Guilt Before God, or God Before Guilt?

The Second Essay of

Nietzsche’s Genealogy
Ridley, Aaron.

The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 29, Spring 2005, pp. 35-45
(Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nie.2005.0008

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nie/summary/v029/29.1ridley.html

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030 Ridley (35-45) 3/21/05 12:12 PM Page 35

Guilt Before God, or God Before Guilt?

The Second Essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy

Aaron Ridley

T he second essay of Nietzsche’s “polemic,” On the Genealogy of Morals, is

a rich and elusive piece, full of valuable hints and suggestions, but difficult
finally to pin down. The essays that flank it are, in their own ways, more straight-
forward, and have attracted the lion’s share of critical attention—the first essay
for its account of the slave revolt in morality, the third for its account of the prin-
cipal fruit of that revolt, the ascetic ideal. But the second essay is absolutely cen-
tral, both as glue to hold essays 1 and 3 together and as a source of answers to
questions that its companion pieces either elide or leave hanging. In my book,
Nietzsche’s Conscience: Six Character Studies from the “Genealogy,” I offered
a reading of the second essay in which I tried to clarify its main theme—the bad
conscience—and to show how it fitted in with and illuminated the other two
essays.1 Mathias Risse, in a recent article, has objected to that reading.2 The imme-
diate issue between us—and one central to an understanding of the essay as
a whole—concerns the transformation, by a process that Nietzsche calls “mor-
alization,” of the concept of debt into the concept of guilt. My view is that
the moralizing process, on Nietzsche’s account, is essentially independent of
transcendental presuppositions, and is logically prior to the invention of (the
Christian) God. Risse disagrees. According to him, a moralized concept of guilt
necessarily presupposes God, and so is transcendentally informed from the start.
But the difference between us is not merely one of exegesis. If Risse is right, the
scope of Nietzsche’s insights into the process of moralization is restricted to it as
it occurs in certain quite narrowly theocratic contexts. If I am right, the scope of
those insights is potentially far wider. To this extent, our disagreement is a dis-
agreement about Nietzsche’s continuing importance. I begin by setting out my
own position (section 1). I then turn to Risse’s reading, which depends on three
considerations, none of them, in my view, convincing: a postcard that Nietzsche
wrote (section 2); an issue about translation (section 3); and the development of
ideas culminating, according to him, in section 21 of the Genealogy’s second
essay (section 4). I conclude by explaining why it matters, in the larger scheme
of things, that my reading is right (section 5).

1. In section 4 of the second essay, Nietzsche asks, “But how did that other
‘somber thing,’ the consciousness of guilt, the ‘bad conscience,’ come into the

Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 29, 2005

Copyright ©2005 The Friedrich Nietzsche Society.

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36 Aaron Ridley

world?”3 His answer, when it arrives, involves two distinct stages.4 The first
stage concerns what he calls “the internalisation of man”—the result of the sup-
pression of instinct engendered by enclosure “within the walls of society and
peace”: “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward
. . . : 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 mem-
branes, expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, breadth, and height, in the
same measure as outward discharge was inhibited” (GM II.16). This new inner
space is presented by Nietzsche as a theater of self-laceration, an arena in which
man vents his instinct for cruelty inwardly, upon himself, and Nietzsche refers
to this condition as the “bad conscience.” Initially, at least, bad conscience is not
evenly distributed: those at the apex of the social order (the nobles) experience
less repression of instinct, and so are less internalized and less subject to the suf-
ferings of self-cruelty than those at the bottom (the slaves). But even those at
the top “are held . . . sternly in check . . . by custom, respect, usage” (GM I.11);
and so even they are subject to some degree of bad conscience.5 At this stage,
however, the badness of the bad conscience is simply a matter of its painfulness;
it has nothing yet to do with morality or guilt.
Nietzsche describes the bad conscience at this preliminary stage as “an ill-
ness”—but “as pregnancy is an illness” (GM II.19): it has the potential, in its
second stage, to issue either in the kind of joyous, affirmative attitude that
Nietzsche associates with nobility or in the vengeful, moralized valuations that
he associates with slavishness. (Indeed, both outcomes can be realized in a sin-
gle individual, as Nietzsche makes clear when he remarks that “today there is
perhaps no more decisive mark of a “higher nature” . . . than that of being divided
in this sense and a genuine battleground of these opposed values” [GM I.16]).6
It is the slavish version of the bad conscience that is responsible for the trans-
formation of the concept of debt into the concept of guilt.7 That transformation
must be understood, according to Nietzsche, against the background of the pre-
history of punishment, which he sketches in the well-known fourth section of
the second essay in Genealogy. In injuring someone, the culprit becomes a
debtor—one who owes recompense to his creditor; and the injured party, in the
role of creditor, exacts payment from the debtor in the form of pain, or rather in
the form of pleasure derived from either causing or witnessing the debtor’s pain.
This sense of “punishment, as requital, evolved quite independently of any pre-
supposition concerning freedom or non-freedom of the will”; indeed, the thought
that the criminal should be punished because he could have acted otherwise is
“an extremely late and subtle form of human judgement and inference” (GM
II.4). At this stage, then, the idea of debt is operating in a nonmoral sense, and
has not yet undergone the transformation that turns it into the concept of guilt.
In the premoral phase, the culprit suffers “no ‘inward pain’ other than that
induced by the sudden appearance of something unforeseen” (GM II.14); he
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Guilt Before God, or God Before Guilt? 37

thinks “here something has unexpectedly gone wrong,” not: “I ought not to have
done that” (GM II.15). The experience of “inward pain” and the thought “I ought
not to have done that,” therefore, are characteristic of guilt-proper. Fairly evi-
dently, then, the moralization of debt into guilt involves the augmentation of an
outwardly caused pain (that of punishment, repayment) by an inwardly caused
one (of “guilt”), by a sense that one is somehow a worse person for doing what
one did. And certainly this captures something of what Nietzsche means by the
moralization of guilt. But there is more. The missing factor can be glimpsed in
the following passage:
[I]t was precisely through punishment that the development of the feeling of guilt
was most powerfully hindered. . . . For we must not underrate the extent to which
the sight of the judicial and executive procedures prevents the criminal from con-
sidering his deed, the type of his action as such, reprehensible: for he sees exactly
the same kind of actions practiced in the service of justice and approved of and
practiced with a good conscience [. . .] all of them therefore actions which his
judges in no way condemn and repudiate as such, but only when they are applied
and directed to certain particular ends. (GM II.14)

So guilt involves not merely “inward pain” and the thought “I ought not to have
done that,” but also the thought that one’s deed, the type of one’s action as such,
is reprehensible. This emphasis helps to explain what Nietzsche means else-
where when he speaks of the “morbid softening and moralization through which
the animal ‘man’ finally learns to be ashamed of all his instincts” (GM II.7):
again, it is a type of action as such—this time instinctive action—that attracts
the condemnation of the moralized conscience.
In the beginning, then, “debt” signifies merely a kind of fact—a fact that, in
the context of contractual relationships, might be expected to have certain con-
sequences (for instance, attempts at recovery on the part of the creditor). The
debtor’s attitude toward the fact is primarily prudential; he may regard it as incon-
venient, but he does not regard himself as a worse person for his indebtedness.
Then debt-incurring actions come to be repudiated as such: one comes to think
“I ought not to have done that; I ought to have done otherwise”—one interprets
one’s indebtedness as freely chosen, as a crime. This now hurts, now constitutes
the “inward pain” of “guilt,” for one is turning the fact of one’s indebtedness
back against oneself, as something with which to torment oneself. Why? Because
the instinct for cruelty is repressed and turned inward by living “within the walls
of society and peace.” In the absence of any other outlet, one makes oneself suf-
fer “out of joy in making suffer” (GM II.18); and holding oneself accountable
for one’s own actions is a peculiarly efficient way of doing this. Guilt, then, as
one of the many products, or potential products, of the internalization of man,
is most likely to be invented by the most internalized, the most repressed—by
the slave. His place at the bottom of the social pile permits him very few oppor-
tunities for the outward venting of his instinct for cruelty, and so he turns it back
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38 Aaron Ridley

on himself. Thus it is that this “other ‘somber thing,’ the consciousness of guilt,
the ‘bad conscience,’ [came] into the world.”
This, I claim, is Nietzsche’s account of the moralization of the concept of debt
into the concept of guilt. Two points should be noted. The first is that the account
as I have presented it is plausible. If, as Simon May has put it, guilt “is an expe-
rience of reprehensible failure,”8 then Nietzsche’s account can explain how such
an experience, with its own distinctive phenomenology, might arise. The sec-
ond point is that the plausibility of Nietzsche’s account is entirely independent
of any presuppositions concerning Christianity or God; and this is because he
regards the concept of guilt as one of the conditions that makes the invention
and success of Christianity so much as intelligible (on which more in section 4,
below). Indeed, that he quite evidently does regard “the consciousness of guilt”
as separable in this sense from the concept of God is made clear in the follow-
ing passage:
Man has all too long had an “evil eye” for his natural inclinations, so that they
have finally become inseparable from his “bad conscience.” An attempt at the
reverse would in itself be possible—but who is strong enough for it?—that is, to
wed the bad conscience to all the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations to
the beyond, to that which runs counter to sense, instinct, nature, animal, in short
all ideals hitherto, which are one and all hostile to life and ideals that slander the
world. (GM II.24)

Here the suggestion is that one might in principle, and among other things, learn
to feel guilty about (being tempted to) belief in God, a possibility that plainly
presupposes the essential independence of guilt from God.9 I turn now to Risse’s
efforts to establish the opposite conclusion.

2. Risse’s first consideration concerns a postcard that Nietzsche wrote to Franz

Overbeck in 1888, the year after the publication of the Genealogy. In it, he pres-
ents the Genealogy as, inter alia, a contribution to the understanding of the ori-
gins of Christianity, and also as a book in which, “for the sake of clarity, it was
necessary artificially to isolate the different roots of that complex structure that
is called morality. Each of these three treatises expresses a single primum mobile;
a fourth and fifth are missing . . . and the same holds true for the ultimate sum-
mation of all those different elements and thus a final account of morality.”10 The
first point is a modest enough statement of Nietzsche’s increasingly obsessive
attitude toward Christianity. It is true, of course, that the Genealogy expresses
insights into the origins of Christianity: but it is only in 1888, the last year of his
productive life, that Christianity begins in a serious way to be equated with every-
thing that Nietzsche finds most objectionable in modern culture. That he describes
the Genealogy in these terms is therefore no surprise. But it certainly does not
provide a warrant, even an indirect one, for thinking that God, on Nietzsche’s
understanding, must be implicated in every significant stage—for instance, in the
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Guilt Before God, or God Before Guilt? 39

transformation of the concept of debt into the concept of guilt—in the develop-
ment of morality that Nietzsche claims, in the Genealogy, to have diagnosed.
The other point—that the themes treated are both artificially separated and
less than exhaustive—is one that Risse begins by glossing in a perfectly rea-
sonable way: however artificial and incomplete, he says, “The three treatises
should be regarded as parts of a unified theory and critique of morality.”11 I take
this to mean, at the very least, that the three treatises—essays—should be
regarded as consistent with one another. I therefore find it surprising, having
placed something of a premium on internal consistency in my reading of the
Genealogy, to find that where my reading goes wrong is in its “attempt to find
a consistent narrative for all three treatises simultaneously. For the absence of
such a narrative is consistent with the artificial separation of topics announced
in the postcard to Overbeck.”12 This is intelligible only if Risse thinks that there
is some very strong distinction to be drawn between “theory” or “critique,” on
the one hand, and “narrative,” on the other; and if he does think that, he really
ought to have told us what the distinction is and how to draw it. It certainly seems,
after all, as if the distinctiveness of Nietzsche’s critique in the Genealogy lies
precisely in its being cast as a narrative. What is missing from Risse’s argument,
therefore, is an account of genealogy as a method that explains why its suc-
cessful execution is orthogonal to the successful development of a theory or cri-
tique; and he offers no hint of such an account (nor is it easy to imagine how he
could). By itself, then, Nietzsche’s postcard to Overbeck contributes nothing to
the matter at issue between us.

3. Risse’s second consideration is that translators have not always solved the
problem of rendering the single German word schuld (meaning debt or guilt)
into the most contextually appropriate English. So, for instance, some transla-
tions give the impression that a fully moralized concept of guilt is already in
place by the time Nietzsche starts to talk about God, in section 21 of the second
essay; and this, given his own preferred reading, Risse quite naturally regards
as a mistake. But whether it is a mistake, of course, depends upon which read-
ing makes the best sense of Nietzsche’s text; and that is not going to be settled
by noting that Risse’s reading is consistent with the original German, because
so is mine. The second consideration is therefore, like the first, entirely neutral
with respect to what we disagree about.

4. Everything devolves, then, on to the third consideration—that is, on to what

Nietzsche actually says in the Genealogy. Here, Risse wants to give absolute inter-
pretative priority to section 21, a section he repeatedly describes as “pivotal.”13
Here is the meat of it (Nietzsche has just been describing how a tribe or a people
might feel indebted [Schuldgefühl] to its founding ancestors in proportion to its
own increasing success, until at last the ancestors are transfigured into gods):
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40 Aaron Ridley

So much for a first brief preliminary on the connection of the concepts “Schuld”
and “duty” with religious presuppositions: I have up to now deliberately ignored
the moralization of these concepts (their pushing back into the conscience; more
precisely, the involvement of the bad conscience with the concept of god). . . .
[With the moralization of these concepts] the aim now is to preclude pessimisti-
cally, once and for all, the prospect of a final discharge; . . . the aim now is to turn
back the concepts “Schuld” and “duty”— . . . against the “debtor” first of all, in
whom from now on the bad conscience is firmly rooted, eating into him and
spreading within him like a polyp, until at last the irredeemable “Schuld” gives
rise to the conception of irredeemable penance, the idea that it cannot be dis-
charged (“eternal punishment”). Finally, however, they are turned back against
the “creditor,” too: whether we think of the causa prima of man, the beginning
of the human race, . . . or of existence in general, which is now considered worth-
less as such (nihilistic withdrawal from it, a desire for nothingness . . . , for a dif-
ferent mode of being, Buddhism and the like)—suddenly we stand before the
paradoxical and horrifying expedient that afforded temporary relief for tormented
humanity, that stroke of genius on the part of Christianity: God himself sacrifices
himself for the “Schuld” of mankind, God himself makes payment to himself,
God as the only being who can redeem man from what has become unredeemable
for man himself. (GM II.21)

The importance of this dense passage, according to Risse, is that it “tells us how
the bad conscience as a feeling of guilt arises from an earlier form of the bad
conscience (which has nothing to do with guilt) and an indebtedness towards
gods”14; and that it does so in a way that establishes that the feeling of guilt pre-
supposes the advent of the specifically “Christian notion of God.” 15
This strikes me as a very odd way of reading the passage. On the face of it,
after all, what Nietzsche is talking about is, as he puts it in the following sec-
tion, “the will of man to find himself guilty [schuldig] and reprehensible to a
degree that can never be atoned for; his will to think himself punished without
any possibility of the punishment becoming equal to the guilt; . . . his will to
erect an ideal—that of the ‘holy God’—and in the face of it to feel the palpable
certainty of his own absolute unworthiness” (GM II.22). “This,” he goes on,
“should dispose once and for all of the question of how the ‘holy God’ origi-
nated” (GM II.23). What Nietzsche appears to be talking about, then, is not the
moralization of the concept of debt into the concept of guilt, but the invention
of the Christian concept of God. And the natural way of reading sections 22 and
23 is to say, first, that man already has the conceptual wherewithal to consider
himself guilty—reprehensible, unworthy—before he erects his ideal, and, sec-
ond, that he erects that ideal “so as to drive his self-torture”—that is, his feel-
ings of being reprehensible and unworthy, that is, of being guilty—“to its most
gruesome pitch of severity and rigour. Guilt before God: this thought becomes
an instrument of torture to him” (GM II.22). If one returns in light of this to sec-
tion 21, the pressure, such as it ever was, to read it as telling us how the inven-
tion of God is a condition of a moralized concept of guilt should have dissipated,
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Guilt Before God, or God Before Guilt? 41

the only remaining hint in that direction now lying in the remark about the “push-
ing back” of Schuld “into the conscience,” and “the involvement of the bad con-
science with the concept of god.” But this, I suggest, marks the end of the
discussion of ancestor-worship (hence my lower-case “god”), rather than an indi-
cation of the subject matter of the remainder of section 21. It is, in fact, all that
Nietzsche has to say in that section about moralization.
This conclusion gains force when one notes the following points. First,
Buddhism features in the passage as one expression of the sense that existence,
and hence man, is “worthless as such.” Feelings of worthlessness, as Risse him-
self acknowledges in another context,16 do not attend mere feelings of indebted-
ness: they attend feelings of guilt; and Buddhists can clearly get those, on
Nietzsche’s account, without believing in the Christian God.17 Second, in section
15 of the third essay (a section that Risse cites in support of his own interpreta-
tion,18 and so presumably will not think me illicitly consistency-hunting if I use
it too), Nietzsche imagines the following exchange: “I suffer: someone must be
to blame for it”—thus thinks every sickly sheep. But his shepherd, the ascetic
priest, tells him: “Quite so, my sheep! Someone must be to blame for it: but you
yourself are this someone, you alone are to blame for it—you alone are to blame
for yourself!” This is clearly a case of the “debtor” being invited to “turn back”
the concept of Schuld against himself, something that in Risse’s “pivotal” section
Nietzsche says happens “first of all”—that is, before God gets into the picture. But
the priest’s “sickly sheep” already speaks the language of “blame” (and therefore
of guilt). Indeed, if he did not, not only would the priest’s invitation be unintelli-
gible to him, but he would be unable subsequently to make any sense of the “whole
mysterious machinery of salvation” that the priest, that is, Christianity, offers as
recompense (GM II.7). Again, only the guilty need God. Finally, and just as a mat-
ter of interpretative etiquette, one ought not to attribute to someone any view less
plausible than his text will support. And the view that Risse attributes to Nietzsche,
apart from being at odds with his text (see above), is implausible through and
through. What independent reason could there possibly be to think that a moral-
ized conception of guilt must be the sole preserve of cultures that happen to have
developed the specifically “Christian notion of God”?19 I can think of none; nor
can I see that anything in Nietzsche’s argument should encourage one to. I con-
clude accordingly: the concept of guilt is logically prior to the concept of God.20

5. I take myself now to have seen off Risse’s reading of the second essay. It
remains to indicate why it matters if one gets Nietzsche wrong in the way that
Risse does. I said at the outset that the issue between us devolved on to a ques-
tion about the scope of Nietzsche’s insights, and hence of his continuing impor-
tance. It is time now to make good on that claim.
If Risse is right, then, as he himself argues in the most convincing section of
his paper,21 Nietzsche’s interest for ethics is limited to his critical impact on a
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42 Aaron Ridley

certain kind of morality. Most obviously, of course, the target is Christian moral-
ity. But also in the firing line are the various crypto-Christian moralities that
have been invented to take its place—self-allegedly post-Christian, but in real-
ity, if unwittingly, trading on Christian presuppositions for whatever force they
have. Nietzsche’s favorite crypto-Christian target is Kantianism. But it is not the
only one, as a passage that Risse cites from Twilight of the Idols makes clear:
They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more
firmly to Christian morality: that is English consistency. . . . With us it is differ-
ent. When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right
to Christian morality. . . . Christianity is a system, a consistently thought out and
complete view of things. If one breaks out of it a fundamental idea, the belief in
God, one thereby breaks the whole thing to pieces. . . . [I]t stands or falls with
belief in God. If the English really do believe they know, of their own accord,
“intuitively,” what is good and evil; if they consequently think they no longer have
need of Christianity as a guarantee of morality; that is merely the consequence
of the ascendancy of Christian evaluation and an expression of the strength and
depth of this ascendancy. (TI, “Expeditions,” 5)
Nietzsche’s purpose here is threefold: first, to expose a particular kind of mas-
querade (the Christian character of certain moralities that present themselves as
non-Christian); second, to show that such moralities are incoherent without the
centrally Christian beliefs that the proponents of those moralities profess to reject
(the moralities stand or fall with belief in God); and third, to explain how those
engaged in such a masquerade can themselves be taken in by it (so entrenched
have the judgments of Christian morality become, they seem self-evidently true).
It is in exactly this sort of way, as Risse notes, that the madman’s announcement
of the death of God gets its point (GS 125): the “atheists” hear what the mad-
man says, but they fail to realize just how radical the consequences of his
announcement are. The madman concludes that he has “come too early.”
It is certainly part of Nietzsche’s project, then, to show how the valuations of
Christian morality can survive the advent of atheism, at least for a time. It is also
true that Christian morality, as Nietzsche construes it, is quite peculiarly tied up
with the notion of guilt. It is therefore also part of his project to show how the
notion of guilt can survive the advent of atheism. Risse and I agree on this much,
I think. But now our respective readings begin to push us in different directions.
For me, the survival of the concept of guilt is entirely unproblematic: unlike
Christian morality per se, guilt, for me, is a logical condition rather than a log-
ical consequence of belief in God, and so can survive the demise of that belief
without difficulty. For Risse, on the other hand, belief in God is a conceptual
prerequisite of the notion of guilt; and it is not at all obvious how the use of a
concept might survive the removal of its own conditions of intelligibility.22
Risse has a choice here, it seems to me. He can give up on the claim that belief
in God, conscious or unconscious, is a condition of the concept of guilt. But he
is unlikely to want to do that, since to do so would be to endorse my reading of
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Guilt Before God, or God Before Guilt? 43

the second essay. Or—and this would surely be his preferred recourse—he can
claim that the crypto-Christian use of the concept of guilt involves a change in
its meaning, inasmuch as that another concept, that of God, once (consciously
or unconsciously) a condition of its intelligibility, no longer is.23 But this would
hardly be a cost-free option for him: for on his reading, the notion of guilt ought
eventually to wither away once the consequences of the death of God are fully
acknowledged.24 And this prospect—the expectation of which is rendered arbi-
trary and unmotivated if the meaning of guilt has changed in the relevant way—
in fact marks the sole point of contact between the second essay of the Genealogy,
as Risse reads it, and Nietzsche’s critique of crypto-Christian morality. Indeed,
it marks the sole point of contact between his reading of that essay and
Nietzsche’s attempts to imagine what a genuinely post-Christian morality might
be like.25 In short, the price of reading Nietzsche in the way that Risse wants to
is to conclude that the second essay of the Genealogy is of next to no impor-
tance at all, and certainly of none with respect to the larger shape of Nietzsche’s
project. And that strikes me—as it must surely also strike Risse—as a high price
to pay for insisting, against the grain of Nietzsche’s text, that the concept of guilt
depends, or at least depended at its inception, upon the concept of God.
On my reading, by contrast, the wider importance of the second essay emerges
unscathed. The notion of guilt arises in the manner described in section 1 above.
It then plays a pivotal role in the invention of the Christian concept of God, and
hence in the invention of Christian morality. With the advent of atheism, Christian
morality comes under pressure, a pressure whose consequences are deferred,
however, by the construction of various crypto-Christian moralities to which the
notion of guilt is, as it were, freely available for use. The modality of crypto-
Christian guilt feelings may well be different from Christian guilt feelings: the
former are unlikely, for instance, to be experienced as “before God,” as limitless,
or as involving a sense of absolute personal worthlessness. But, however much
their intensity may have been ratcheted down from the “gruesome pitch” to which
belief in God had driven them,26 they will still be experienced as guilt, as a sense
of reprehensible failure. Once the news of the death of God has finally sunk in,
the characteristic objects of Christian and crypto-Christian condemnation—life,
the flesh, the “whole sphere,” as Nietzsche puts it, “of becoming and transitori-
ness” (GM III.11)—are up for rehabilitation. This is why, in the passage from
section 24 of the second essay already quoted, Nietzsche thinks that it might be
possible henceforth to redirect the “evil eye”—that is, one’s propensity to guilt—
away from “sense, instinct, nature, animal” and instead on to one’s tendencies to
embrace “ideals that slander the world.”27 That the “evil eye,” once developed,
cannot just be sealed up or abolished is thus part of Nietzsche’s point: slave moral-
ity first made man an “interesting animal” (GM I.6); and it is as an interesting
animal, replete with the propensities and capacities bequeathed by two millen-
nia of Christianity, that he must discover whatever worthwhile (post-Christian)
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44 Aaron Ridley

future he might have. When Nietzsche celebrates the “intellectual conscience”

in The Anti-Christ—saying that “Greatness of soul is needed for it: the service
of truth is the hardest sevice. For what does it mean to be honest in intellectual
things? That one is stern towards one’s heart, . . . that one makes of every Yes
and No a question of conscience” (A 50)—he is commending one aspect of his
own preferred redirection of the propensity to guilt, a redirection designed to
co-opt it in the search for a genuinely noble post-Christian morality. (If only the
guilty need God, the Godless may nonetheless need guilt.)
To foreclose this dimension of Nietzsche’s thought, as Risse’s reading does,
is not only to trivialize the second essay of the Genealogy: it is to subtract hugely
from the depth, and indeed the pathos, of Nietzsche’s engagement with the mod-
ern moral psyche. It is, moreover, to mistake a style of thought that is always
intensely alert to and charged by a sense of what man might become—by a sense
that man is “pregnant with a future . . . , as if with him something were announc-
ing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but only a way, an episode, a
bridge, a great promise” (GM II.16)—for an altogether more passive and doc-
umentary style of thought; and to make that mistake is to expect, and therefore
on the whole to find, much less that is of real significance in Nietzsche’s work
than he in fact put there.28

NOTES
1. Aaron Ridley, Nietzsche’s Conscience: Six Character Studies from the “Genealogy”
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), passim. But see especially chaps. 1 and 2.
2. Mathias Risse, “The Second Treatise in On the Genealogy of Morality: Nietzsche on the
Origin of the Bad Conscience,” European Journal of Philosophy 9:1 (2001): 55–81. Referenced
hereafter as “Risse.”
3. This, and all subsequent quotations from the Genealogy, have been taken, with the
occasional modification, from the Kaufmann/Hollingdale translation given in On the Genealogy
of Morals and Ecce Homo (New York: Vintage, 1969).
4. Risse presents himself as criticizing my account of Nietzsche’s answer (75 n. 12), while in
fact duplicating it (57–61).
5. Risse, too, makes this point (61 and 75 n. 12). When I made it in my book (22), I attributed
a number of the details to David Owen’s essay “Nietzsche, Enlightenment, and the Problem of
Noble Ethics,” in J. Lippitt, ed., Nietzsche’s Futures (London: Macmillan, 1999), 3–29, which is
where I got them. Risse seems to have arrived at them independently.
6. Again, Risse says exactly what I say about this, but he presents himself as offering to
correct me (75 n. 12).
7. The remainder of this paragraph and the whole of the next two are based on the relevant
pages of my book. See Nietzsche’s Conscience, 30–33. The treatment given there is a good deal
fuller, however.
8. Simon May, Nietzsche’s Ethics and His War on “Morality” (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 77. May’s own very useful discussion of the moralization of guilt is broadly
consonant with mine.
9. Nietzsche’s suggestion in the quoted passage is probably not, in fact, sustainable. But the
reasons for that do not affect the present point. For discussion, see Ridley, Nietzsche’s Conscience,
134–35.
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Guilt Before God, or God Before Guilt? 45

10. Quoted in Risse, 55.

11. Ibid. Actually, this is not entirely reasonable: unified “critique,” yes; unified “theory,” no.
Nietzsche was not a theory builder. To think that he might have been would be to misunderstand
his mature method, and to be blind to the role played in it by his perspectivism. See section 12 of
the Genealogy’s third essay.
12. Risse, 78 n. 23.
13. Ibid., 56, 58, 61, 78.
14. Ibid., 56.
15. Ibid., 63.
16. Ibid., 61.
17. See also section 20 of The Anti-Christ, where Nietzsche describes Buddhism as already
having put “the self-deception of moral concepts behind it” (emphasis added). This and
subsequent references to The Anti-Christ are taken from R. J. Hollingdale, trans., Twilight of the
Idols and The Anti-Christ (London: Penguin, 1968).
18. Risse, p. 64.
19. Which is not to say that such cultures might not have quite specific modalities of guilt
feelings. Indeed, as I take it, this is part of Nietzsche’s point throughout section 21.
20. Whether, in all cases, the concept of guilt is also chronologically prior to the concept of
God is of course another question, and one about which I doubt that there is much of a general
nature to be said.
21. Risse, section 5.
22. Brian Leiter also worries about this point in his Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge,
2002), 239.
23. Section 12 of essay 2 might be enlisted for this purpose.
24. Risse, 69–70.
25. It is no accident, perhaps, that Risse’s reflections on these attempts are confined to a certain
skepticism about Nietzsche’s envisaged time-table (Risse, 70–71).
26. This is part of what Nietzsche means when he talks of atheism promising “a second
innocence” (GM II.20).
27. This is the rest of what Nietzsche means by a possible “second innocence.” See note 26.
28. My thanks to David Owen for comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

WORKS CITED
Leiter, Brian. Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002).
May, Simon. Nietzsche Ethics and His War on “Morality” (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999).
Owen, David. “Nietzsche, Enlightenment, and the Problem of Noble Ethics,” in J. Lippitt, ed.,
Nietzsche’s Futures (London: Macmillan, 1999), 3–29.
Ridley, Aaron. Nietzsche’s Conscience: Six Character Studies from the “Genealogy” (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1998).
Risse, Mathias. “The Second Treatise in On the Genealogy of Morality: Nietzsche on the Origin
of the Bad Conscience,” European Journal of Philosophy 9:1 (2001): 55–81.