In several contexts Nietzsche claims that he wants to free humanity of the affect of guilt. He also argues that we are not ultimately responsible for who we are or what we do because libertarian free will is a false belief invented for the purpose of legitimizing judgments of guilt. Combining these related threads of argument, we arrive at what would seem to be an uncontroversial conclusion: Nietzsche does not think guilt is an apt response to wrongdoing, and he therefore (...) thinks we ought to dispense with the feeling of guilt altogether. I argue against this conclusion by offering a comparative analysis of two kinds of guilt Nietzsche discusses in his works, reactive guilt, which is a reaction to an act of wrongdoing, and proactive guilt, which is a drive or desire to make oneself feel guilty. Here I offer an account of Greek guilt as a species of reactive guilt, and I argue that Nietzsche only rejects proactive guilt, which is endemic to Judeo-Christianity. (shrink)

This paper attempts to clarify the relationship between conscience and bad conscience in the Second Essay of the Genealogy of Morality (GM II). Conscience, which Nietzsche calls the “will's memory” (GM II, 1), is a faculty that enables agents to generate and sustain the motivation necessary to honor commitments, while bad conscience is that “other gloomy thing” (GM II, 4), gloomy because it is a self‐punishing faculty that produces feelings of guilt. In addition to having different functions, conscience and bad (...) conscience have distinct causal origins. Conscience originated as a memory of “I will nots” inculcated by punishment (GM II, 3), whereas bad conscience is produced by the process of “internalization” (GM II, 16)—not punishment (GM II, 14–15). It would seem to be possible, then, that an agent could have a conscience without having a bad conscience. The sovereign individual is sometimes interpreted in such terms. I argue that this separation is impossible, however. An agent would be incapable of generating and sustaining the motivation to honor commitments, thus having a conscience, without having undergone the process of internalization, necessitating the presence of bad conscience as well. (shrink)

This article examines a subject that has received relatively little attention in the literature on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: the pivotal role played by the emergence of consciousness (Bewusstsein) as an epistemic faculty in the development of conscience (Gewissen) as a moral faculty. To achieve this objective, I will (1) introduce the inquiry, (2) elucidate Nietzsche’s hypothesis regarding the emergence of consciousness, (3) establish a connection between consciousness and the genesis of conscience, and (4) expound upon the cognitive (...) capacities involved in the formation of conscience as a moral faculty. (shrink)