Nietzsche and Bad Conscience

It's a lazy mild Sunday in late November - a good time, I think, to quote someone else at length. For those who have never read any of Nietzsche's work, you may have formed a certain impression of him through movies and television; to my recollection anyway, Nietzsche is often portrayed as the go-to philosopher for depressed, brooding, and angst-ridden teenagers. I do not think this is a fair treatment, but then again one shouldn't be too surprised to see something addressed inaccurately at the movies. Anyway, while he certainly had some controversial and antiquated ideas, he also wrote with incredible insight on a vast number of subjects, and with a poets touch I might add. The following quote is from On the Genealogy of Morals, and it presents a theory for the origins of what Nietzsche calls "the bad conscience":

At this point I can no longer avoid giving a first, provisional statement of my own hypothesis concerning the origin of the "bad conscience": it may sound rather strange and needs to be pondered, lived with, and slept on for a long time. I regard the bad conscience as the serious illness that man was bound to contract under the stress of the most fundamental change he ever experienced—that change which occurred when he found himself finally enclosed within the walls of society and of peace. The situation that faced sea animals when they were compelled to become land animals or perish was the same as that which faced these semi-animals, well adapted to the wilderness, to war, to prowling, to adventure: suddenly all their instincts were disvalued and "suspended." From now on they had to walk on their feet and "bear themselves" whereas hitherto they had been borne by the water: a dreadful heaviness lay upon them. They felt unable to cope with the simplest undertakings; in this new world they no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and infallible drives: they were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, coordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their "consciousness," their weakest and most fallible organ! I believe there has never been such a feeling of misery on earth, such a leaden discomfort and at the same time the old instincts had not suddenly ceased to make their usual demands. Only it was hardly or rarely possible to humor them: as a rule they had to seek new and, as it were, subterranean gratifications.

All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward—this is what I call the internalization [Verinnerlichung] of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his "soul." The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge was inhibited. Those fearful bulwarks with which the political organization protected itself against the old instincts of freedom—punishments belong among these bulwarks—brought about that all those instincts of wild, free, prowling man turned backward against man himself. Hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction—all this turned against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of the "bad conscience."

...

Let us add at once that, on the other hand, the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered. Indeed, divine spectators were needed to do justice to the spectacle that thus began and the end of which is not yet in sight - a spectacle too subtle, too marvelous, too paradoxical to be played senselessly unobserved on some ludicrous planet! From now on, man is included among the most unexpected and exciting lucky throws in the dice game of Heraclitus' "great child," be he called Zeus or chance; he gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if with him something were announcing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.

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The only thing I wonder about is giving the instincts of "wild, free, prowling man" the characteristics of "hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking". Isn't this like watching a documentary on lions and commenting on how cruel and hostile they are towards zebras? But then how do you characterize these instincts? The wild, free, and prowling humans were still human - still genotypically exactly as we are today - so there must have been an emotional edge to their activities, but not internalized in the least.


Anyway, food for thought I guess.

In other news, it looks like Santa Clause got a nice day for his parade.