Summary
Having dismissed punishment as the origin of bad conscience, Nietzsche
offers his own hypothesis: bad conscience 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.
Nietzsche suggests that 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. In so doing, we developed an inner
life and bad conscience. Nietzsche characterizes the war we wage
against our own instincts as "man's suffering of man, of
himself," and sees in this struggle the suggestion that "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 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.
Next, Nietzsche traces the development of the bad conscience beginning
with 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. 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.
Nietzsche suggests that not all Gods serve to reinforce bad conscience.
While the Christian God is the focal point of bad conscience, self-
torture, and guilt, the Greek gods serve as a celebration of their
animal instincts, as a force to ward off the bad conscience.
Nietzsche concludes by suggesting that 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.
