Nietzsche contra Freud on Bad Conscience

Introduction
	While much has been made of the similarities between the work of Nietzsche and Freud, insufficient attention has been paid to their differences.  Even where they have been noted, the degree of these differences, which sometimes approaches direct opposition, has often been underestimated.  In the following essay, I will suggest that on the topic of conscience Nietzsche and Freud have radically opposed views, with profoundly different moral consequences.    
	Despite superficial similarities, Nietzsche’s conception of conscience is opposed to that of Freud in almost every conceivable way.  For Freud, conscience is primarily associated with bad will, repression, subordination to social prohibition, and the feeling of guilt.  For Nietzsche, conscience is primarily related to affirmation, memory, individual sovereignty, and the feelings of pride and power.  To be sure, Freudian “bad conscience” has its parallel in Nietzsche’s philosophy—but only as a modality of conscience, not as its foundation.  Freudian conscience is, on the contrary, an essentially bad conscience.  
	In light of Nietzsche’s distinction, in the On the Genealogy of Morality, between noble and slavish forms of evaluation, it may be more appropriate to say that Freudian conscience is fundamentally an “evil” conscience, as distinct from what Nietzsche considers the noble mode of the evaluation of “bad.”  The noble sense of the term “bad” simply identifies difference from and lack of the good, as opposed to the slavish evaluation of “evil,” which is inseparable from implications of moral responsibility, guilt, and blame.  For this reason, in my discussion of Freud and Nietzsche’s views on conscience, I will use the opposition of good and evil, rather than good and bad, forms of conscience.  By “good conscience” I will mean simply the absence of an evil conscience.  I will use “evil conscience” to indicate a state of conscience that not only negates a desire on moral grounds, but also includes a self-assignment of moral blameworthiness and some aspect of self-punishment, such as guilt.  
I will begin by suggesting that Freudian conscience is essentially and irredeemably “evil” in two ways.  First, according to Freud the self-punishing feeling of guilt is made inevitable by an essential and insurmountable conflict between two basic categories of the drives: life drives (or “Eros”), which are the basis of social bonds, and death drives, which are the basis of aggressive and destructive social behavior.  Indeed, even without the controversial assumption of a death drive, Freud’s basic theories of pleasure and the drives suggest a fundamental antagonism between desire and social life that ensures the inescapability of guilt.  
Second, I will show that for Freud the only function of moral conscience is to negate anti-social desire and to produce the feeling of guilt.  Every activity of conscience is fundamentally reactive and negative because moral goodness in the Freudian worldview is essentially reactive and negative in character.  That is, the good is nothing other than the reduction of suffering, where suffering is equated, in Freud’s particularly nihilistic form of hedonism, to stimulation and, ultimately, to vitality—to life as such.  
	I will then suggest that in Nietzsche’s theory of conscience there is, on the contrary, no essential conflict between desire and moral life that would lead to the inevitability of evil conscience.  Moreover, the function of conscience for Nietzsche is not solely to negate bad will and produce guilt—far to the contrary, its original function is to affirm and sustain the will in the forms of promise and responsibility-to-self.  
Finally, I will suggest that the striking consequence of Nietzsche’s theory of conscience is the possibility of forms of moral self-determination that are free of guilt, blame, and self-cruelty.  Put in Nietzschean moral language, a “noble” [vornehm] form of moral conscience is possible—a possibility that is eliminated from the very start by Freud’s theory of conscience.  Such a form of conscience would correspond to, and support the actualization of, a noble form of morality in Nietzsche’s sense: namely, a morality founded upon positive, self-affirming values, rather than upon the negation of an externally grounded concept of evil.   
It should be emphasized that when I speak of a noble form of moral conscience, I do not have in mind a possible return to the moral and psychological conditions of the master class Nietzsche so vividly describes in On the Genealogy of Morality, and to which he attributes the founding of the noble form of values.  On the contrary, Nietzsche’s historical masters are free of bad conscience only because they are free of moral conscience altogether.  Their nobility lies not in this lack of conscience, but rather in the independence and self-affirmation that characterizes their values and actions. 
 It is these characteristics of independence and self-affirmation, as opposed to the social subservience and self-sacrifice that characterizes the subject afflicted by evil conscience, that would distinguish a truly noble form of moral conscience.  In the spirit of Nietzsche’s insistence that “beyond good and evil” does not mean “beyond good and bad” (GM I: 17, KSA 288), a noble moral conscience would be one that is capable of moral self-determination, and so might include the negation of desires for moral reasons.  But it would nonetheless be a form of good conscience, free of the self-assignment of evil and free of self-punishment for assumed moral blameworthiness.     

1. 
	In Freud’s theory of conscience, conscience is essentially and irredeemably an “evil” conscience because guilt is inescapable.  According to Freud, this is due to an essential instinctual conflict between “life drives” and “death drives.”  The life drives, or “Eros,” are rooted in a primary psychological tendency toward the formation and extension of sexual and social bonds, while the death drive is an essential psychological demand to bring mental life to the lowest possible level of stimulation or tension.  According to Freud, the death drive is satisfied either through self-cruelty or through social aggression and destructiveness.  The conflict between life and death drives is, in turn, the foundation of bad conscience.  When civilization thwarts the anti-social manifestation of the death drive in destructiveness, moral conscience takes it over and redirects this destructiveness toward the ego in the form of self-cruelty, self-punishment, and the heightened feeling of guilt.  
	That is Freud’s own explanation of the inescapability of bad conscience and guilt.  It relies on the assumption of the existence of the death drive, a highly controversial addition to his general theory of the drives, made very late in his career.  However, we do not need to appeal to Freud’s controversial postulate of the death drive to ground his claim about the inevitability of guilt.  Throughout his work, Freud equates unpleasure with psychological stimulation and pleasure with the decrease of such stimulation, a negative definition of pleasure and satifaction that grounds his hedonistic theory of the mind.  And with his theoretical introduction of the “constancy principle” and the “pleasure principle,” he makes the avoidance and reduction of unpleasurable stimulation into the primary governing principle of both psychological and biological life.  Consequently, Freud suggests that human desire and motivation are fundamentally at odds with a hostile external world.  For the external world is a constant source of increased stimulation, a constant source of displeasure and a frustration of the goal of reducing mental tension and stimulation to their lowest possible level: “It cannot be denied that hating, too, original characterized the relation of the ego to the alien external world with the stimuli it introduces [...] At the very beginning, it seems, the external world, objects, and what is hated are identical.”
	This fundamental relation of hatred between subject and external world is the basis of an essential tendency in the Freudian subject toward social domination.  For the conflict between self and world is an insurmountable one: although the subject’s relation to the external world allows for the satisfaction of instinctual demands, it is also essentially a source of unpleasure.  The external world, including the social human world, is in its very essence a frustration of the primary guiding principles of mental and biological life.  This basic antagonism between self and world is particularly troublesome in the case of the non-libidinal social other, that is, in the case of social relationships that do not involve sexual or affectionate bonds.  For the non-libidinal social other makes social and ethical demands upon the subject without, in return, serving as a means to instinctual satisfaction.  Consequently, the Freudian subject is related to the social world first and foremost as an obstacle to its desire, a basic relationship of hatred that is only mitigated—and then only partially—through the other’s utility (whether sexual or through shared labor) to the alleviation of instinctual and organic needs.  The true image of the individual as social subject is that of the mythical father of the primal horde, the absolutely narcissistic, despotic, and terrifying leader that Freud imagines ruled the earliest forms of human society.  
	Consequently, the social desire of the Freudian subject is inherently and invariably anti-social and immoral.  The subject desires to dominate the other as both a source of instinctual satisfaction and an obstacle to its fundamental drive toward the elimination of unpleasure and stimulation.  Thanks to this essentially anti-social tendency, the subject’s desire is always in conflict with the social good and with moral responsibility.  Although the demands of conscience are supported by a compromised social desire to protect limited instinctual satisfaction through the renunciation of domination, this desire is only a modification of the foundational desire for domination.  “Bad will”—and the guilt it produces—belongs essentially to the Freudian subject.  

II.	
Bad will does not, however, belong essentially to the Nietzschean subject.  While Nietzsche’s psychology of the will to power appears to assume a fundamental tendency toward domination or exploitation in the same morally problematic sense, in fact his adamant refusal to attribute an essential teleological aim to human action makes such a conclusion impossible.  A fundamental aspect of Nietzsche’s rejections of the mythology of the atomistic subject and of the metaphysical account of the faculty of the will is his demand that the purpose or aim of an activity be rejoined to the act, just as he has demanded that we reject the essential distinction and separation of doer from deed, agent from act.  There is no “will” to power in the sense of a primary motivation to gain power, a bad will that would inevitably cause anti-social or destructive behavior: “The will no longer moves anything, consequently no longer explains anything - it merely accompanies events [...] The so-called ‘motive’: another error.  Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, an accompaniment to the act.”  Consequently, Nietzsche cannot consistently treat any particular aim or goal as the motivational basis of human action.  He cannot, as Freud explicitly does, treat death, destructiveness, or the formation of sexual and social bonds as essential instinctual aims.  
Nor must his psychology of will to power entail, as often thought, that human motivation aims essentially at the domination of others.  To be sure, Nietzsche’s psychology does suggest the necessity of agonistic relations of tension and struggle among subjects, but it does not require that these agonistic relations take specifically violent or destructive forms.  After all, the most striking aspect of Nietzsche’s power psychology is that he interprets every human interaction, even the most innocuous or apparently altruistic, as essentially agonistic—not just relations of overt conflict.  More importantly, Nietzsche’s psychology does not require that subjects be motivated toward ending these relations of agonistic struggle through the subordination of one subject to another.  It does not, in other words, require that the Nietzschean social and moral subject be plagued by an essentially “evil” or anti-social will.  
Because there is no fundamental and inescapable conflict at the basis of conscience, the Nietzschean subject can have a moral conscience with a good will.  Its desires need not be in conflict with morality.  For the Nietzschean subject’s desire is not, as the Freudian subject’s desire is, necessarily at odds with moral interest.  Consequently, the price of moral conscience is not, as it is for Freud, the necessary negation or restraint of an insurmountable anti-social desire.  Evil conscience is not inevitable for the Nietzschean subject because bad will is not inevitable.  To be sure, this leaves room for contingent moral conflicts of interest, and thus for bad conscience of a sort—but only as a contingency of the Nietzschean subject’s moral life, not as its very foundation and possibility.  In other words, the Nietzschean subject can become free from guilt—a will in conflict with moral commitments is accidental rather than essential.  
More importantly, Nietzsche’s theory suggests that evil conscience is unnecessary, even given a moral conflict of the will.  In the next sections, I will argue that because Nietzschean conscience is founded in self-affirmation rather than social subordination and sacrifice, it is possible for the Nietzschean subject to negate a desire for moral reasons, to act morally in the case of conflict of the will, and yet remain free of evil conscience in the sense of self-cruelty, blame, and guilt. 

III.
	Nietzschean good conscience is not defined only negatively as the absence of bad will or guilt.  One of the most important differences between the Freudian and Nietzschean views of conscience is that for Nietzsche, the production of guilt is not the only—or the principal—function of conscience.  Instead, conscience originates in an essentially affirmative act: the act of promising.  It is this positive foundation of the theory of conscience that allows for the possibility of a positively determined, and thus noble, form of good conscience, one that is not reducible to the absence of bad will.  Evil conscience, we shall see, is merely a modality of the more primary, and positive, form.
	While Freud’s theory of the origin of moral conscience begins with an act of motivated forgetfulness, the repression of a forbidden desire, Nietzsche’s theory of conscience begins in opposition to forgetfulness.  It begins with the development of the ability to remember and keep promises.  Nietzsche claims that forgetting is an active faculty that is essential to human health.  Consequently, promising requires a sustained act of will to continually counter forgetfulness: “This involves no mere passive inability to rid oneself of an impression [...] but an active desire not to rid oneself, a desire for the continuance of something desired once, a real memory of the will” (GM II: 1, KSA 292). This primary act of memory and sustained volition that serves as the origin of conscience is—much like the noble conception of the good—a form of self-affirmation, an affirmation of one’s present state of will as one that is worth preserving.  Nietzsche calls the capacities of memory and protracted will the right to “really make promises,” “to stand security for oneself and to do so with pride, thus to possess also the right to affirm oneself” (GM II: 2-3, KSA 293-294).  
Consequently, the primary act of conscience—the act of memory that founds the ability to make promises—is an act of good conscience: not the negation of a desire but an act of continued affirmation of desire.  Whereas the founding act of the Freudian conscience is obedience to a negative, external command—to the “thou shalt not” of the father’s prohibition of incest—the foundational act of Nietzschean conscience is an affirmative self-command, an original “I will,” “I shall do this” that is actively willed by the subject (GM II: 1, KSA 292).  While Freudian conscience encourages a primary forgetting of the subject’s desire—the child’s repression of its incestuous desire for its mother—Nietzschean conscience commemorates and affirms the subject’s desire through “protracted” [langen] will (GM II: 2, KSA 293).  And while the founding affect of Freudian conscience is the guilt that serves as the child’s self-punishment for its forbidden desire, the founding affect of Nietzschean conscience is pride in the feeling of power that accompanies the subject’s ability to sustain an act of volition in the face of change: “A proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle, of what has at length been achieved and become flesh in him, a consciousness of his own power and freedom, a sensation of mankind come to completion” (GM II: 2, KSA 293).  
	This connection of Nietzschean conscience to freedom is perhaps the most striking point of contrast to the Freudian view.  Although Freudian conscience makes possible individual self-control and responsibility, it has its primary basis in subordination to social control: the internalization of external authority and the sacrifice of the original, prohibited object of desire.  Consequently, in the Freudian subject, individual sovereignty is from the start a compromise; the individual is freed only through socially-mediated strategies of self-domination and the frustration of the drives—fortunately so, if Freud is correct in his view that the subject’s essential will is a devilish one that has its root in suicidal, murderous, and tyrannical drives.  
For Nietzsche, on the contrary, the invention of conscience and responsibility makes possible a truly “sovereign individual” whose freedom consists not in the internalization of external authority, but rather in independence from it: “Like only to himself, liberated again from morality of custom [Sittlichkeit der Sitte], autonomous and supramoral [übersittliche] (for ‘autonomous’ and ‘moral’ [sittlich] are mutually exclusive)” (GM II: 2, KSA 293).  Nietzschean conscience is independent of morality because it has its basis in the subject’s self-affirmation of its own positive desire, rather than in an externally imposed prohibition of the subject’s desire.  Such affirmative and independent acts of conscience are essentially impossible on the Freudian understanding of conscience.  
Admittedly, Freudian conscience has its beginnings in what is only contingently a negative act: the father’s prohibition of the child’s incestuous desire and the child’s negatively-structured desire to avoid the harm that would come from violating the prohibition.  Although the faculty of conscience begins, in Freud’s theory, with an act of self-denial in obedience to social authority, this does not mean that moral conscience cannot also serve positive, autonomous, and self-affirming action as well.  Nevertheless, the Freudian subject’s desire is, at root, always at odds with social and moral demands.  Consequently, for Freud, even an act of conscience that affirms a moral will is the affirmation of a negative desire; it is the negation of the subject’s essential desire to dominate the social and libidinal other.  
For Nietzsche, in contrast, every act of conscience is fundamentally a self-affirmation.  The sovereign individual takes pride in maintaining a promised state of will over time and in the face of changing circumstances and desires.  Because the act of promising includes the negation of desires at odds with the will that is maintained, it is the Nietzschean basis for the possibility of a moral conscience, for the negation of a desire on moral grounds.  But on Nietzsche’s theory of conscience, the moral negation of a desire is possible only in obedience to a more primary self-affirmation: to the will it affirms and maintains in this act of negation.  

IV.
	It might be objected that Nietzschean conscience is capable of being a good conscience only because Nietzsche is using the term in a very different sense from Freud’s more conventional usage.  Nietzschean conscience is not moral conscience, we might argue, just as Nietzsche’s noble morality is not truly a morality.  After all, in Nietzschean conscience, the act of promising and implication of responsibility is only that of the subject to itself, rather than to another (as conscience in the moral sense must include).  While this is true, I will now argue that the positive foundation of Nietzschean conscience, unlike the Freudian view, allows for the possibility of a truly noble form of moral conscience, one that is free of guilt and self-cruelty.  Nietzsche’s view frees us from Freud’s conclusion that moral conscience must always be evil conscience—that moral demands can be actualized only through self-cruelty. Nietzschean conscience as described its original, primary form, is not moral conscience.  But it does allow for the possibility of a form of moral conscience that would preserve the affirmative character of the original form.
	For Nietzsche, the earliest form of bad conscience originates, as does the slavish form of moral evaluation, in historical conditions of social domination.  It begins, he tells us, when a “conqueror and master race [...] lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless and nomad” (GM II: 17, KSA 324).  It is this condition of social oppression that produces what Nietzsche calls the “internalization of man,” in which drives that are prevented from discharging themselves externally are turned inward.  This redirection of powerful drives produces bad conscience (GM II: 16-17, KSA 321-325).  
Nietzsche’s explanation of bad conscience in many ways parallels Freud’s explanation of guilt and bad conscience.  Freud suggests that civilization requires the diversion of destructive drives away from the social other, and that guilt is produced when these drives seek substitute satisfaction in self-punishment.  But we should be wary of conflating the two accounts.  Freud’s theory places the origin of guilt in an essentially destructive drive.  Consequently, it leads necessarily to the pessimistic choice between the absence of society or a society of universal and inescapable self-destructiveness in the form of guilt.  I have already suggested that Nietzsche’s rejection of teleology is incompatible with the attribution of a distinct, essential aim to human activity or to the drives.  Consequently, for Nietzsche, bad conscience cannot begin with the internalization of essentially destructive drives.  Admittedly, Nietzsche’s account encourages such a view: “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” (GM II: 17, KSA 322-323).  But although the foundation of desire in will to power allows for pleasure in destruction (just as it allows for pleasure in anything the produces a feeling of power), it cannot admit of drives that have such destructive behavior as an essential aim.  
Consequently, unlike Freud’s view, there is no inevitability to self-destructive and self-punishing behavior.  The production of bad conscience in Nietzsche’s account of the historical origin of conscience depends upon the contingent condition of severe social and political oppression.  Self-cruelty only becomes a necessary outlet for the drives if other forms of the manifestation of power are prevented.  Like slave psychology and slave morality, bad conscience is a merely contingent product of social hierarchy and domination, not a necessary entrance ticket into civilization.
This establishes only the possibility of the separation of moral conscience and self-cruelty.  It might still be objected that it is practically, if not in principle, impossible to free morality from evil conscience.  Nietzsche has, after all, suggested that modern humanity is the product of the slave revolt in morals, the outcome of a two-thousand year history of frustration, ressentiment, and guilt.  Humanity is not accidentally afflicted with the illness of bad conscience, but born out of it, having this illness as its very nature.  It is “the sick animal” (GM III: 13, KSA 367).  
Such pessimism about the practical possibility of overcoming evil conscience depends upon a misinterpretation of Nietzsche’s metaphorical identification of bad conscience with an illness.  The identification of bad conscience with illness does not, in fact, support the inevitability of the cruel and self-punishing form of bad conscience Nietzsche describes.  Rather, it emphasizes the historical—and thus changeable—nature of this particular mode of human psychology.  Nietzsche identifies bad conscience as an illness “as pregnancy is an illness” (GM II: 19, KSA 327), which suggests that it is a temporary condition out of which new forms of life, or new forms of conscience, are produced.  Indeed, when he identifies humanity as the “sick animal,” he underlines precisely the degree to which humanity’s nature is yet to be shaped: “For man is more sick, uncertain, changeable, indeterminate” (GM III: 13, KSA 367).  
The truly dangerous illness that afflicts humanity, the evil conscience of self-cruelty, moral blame, and guilt, is not then an essential and insurmountable part of human nature.  Bad conscience in its most basic form, the inward redirection of the drives, is precisely the possibility of the self-transformation of human psychology.  Bad conscience is a pregnancy, because it gives birth to its own transformation from self-cruelty into self-mastery.  It gives birth to a new form of human being: “If we place ourselves at the end of this tremendous process [...] where society and the morality of custom at last reveal what they have simply been the means to: then we discover the ripest fruit is the sovereign individual, like only to himself, liberated again from morality of custom [Sittlichkeit der Sitte], autonomous and supramoral [übersittliche]” (GM II: 2, KSA 293).  The sovereign individual is liberated from morality and custom.  It is surely, as well, liberated from the self-cruelty and guilt of evil conscience. 
What is most significant about the possibility of a noble form of moral conscience is that its negative form need not include self-cruelty and guilt—that bad conscience need not be evil conscience.  If, as I have argued, Nietzschean conscience is primarily an affirmation of the will and if, in the absence of conditions of social oppression, self-cruelty is not a necessary aspect of conscience, then it is possible for a noble form of moral conscience to be both morally self-determining and free of self-cruelty and guilt.  An act of conscience may include the moral negation of an act or desire without the additional self-punishing affect of guilt or blameworthiness.  Consequently, a noble form of normative social morality can be effective in the realization of its aims without inflicting, or demanding the self-infliction of, suffering.  

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NOTES