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Good and Evil, Good and Bad
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in On the Genealogy of Morals, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Good and Evil
The Repression of Human Nature
Art, Beauty, and Emotions
Summary
Analysis
1. Nietzsche thinks about what’s involved in making promises. First, he thinks that forgetfulness works against keeping promises. Nietzsche argues that forgetfulness is an active, useful capacity of the mind. When someone is digesting something they’ve experienced, forgetfulness blocks other thoughts from entering their consciousness and stops people from becoming mentally overloaded. The opposite of forgetfulness is memory. Memory is also active: it’s an active choice to keep vowing something in between making a promise and fulfilling it, no matter what happens in between those two events. To do so, a person has to be able to anticipate the future and have a reliable conception of themselves so that they can vouch for their future self when making a promise.
Nietzsche has just argued that popular beliefs about what’s “good” and “evil” are relatively new, can be changed, and were different in the past. Now, he’s going to debunk several aspects of 19th-century European culture in similar ways. Nietzsche thinks that many social practices people consider “good”—like keeping promises, implementing justice, and punishing wrongdoers—cause unnecessary suffering, which means that European society is not as progressive as most people think. Having just discussed how moral standards are established over time, it’s likely that Nietzsche’s discussion of memory and promises will relate to how people make moral commitments.
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2. Making promises thus depends upon teaching humans to be reliable and predictable, which happens through customs and social constraints. When people feel like they’ve mastered social customs and consider themselves free to make and keep promises, they derive a sense of pride and perfection in knowing that they honor their word and are trustworthy. It’s almost like feeling proud of being responsible. People call this having a “conscience.”
Nietzsche argues that societies use social conditioning to make people commit to their promises. Societies teach people to feel proud for keeping promises and guilty for breaking them, which most people assume is a good habit to acquire. However, given Nietzsche’s distaste for blindly accepting social norms, he likely disagrees with this mindset.
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3. It’s obvious to Nietzsche, however, that such a rosy picture of acquiring a good “conscience” obscures its ugly history. Historically, pain, punishment, and fear were used to make people “conquer” their forgetfulness and keep their promises. Germans—who consider themselves a nation of enlightened, uncruel thinkers—originally employed horrific methods to drum social codes into people’s minds, including stoning people, trampling people under horses, and boiling people in oil. With the help of such methods, people were able to remember “five or six ‘I will nots’.” Nietzsche thinks it's funny how much suffering is at the root of things we now perceive as good.
4. Nietzsche now wonders how “bad conscience”—essentially, “guilt”—comes into the world. He thinks that many “genealogists” of morals only look at their “modern” experience, which overlooks how the ideas of guilt, retaliation, and obligation are closely related. Punishment was often inflicted out of anger at someone for the injury they caused. Such punishment was framed as inflicting an equivalent amount of pain on the wrongdoer as “compensation” that settled the score. Nietzsche thinks that thinking about punishment this way comes from the notions of “credit” and “debit,” which have been entrenched in human history since people first started bartering and trading with one another.
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5. In order to show that a promise is sincere, the promise-maker pledges something important—such as their life, their spouse, or their freedom—and they owe that as a “debt” if they fail to keep their promise. If that happens, the “creditor” has a legal right to humiliate and torture the “debtor”—for example, cutting off a piece of the debtor’s body equivalent to the size of the debt. The creditor settles the score by getting the pleasurable satisfaction of exercising their power on the debtor. Effectively, the creditor enjoys feeling like a “master” who is entitled to be cruel.
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6. Nietzsche wonders why inflicting suffering yields pleasure to humans, and he worries about how this urge surfaces in modern society. Such an idea seems obscene today, but historically, we considered taking pleasure in hurting others to be an accepted human instinct. Royal weddings and public festivals used to include executions as standard, and many aristocratic households typically kept a slave to taunt. Nietzsche knows he’s harsh to say that inflicting suffering is good for humans, but it’s just a fact of history that humans find punishment “festive.”
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7. Nietzsche doesn’t reference these examples to be discouraging. Rather, he wants to stress that he thinks humanity was healthier when we weren’t so ashamed of our inherent cruelty. Nietzsche believes that shame is what makes people feel disheartened about who we are as human beings. It grows from a “swamp” of harmful conditioning and moralizing that teaches humans to be ashamed of our natural instincts. Historical cultures are very different: for instance, Ancient Greeks believed that even the gods take pleasure in cruelty and human “tragedies” are “festivals” for the gods. Nietzsche says that Ancient Greece was an inherently public society, and that spectacles—including punishment—were simply part and parcel of cultural life in this time.
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8. Nietzsche addresses feelings of guilt or personal responsibility. He’s noted that such emotions come from notions of credit and debit, commerce, compensation, and calculation, all of which have been part of human culture for so long that it’s hard for humans to think otherwise. We tend to evaluate things, and we typically assume that there’s some price to pay for everything. Nietzsche thinks this sort of thinking is the root of our concept of justice.
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9. When communities form, the same mechanism of debit and credit is in play. A person gets protection, peace, and comfort from living in a community, and they pledge to behave a certain way in the community. If they don’t, the community (or creditor) will collect the debt in another way. A criminal is simply someone who’s broken their promise to their community. When somebody becomes a criminal, they are treated like an enemy: they are despised, treated with animosity, and deprived of rights and protection.
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10. As a community grows more powerful, the deviant actions of one individual become less threatening to the community’s existence and punishment shifts in format. Instead of inflicting pain, the community isolates the criminal until the offence has been “paid off.” When a community becomes weakened or threatened, however, harsher punishments resurface. In addition, the more wealth a creditor accumulates, the more it takes for an offence to injure them or their livelihood. This is how the concept of “clemency”—or letting people off—emerges. For Nietzsche, clemency (or mercy) is a privilege of the wealthy.
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11. Nietzsche thinks that some people—like anarchists and anti-Semites—have problematic notions of justice. They base their concept of justice on prejudice and resentment against others, essentially trying to legitimize vengeance by reframing it as justice and saying it’s objective when it’s not. Nietzsche would prefer people to center their concept of justice on what humans can do for themselves—(“active” emotions like ambition and greed), rather than what they want to do to others (“reactive” emotions). In fact, Nietzsche thinks that reactive emotions are the most unjust, because even the most reasonable, levelheaded people can lose their composure when they feel animosity toward others.
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Nietzsche thinks about the origins of legal systems. Historically, laws are designed to allow people to be active and aggressive but restrict any urges to be vindictive. For Nietzsche, justice is exercised when the strong establish laws to enforce peace and order, offer an impersonal perspective, and therefore steer people away from any personal desire for revenge. Nietzsche thinks that oppressive and exploitative actions aren’t wrong in themselves because humans are drawn to power and aggression is simply part of human nature. For Nietzsche, laws only make sense if they don’t completely obliterate these human tendencies. He thinks that legal systems aimed at minimizing “conflict” violate human nature and are destructive to humankind.
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12. Nietzsche thinks that customs like punishment don’t progress logically or necessarily become better over time. In fact, they evolve in a haphazard way: society’s dominant people constantly reinterpret and adapt customs for different purposes after they usurp others and seize power. For Nietzsche, genuine progress is not linear, and it entails the “death” of old values and purposes as they’re replaced by new ones. This is obvious to Nietzsche, given how much historical customs differ from contemporary attitudes. Nietzsche thinks that all in all, humanity’s desire for power is driving force of life— suppressing this urge is harmful. Such suppression only leaves room for reactive action—like vindication and resentment—rather than productive aggression in modern society.
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13. Returning to the topic of punishment, Nietzsche argues that some components of punishment are permanent (namely, the pain and spectacle of the act), and other components are fluid (namely, the purpose that the act serves). Nietzsche thinks that in the European society of his time, it’s difficult to say exactly what specific purpose punishment is used for. In the past, the various purposes and uses for punishment shifted back and forth in importance, usually with one idea becoming dominant. Nietzsche illustrates that customs are fluid, contrived, and arbitrary by collating a list of possible purposes for punishment.
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Nietzsche lists that first, punishment can be used to make the criminal harmless and unable to commit another offense. Second, it can be used as compensation for the injured party. Third, punishment can be used to isolate a disturbance to the peace of society. Fourth, it can be used to incite fear and deter others from acting the way the criminal acted. Fifth, punishment can be used to eliminate elements of society (such as a class or race). Sixth, it can be used to celebrate the defeat of an enemy by humiliating them. Seventh, punishment can be used to correct a criminal’s problematic behavior. Eighth, punishment can be used as revenge. Finally, punishment can be used as a weapon against people who disrupt the peace or authority figures a society.
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14. Nietzsche says that the list goes on. His point is that the most popular purpose for punishment in society might not be the most useful of the options. Nietzsche thinks that punishment is thought to be most useful because it makes the criminal feel guilty or repentant—in theory, it helps them develop a conscience. Yet in reality, the legal system of judiciary procedures and imprisonment doesn’t achieve that aim. If anything, it makes criminals aware that powerful people are permitted to do things that they are not: espionage, bribery, entrapment, and all other methods that police and lawyers use to achieve their aims.
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15. Nietzsche says that philosopher Spinoza realizes that criminals facing punishment tend to think reflect that something wrong occurred that fell short of their expectations—not that they did something wrong. Punishment just becomes some unfortunate outcome that they have to deal with, like being ill. Nietzsche thinks that punishment is actually used to increase fear and “tame” humans against acting aggressively, but it doesn’t make them better. In fact, punishment leaves humankind worse off.
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16. Nietzsche thinks that feeling guilty is a sickness in humanity. Ancient humans faced a wild world that they explored nomadically; they fought freely and acted without guilt. Modern humans have to adapt to a completely different world: to stay safe in modern society, humans have to perpetually think, evaluate, and calculate. Nietzsche thinks that humans are miserable because modern society doesn’t permit us to express our instinctive drives for exploration and violence. Society forces us to suppress these tendencies. To Nietzsche, this is abusive. We can no longer express our violent or cruel human tendencies outwardly, so we internalize them and torture ourselves through guilt instead.
17. Nietzsche thinks that this shift doesn’t come about organically—it has to be imposed with violence. For instance, Europe’s free and wild populace was subjugated by the tyranny of conquerors—the invading “blond beasts”—who arrived and exerted their mastery unexpectedly and unapologetically. The invaders didn’t care about ideas like conscience, guilt, responsibility, or consideration—they simply wanted to organize and create society, and so they exerted pressure and forcefully drove out freedom. The instinctive desire for freedom among the populace has resurfaced in a repressed form, since there’s no safe place in society for people to freely express their desire for power and violence. Instead, it manifests inwardly and psychology—giving rise to guilt and “bad conscience.”
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18. This is a difficult truth to acknowledge, but it’s important. Conquerors are motivated by a productive desire for freedom (or power, as Nietzsche thinks they are the same thing). The same desire becomes regressive when people unleash it on themselves (to conquer and “tame” their “animal” self). It makes people suffer and hate themselves for having a natural instinct to take pleasure in inflicting violence or cruelty. When people take pleasure in being or self-sacrificing, they’re taking pleasure in suppressing their cruel nature, which technically means they’re taking pleasure in being cruel to themselves. Nietzsche therefore believes that altruism is really just self-abuse.
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19. Nietzsche argues that early tribal people considered themselves in debt to previous generations for founding the clan and keeping it going. Usually, this debt was paid back with sacrifices, festivals, and obedience to historical customs. Sometimes, the repayment was more violent and fear-driven, such as human sacrifice. Over time, the idea of paying tribute to the ancestors’ spirits morphed into paying tribute to vague and mysterious forces, which gave rise to belief in deities that people fear and feel they must obey. Nietzsche thinks that aristocratic people pay their debts by embodying the skills of their ancestors, and he finds this approach healthier.
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20. The idea of being indebted to a deity gets absorbed into society as it expands, even slaves adopt the religions of their masters. Belief in indebtedness grows as the concept of God becomes stronger, and it culminates in the Christian God. Nietzsche thinks that as people start to abandon that belief and become atheists, they free themselves from the feeling of debt.
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21. Nietzsche argues that when the concept of guilt (or “bad conscience”) emerges, people turn their cruelty on themselves, and they start to think that they are so evil that they’ll never repay their debts to God. They think their sins are unforgivable, hence the concepts of original sin (the fall from Eden, a sin that mankind can never erase) and hell as eternal punishment. This breeds pessimism and nihilism. At this point, Christianity comes along and says that God (the creditor) pays the debt himself, out of love for his debtor. Nietzsche thinks this idea is ridiculous.
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22. However, the full truth that lies behind the evolution of religion is that when humans become “incarcerated” in the prison of society, they have no natural outlet for their violent and cruel instincts, so they turn them inwards on themselves as they try to tame themselves. This self-torture is amped up when a person feels indebted to a God: we start to think our animalistic instincts are sinful, and we suppress them further as we try to be good. In fact, the Christian religion is the perfect instrument for self-torture: since no human can ever be as good as a God, we keep torturing and berating ourselves, satisfying our innate desire to express cruelty with perpetual self-abuse.
23. Nietzsche thinks that the concept of gods can be put to better (or “nobler”) use. Ancient Greeks, for example, believed that the gods accept our “animal” instincts, and people were free to express these instincts rather than suppress them. The Ancient Greeks used the concept of deities to alleviate guilt so that they could be psychologically free. In Ancient Greek society, a person could be deemed foolish or stupid (for failing to express themselves), but they never thought of themselves as evil or sinful. In fact, the Ancient Greeks went even further: they assumed that when someone acted foolishly, they were possessed by a god. Any guilt was thus attributed to the gods, leaving humans free to act.
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24. Modern humans bear the legacy of being cruel to our naturally animalistic selves. Nietzsche thinks that we’ve treated our natural instincts unkindly for too long. He wonders what it would take to turn this situation around. We’d have to connect guilt with our unnatural inclinations—namely, our spiritual beliefs. Nietzsche thinks that in order to do that, we’d need to reconnect with our natural instincts through war, which taps into our natural needs for adventure, danger, and violence. The actual savior is someone who can free humanity from the curse of self-torture. Such a person will essentially be an Antichrist, an Anti-nihilist and a “conqueror of god and nothingness.”
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25. Nietzsche thinks he might have gone too far, so he stops himself, concluding that such questions are best left to future generations and that he should remain silent.
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