, therefore, these concepts of necessity ceased to exist after their presupposition has fallen away, the faith in our "creditor," in God. But the facts of the case differ from this speculation in a terrible manner. The moralisation of the concepts of guilt and duty, the pushing of them back into bad conscience, implies, in fact, an attempt to reverse the direction of the development now described, or, at least, to stay its progress. Now the very prospects of a final commutation of guilt are asked, once for all, to be shut up in a pessimistic way; now the look is asked to shrink back and recoil disconsolately as though from some iron wall of impossibility; now those concepts "guilt" and "duty" are asked to turn backwards. Against whom? No question whatever: first of all against the "debtor," in whom bad conscience will now establish itself, eat into his flesh, extend, and polype-like branch out into every depth and breadth until at last, in the conception of the irredeemableness of guilt, the idea of its unpayableness (everlasting punishment) is also conceived; but at last even against the "creditor," whether this be thought to be the causa prima of man, the beginning of mankind, its progenitor, who now will be burdened with a curse ("Adam," "original sin," "unfreedom of will"), or nature herself, from whose womb man takes his origin, and into which now the evil principle is laid ("diabolification of nature"), or existence in general which is declared as worthless in itself (nihilistic desertion of life, longing to reach the Nothing, or longing for one's antithesis, the state of being otherwise, Buddhism and kindred religions) — until, all of a sudden, we find ourselves face to face with that paradoxical and frightful expedient which afforded at least temporary relief to tortured humanity, that master-stroke of Christianity: God himself sacrificing himself for the guilt of man; God himself making himself paid; God being alone able to redeem from man what for man himself has become irredeemable — the creditor sacrificing himself for his debtor, from love (would you believe it?), from love for his debtor! . . . .

We shall have divined by this time the real and inner meaning of this entire phenomenon: that will to self-torture, that stemmed-back cruelty of animal man who has become internalised, who is, as it were, chased back into himself, who is encaged in the "state," to the end of being tamed, who invented bad conscience for the purpose of causing pain to himself after the more natural outlet of this will to cause pain had become obstructed, — this man of bad conscience availed himself of religious presuppositions as a means of carrying his self-torture to an excess of frightful severity and cruelty. A guilt against God — this thought becomes his instrument of torture. In the concept of "God" he finds the ultimate antitheses to be tracked to his own and irredeemable animal instincts; by interpretation he transforms these animal instincts into a guilt against God (as enmity, insurrection, rebellion against the "Lord," the "Father," the Progenitor, the Beginning of the world), he yokes himself into the antithesis "God" and "Devil;" every Nay he pronounces upon himself, upon the nature, naturalness and actuality of his own essence, he utters as a Yea, as something existing, bodily, real, as God, as the holy God, as God the judge, as God the hangman, as another world, as eternity, as everlasting torture, as hell, as immeasurableness of punishment and guilt. This is a kind of volitional insanity in spiritual cruelty, such as has not its parallel anywhere; it is the will of man to find himself guilty and condemnable even unto irredeemableness; it is his will to conceive himself as punished, the punishment being incapable of ever balancing the guilt; it is his will to infect and poison the inmost nature of things with the problem of punishment and guilt, in order to make impossible for himself, once for all, the exit from this labyrinth of "fixed ideas;" it is his will to erect an ideal — the ideal of the "holy God" — in order to be in the presence of what plainly assured him of his absolute unworthiness. Oh, for this insane, wretched beast of man! What notions it will take! What anti-nature, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestiality of idea will forthwith break out, if it be but in the least hindered from being a beast of action! . . . . All this is abundantly interesting, but it is also of a black, cloudy, enervating sadness, so that we must sternly forbid ourselves to gaze too long into these abysses. Here is disease, no question whatever, the most terrible disease that has ever raged in man. And he who is able to hear it (but modern ears are dead to such sounds!) how, in this night of torture and nonsense, the cry of love, the cry of keenest longing and ecstasy, of salvation in love, has sounded, will turn away conquered by a feeling of invincible horror! . . . . In man there are so many frightful things! . . . . For too long a time the earth has been a madhouse! . . . .

So much be once for all enough on the origin of the "holy God." — That in itself the conception of gods need not necessarily lead to this degradation of fantasy (to which we were obliged to devote a moment's consideration); that there are nobler ways of inventing gods than for the purpose of this self-crucifixion and self-shaming of man in which Europe during the last thousands of years has attained to perfection; — thus much fortunately can be seen by every glance which we cast upon Grecian gods, these personifications of high-born and self-glorying men, in whom the animal in man felt itself deified, and did not tear itself for rage against itself! These Greeks for the longest time used their gods just for keeping "bad conscience" at a safe distance, in order to enable them to remain happy in their freedom of the soul; i.e., reversely from the practice of Christianity in the application of its God! They went very far in this, these splendid, lion-hearted children; and no less an authority than that of the Homeric Zeus himself gives them to understand at times that they make life too easy for themselves. "Strange!" he says on one occasion — the case in question is that of Ægisthus, a very bad case —
"Strange, that for ever mortals the gods will be sorely accusing!
Evil of us only cometh, they ween, but by their own folly
They will heap on themselves hard misery, even against fate."

But here we both see and hear, that this Olympian spectator and judge is far from being wroth or from thinking ill of them: "How foolish they are!" he thinks when contemplating the misdeeds of mortals, — and "folly," "unreasonableness," a little "disturbance in the head," thus much the Greeks even of the strongest and most heroic age have admitted to be the reason of many ominous events and fatalities. Folly, not sin! Ye understand this? . . . . And even this disturbance in the head was a problem with them. "How could it be even so much as possible? Whence did it come into heads as we have them, we men of noble descent, of happiness, of well-constitutedness, of the best society, of superiority, of virtue?" Thus for centuries the noble Greek would ask himself in the face of every horror and outrage inexplicable to him and committed by one of his equals. " 'Tis like some god has blinded him," he at last said to himself, shaking his head . . . . This explanation is typical for Greeks . . . . In this manner the gods, in those times, subserved the purpose of justifying, in some measure at least, man also in his wrong-doings. They served as causes of evil. Then they took upon themselves, not punishment, but, as is nobler, guilt . . . .

I close with three interrogation marks, as you will see. "Is here," some one will ask, "an ideal being erected, or an ideal being broken down?" But have ye ever really asked yourselves sufficiently as to how dearly the erection of all ideals on earth was paid for? How much reality had to be slandered and misconceived for this purpose; how much falsehood sanctioned; how much conscience confused; how much "God" sacrificed each time? In order that a sanctuary may be erected, a sanctuary must be broken down: this is the law — name me an instance in which it is violated! . . . . We modern men, we are the heirs of the vivisection of conscience and self-torment of thousands of years in which we have had our longest practice, perhaps our artist-mastery or, in any case, our raffinement, our fastidiousness of taste. For too long a time man regarded his natural bents with an "evil eye," so that in the end they became related to "bad conscience." A reverse experiment is in itself possible — but who is strong enough for it? — who will bring into relation to bad conscience all unnatural bents, all those aspirations for another life for all that is hostile to the senses, the instincts, to nature, to animality; in one word, all the old ideals, which are, each and every one, ideals hostile to life and slandering the world? To whom to-day apply with such hopes and claims? . . . . Just the good we should thereby have against us; and, of course, also the indolent, the reconciled, the vain, the enthusiastic, the tired . . . . What offends more, what estranges more than to make others aware of the rigour and altitude of our self-treatment! And, on the other hand, how obliging, how amiable all the world will show itself to us, as soon as we behave like all the world and "indulge our humour" like all the world! . . . . For such a task there is requisite a different kind of spirits than our age is likely to produce: spirits, strengthened by wars and victories; to whom conquest, adventure, danger, even pain have become a need; for it an accustoming to thin, Alpine air, to winterly wanderings, to ice and mountains in every sense; nay, even a kind of sublime maliciousness; an ultimate and most self-assured sprightliness of knowledge, indispensable for the great health; to say a bad thing in one word: even this great health is requisite! . . . . But is just this even so much as possible to-day? . . . . But at some time, and in a stronger time than this tottering and self-doubting age of ours, he is to come, the redeeming man of the great love and contempt, the creative spirit who, by his thronging power, is ever again driven away, from every corner and other world; whose loneliness is misunderstood by the people, as though it were a flight from reality, whereas it is but his sinking, burying, and deepening into reality, in order that, when again he rises unto light, he may bring home with him the redemption of reality, its redemption from the curse which the old ideal has laid upon it This man of the future who will redeem us from the old ideal, as also from that which had to grow out of this ideal, from great surfeit, from the will to the Nothing, from nihilism; this bell-stroke of noon-day and the great decision which restores freedom to the will, which restores to the earth its goal, and to man his hope; this Antichrist and Antinihilist, this conqueror of God and of the Nothing — he must come some-day . . . .

But what say I here? Enough! Enough! At this place but one thing befits me — silence: lest I should infringe on that which only one younger than I am, one more "futurous" than I am, one stronger than I am is free to do — on that which only Zarathustra is free to do, Zarathustra the Ungodly . . . .