Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, Essay #2

In this presentation, I have two goals: first, because the "narrative" of the second essay is disjointed, I want to attempt to "storyboard" its elements, in the hope of providing a basic structure within which to think through this text. In the process, I want to keep track of a few key terms and offer provisional definitions. As a side note, I do think that there is a very specific purpose Nietzsche has for not presenting his genealogy "straightforwardly" and in discrete stages, but nonetheless find it heuristically useful to present it as such.

In the second essay, Nietzsche is describing a "task that nature has set itself," a process that begins with an animal, an animal which although healthy, lacks the capacity for true freedom. In the second section, Nietzsche jumps directly to the end of this process, which is also an animal of health. Nietzsche calls this ripe fruit the "sovereign individual." The sovereign individual is autonomous, by which he means he is not bound to the "morality of custom," and guided by his conscience, which Nietzsche associates with possessing the "right to affirm oneself."

In contrast to the animal, the sovereign individual is able to "stand security for his own future." The animal, having no real memory and thus no real future, blows with the wind. The sovereign individual on the other hand, dictates his own future and has the gumption to bear the security of that future. Having this capacity is what Nietzsche says it is to be free.

Recall from the first essay that Nietzsche was examining "the problem of the noble ideal itself," which is the "synthesis of the inhuman and the overhuman" (I.16). Good, "overhuman" traits like "consideration, self-control, tenderness, fidelity, pride and friendship" sat alongside an inhuman beastial cruelty. Nietzsche is pointing to the sovereign individual as someone who exemplifies these good traits without the contradictory inhuman ones. The sovereign individual is thus the solution to a contradiction inherent to the noble ideal that, as we will see, only gets worked out by passing through the person of bad conscience. The sovereign individual stands in a purposefully stark contrast to the rest of Nietzsche's story, held up as a light at the end of a very dark tunnel.

Nietzsche then jumps back to delimiting two spheres of human prehistory. The first is the sphere of punishment. Nietzsche believes that all ascriptions of utility, purpose and meaning to punishment are contingent and that its practice pre-dates the purposes we commonly associate with it. If there was something like a "use" of punishment in humanity's pre-history, it was simply to make one feel good in watching the suffering of others. He makes clear in Section 7 that he does not mean to "furnish our pessimists with more grist for their discordant and creaking mills." Life, he says, was much more cheerful when human beings reveled in suffering. I believe Nietzsche would say that our inability to grasp how suffering could be an enticement to life is a testament to just how lost in our own sickness we are.

The other sphere of human prehistory is the sphere of legal obligation, which entails the relationship between creditor and debtor. It is in this sphere that punishment is first made equivalent with injury; that is, the idea is born that injury can be paid back in terms of pain. To be clear, the creditor is paid back in the form of pleasure, the pleasure of seeing another suffer. Nietzsche claims that it is in this sphere that guilt and bad conscience have their origin and not in the sphere of punishment, though I think it is important for later developments that punishment is given a specific meaning within the sphere of legal obligation.

The first development from these two spheres I want to examine is that of responsibility. Nietzsche makes it clear that responsibility is only possible in an animal in whom memory has been instilled, and that the faculty of memory is the direct result of the experience of pain. Thus, it is natural to believe that responsibility arises out of the sphere of punishment, that the promise-keeping ability comes from the making calculable of men through punishment and the remembering of a few "I will nots." I fail to see, however, how the practice of punishment alone could produce responsibility. Only in conjunction with some kind of obligation to other people does responsibility develop from the practice of punishment. There are two options for this source of obligation: one is in the "making equivalent of injury and punishment" in the creditor/debtor sphere. On this reading, non-moralized guilt (indebtedness) + punishment => responsibility. Another option is simply the social restraint necessary to living in a peaceful society, thus bad conscience + punishment => responsibility. The ability to distinguish between the two depends upon thinking of "community" and "society" as different things, which I think is strictly speaking impossible. Thus, some combination of bad conscience and indebtedness + punishment => responsibility. The choice between the two, however, does not matter so much as the fact that responsibility does not stem from moralized guilt. In any event, this is a good thing: the capacity for keeping promises is a uniquely human good, one that the human being takes pride in. The instinct born of the making responsible of the human animal is conscience, which I will offer a preliminary definition of now.

Conscience is the instinct that produces a feeling of regret when one does not make good on one's promises. The feeling of regret is not for having "let down" some external agency but for having failed to realize one's own potential as a promise-keeping being and therefore having failed to express the uniquely human strength of being able to bear the security of one's own future.

The other development to be examined is obviously that of guilt and bad conscience, which have to do with the "morality of custom and the social straightjacket" that man is subject to within the "walls of society."

First, bad conscience: in the violence of state formation, a noble-warrior class subjugates a people and makes them into slaves. When the dust settles, everyone is confined within the walls of society, but the noble-warrior class still has an outlet for their will to power in dominating the underclass. The notion of bad conscience is alien to them, but without them, without them having subjugated this other class, the bad conscience could not have been born. It is in this underclass, no longer able to outwardly vent their hostility and cruelty, that the will to power is blocked and turns back on itself. This festering incapacity for the expression of the will to power is the origin of the bad conscience.

Second, regarding guilt: the basic creditor/debtor schema, in which we find a non-moralized conception of guilt as simply a feeling of indebtedness, this schema is generalized in two ways: first in the relationship between a community, the disappointed creditor, and its members and secondly through the relationship of ancestors to their descendents. In the generalization of the creditor/debtor schema, we feel like we owe others more and more, and thus our feelings of guilt increase.

But I don't think we're yet at the moralized guilt that Nietzsche is really worried about. In section 21, a very important section, Nietzsche says that guilt is moralized by being "pushed back into," or simply entangled with, the bad conscience. Only in their combination do we get the fully moralized conception of guilt. How does this happen? And what is it that encourages their combination?

Remember that in the bad conscience, the will to power is essentially at an impasse, frustrated, arrested, a sadism turned back on itself. In latching on to guilt, that is, in guilt's moralization, the will's mistreatment of itself in the bad conscience is legitimized in reference to the creditor-debtor schema. If bad conscience emerges when sadism is turned back on itself, the moralization of guilt emerges as a naturalization of that process into masochism. What was a deadlock becomes a new way for the will to power to express itself.

Thus, we should distinguish between two senses of guilt: non-moralized guilt is simply our feeling of indebtedness to others. Moralized guilt is what transforms a frustrated sadism into masochism. It is the co-optation of non-moralized guilt in the service of the will to power, though obviously at cross-purposes with it. The will to power is thus so blind in its striving that it will even destroy the integrity of the being in whom it is manifest if it is the only avenue of its expression.

In point of fact, I think debt and guilt are not always adequately distinguished in the English version of the Genealogy. Specifically, in the second paragraph of Section 21, I believe it should read: "The moralization of the concepts debt [not guilt] and duty..." The moralization of debt is guilt on my reading. Thus, I would substitute a feeling of indebtedness for non-moralized guilt and guilt for moralized guilt, but for the sake of remaining true to the English translation, will simply stick to the distinction between moralized/non-moralized guilt.

Matthias Risse believes, however, that the joint presence of a non-moralized guilt and the bad conscience are not enough to produce the moralized guilt that Nietzsche laments. He says that there must be a third term, a catalyst that provides a general narrative framework within which guilt is moralized. This framework is Christianity. While I believe that Risse is right, I think he overemphasizes the need for a third term. Christianity is the narrative framework in which guilt is moralized, but it should also be said that the moralization of guilt offers a "solution" to the frustrated sadism of the bad conscience, and thus that their entanglement does not need a third term to explain the moralization of guilt.

In conclusion, briefly, the purpose of Nietzsche's genealogy is to separate responsibility and conscience on the one hand, from bad conscience and guilt on the other, to show that there is the possibility of keeping one without the other.

I also want to point to one section that I did not cover in this presentation, a section that I find confusing and honestly do not know where to place: this is section 10 on fairness and justice vs. mercy. Part of me wants to say that a community displaying mercy is a good thing, that "merciful community" should be placed right next to "sovereign individual." But part of me also wants to say that in making crimes "dischargeable," the criminal is separated from his crime, the doer from his deed, which is one of the preconditions for ascriptions of blame and the creation of the "moral agent" that Nietzsche criticizes.

Walter Benjamin's Theses

The guiding thought behind this chart is that Benjamin is ultimately speaking about one of two types of people in every thesis from his "Theses on the Philosophy of History:" either those who align themselves with theology and historical materialism on the one hand, or those who think of themselves as social democrats or adherents of historicism on the other. The latter should not be thought of as "the enemy;" they are much closer to "Obama supporters."

A few notes:

1) I have put the chronicler on the side of the historical materialist, though I am still troubled by the exact function of this character (imported from the Kafka essay) in the Theses. My thought is that the chronicling impulse is something like the condition for the possibility of historical materialism: because nothing is lost, history can be redeemed.

2) I think Thesis 8 is a mistake. Getting involved in the game of whose state of emergency is more "real" is always a mistake for historical materialists. In other words, I don't think there is a way to separate a good sense of urgency from a bad sense.

3) I might add "Judaism" to the first column and "Christianity" to the second.

Trying to Understand Chapter One of Zizek's Book on Schelling

This is a diagram of Chapter One of "The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Other Matters," by Slavoj Zizek. In this chapter, Zizek is explaining the system of Schelling's Weltalter drafts.

Taking Schopenhauer's "Ideas" Seriously

The general appropriation of Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy is today fragmented: while it is undeniable that Schopenhauer touched upon a number of interesting philosophical themes (the body, his aesthetics, particularly with regard to music, etc.), the whole of his philosophy is incoherent, or so says conventional wisdom. As a systematizer, Schopenhauer is less than Hegel, and as a thinker, less than Nietzsche, though no doubt interesting in his contrast to the former and as a prototype for the latter. What I hope to do here is treat Schopenhauer's philosophy as the connected tour de force that he claimed it was, in recognition of the fact that systematizing the unthinkable is always an incoherent project. If Schopenhauer's philosophy as a whole cannot help but fall apart, it is because this very falling apart is his philosophy.

The Will, this formless, undifferentiated thing that stands self-sufficiently before and beyond the world that is subject to the principle of sufficient reason, the world of representation, is blind striving, pure contradictory movement. As pure contradiction, it is both itself and not itself while never and always being both. It's existence is not relative, not standing in comparison to something else; it is thus pure singularity. Due to the ambiguity of singularity, of undifferentiation, which is the ambiguity also of absolute contradiction, the Will is both itself and the Ideas. If the Will is chaos, though chaos without an order with which to compare it, a proto-chaos, then the Ideas are pure, undifferentiated order, though order without a chaos with which to compare it, a proto-order; thus, in the Will (though he may just as easily call it the Ideas), Schopenhauer sees the absolute coincidence of law and violence, order and arbitrariness, whose movement can only be characterized by the blind self-movement caused by its own contradiction, the dialectical explosion of its concentration as being and nothingness. We might liken Schopenhauer's Will to the Void in Schelling, which through the absolutely formal contradiction of “wanting nothing” and “wanting no thing,” the ambiguity of nothingness as both activity and passivity, explodes into being. The primordial ooze of existence bursts beyond itself while remaining completely within itself by its very contradictory nature.

Frederick Copleston sees the Ideas as “a sort of half-way house” between the phenomenal world and the world as Will, which is to overlay upon Schopenhauer's philosophy a hierarchical topology of neo-Platonic emanation, wherein the Will gradually objectifies itself into first the Ideas and then the world as representation. This interpretation sees the veil of Maya as a quantitative step on the Will's path to self-objectification. Not only does this understanding of the Ideas undermine Schopenhauer's dual perspectival understanding of the world (as one and the same thing from two different perspectives), but it also ignores Schopenhauer's claim, repeated by Copleston, that “the principle of sufficient reason has for [the Idea] no meaning” (Copleston 105). Though it is difficult to swallow, we must accept Schopenhauer's claim that the Idea is absolutely not part of the world as representation. It must be, then, synonymous with the undivided Will, both in contradiction to and at one with it.





The Will is, then, at first a mass of contradiction, and through it's self-movement, by its very nature, divides itself into absolute alterity in the form of the Ideas (Fig. 1 and 2). It's own neutral charge splits into positive (the Will) and negative (the Ideas); the Ideas revolve around the positive core of the Will and in complete dependence upon them. Without the Will, the Ideas spin off into non-existence and without the Ideas the Will loses its very nature as self-movement.



In pure space the Will, as charge, constructs, first at a low grade in inorganic nature, then at a higher grade in organic nature (Fig. 3). As Schopenhauer says, when the "phenomena of the will at the lower grades of its objectification, that is, in organic nature, come into conflict with one another, because each under the guidance of causality wants to take possession of the existing matter, there arises from this conflict the phenomenon of the higher Idea. This higher Idea subdues all the less perfect phenomena previously existing, yet in such a way that it allows their essential nature to continue in a subordinate manner, since it takes up into itself an analogue of them. This process is intelligible only from the identity of the will apparent in all the Ideas, and from its striving for higher and higher objectification" (Schopenhauer 144-45).

It is important to point out that only the phenomenon of the higher Idea arises from the conflict of lower phenomena, not the Idea itself. The Idea itself functions as a catalyst for the manifestation of its phenomenal appearance; as it draws pure matter towards it, it molds that matter more and more into its own likeness. At the pinnacle of the process of objectification stands the human being, both fully in the world as representation, the phenomenal world, and in the world as will, uniquely situated in the world's stratosphere, where he can glimpse both the stars above and the ground below. He is, however, pointed toward the ground upon which he arose, having backed in to his dual position much like Benjamin's angel. Schopenhauer's whole project might simply be described as turning this being around.

It is only with man that the process of the Will's objectification becomes intelligible. Before man it could not have been known that the Will was ever objectifying itself in the hierarchical form of the phenomenal world. Only retrospectively, only when the Will's objectification in the phenomenal world reached such a point that one of its phenomenal objectifications became so like it that it was it, could it be known that the Will had all along been objectifying itself.



It is because man is embodied that he has a dual nature, his body being the protrusion of his being, the Will, into the phenomenal world (Fig. 3, inset). In his protrusion he exists in space and time and is subject to the principle of sufficient reason. The veil of Maya intersects his being and bifurcates his world in two.

For Schopenhauer, then, the subject alone, as embodied in the individual human being, stands alone between the two worlds, or the one world divided upon itself, and thus in its existence alone is the “inner and essential destiny of the will” (Schop 310). Man, however, realizes that his existence is based upon a lack, that the entire hierarchical structure of the phenomenal world was built on its own fundamental lack, which is that it is ever not yet what it seeks to be. In every conflict wherein the phenomenon of a higher Idea arises, it becomes clear that this phenomenon is still not it, still not the Idea it seeks to emulate. And with every higher grade of phenomena the intensity of not being it, the intensity of suffering, increases. Man, then, as the highest objectification of the Will, suffers most.



But he does not suffer in vain; for only man is capable of severing his connection with this world, on the one side Will, on the other representation (Fig. 4). In turning away from the phenomenal world, he wrests away the Idea of himself from the Will in the most epic of struggles. In this struggle, which is the path of virtue and holiness, man comprehends his Kafka-esque proto-human reality and reaches up to the heavens to grab his own form, the completeness of his own lack. In doing so he sees himself “in all places simultaneously,” as all the constructions of the phenomenal world, as all the Ideas identical to the Will and thus as Will itself (Schop 380). In this realization he effects the dissolution of structure and the contraction of being. The thing freed by the abolition of the Will (and representation and the world) is “assuredly nothing,” but not a negativity in contrast to some positivity. It is absolute neutrality, disconnected finally from the epic elaboration of the Will's objectification. This thing, of course, though Schopenhauer goes no further, is of course the Will itself, returned to its primordial state, which is to say that man, in renouncing the world and abolishing the Will, becomes a world in potentia.

Logos/Hysteria

Both terms of each binary are nodes of power, and the narrative of “The Yellow Wallpaper” describes the movement from the first to the second; upon completion of this movement, the terms collapse into each other. With the hope of making the relationships clearer, I have created the following chart:

The terms on the left are associated with men or the masculine; on the right, the terms are associated with women or the feminine. Yet this is not to say that men possess the powers named on the left, and women those on the right. Rather, this chart provides one way of looking at phallogocentric discourse—one reading. To put it plainly, men control all the terms (at least in the three texts that are the focus of this essay), but they only overtly wield the terms on the left. The terms on the left define the terms on the right, i.e., the terms on the right are negatively defined via those on the left.