pricks of conscience (Gewissensbisse) after ordinary social companies? Because we have taken serious things lightly, because in discussing persons we have not spoken with complete loyalty, or because we have been silent when we should have spoken, because we have not on occasion sprung up and taken ourselves off—in short, because we conducted ourselves in society as if we belonged to it."[1] A scientific man may have bad conscience, if he allows himself views unsupported by scientific evidence.[2] One who has determined to become and achieve something in his own person may have bad conscience, if he allows himself to be allured into ordinary benevolent work—it is something which may accompany altruistic acts as well as egoistic ones.[3] Emerson seems to have experienced it when he succumbed to certain philanthropic appeals, calling it a "wicked dollar" that he on occasion gave for "your miscellaneous popular charities, the education at college of fools, the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand, alms to sots, and the thousandfold Relief Societies."[4] In one of Stendhal's novels a Jew has a bad conscience when he falls in love and takes money out of his business for a bracelet; and so it was with Napoleon, remarks Nietzsche, after he had performed a generous act, and may be with a diplomat who for once is honorable.[5] Sometimes the feeling may be indicated in indirect ways, as when a man, conscious of the callings of a higher self, but giving himself up to society or official work or his family, talks much of fulfilling his "duty"—he seeks thereby to excuse himself to himself, to quiet himself.[6] Nietzsche himself wished to give a bad conscience to other-worldly aspirations, to the antinatural ideals of Christianity and Schopenhauer, i.e., he wished to set up a standard from which these would be felt as a conscious defection.[7] There is no special difficulty in understanding bad conscience in cases like these.
- ↑ Human, etc., § 351.
- ↑ Cf. the suggestions of Will to Power, § 328.
- ↑ Werke, XII, 123-4, § 243.
- ↑ Essay on "Self-Reliance."
- ↑ Werke, XI, 266, § 260.
- ↑ Ibid., XI, 216, § 145. "All that he now does, is brave and proper (ordentlich)—and yet he has with it a bad conscience. For the extraordinary (Ausserordentliche) is his task" (Joyful Science, § 186).
- ↑ Genealogy etc., II, § 24.
