But in making a problem of "bad conscience" Nietzsche has in mind something different—at least graver. If I should say "guilt" or "sense of guilt," I should more nearly suggest it—though guilt, too, may have different shades of intensity or blackness. The guilt he has in mind is that implied when man is spoken of as a guilty being or as having a guilty nature. It is the religious, or more specifically still, the Christian conception of guilt, the conception essentially shared by Schopenhauer, that concerns him. With it a man feels wrong in his essential make-up, particularly in the animal ground-work of his being. He looks on his natural impulses with an evil eye, finds something praiseworthy in denying them, chastising them, mortifying them.[1] Sometimes one goes so far in painful self-analysis that one draws up a list of the things that make one ashamed of oneself—as Pope Innocent III did, who enumerated "impure procreation, nauseous nourishment in the womb, baseness of the material out of which man grows, abominable stenches, secretion of spittle, urine, and excrement."[2] How could an attitude like this—a bad conscience about man as man—have come about? What were its probable beginnings?
Nietzsche starts out by saying that guilt originally was a form of debt—or rather a development of it under certain conditions. The German word Schuld, I may note, means both debt and guilt. A debt arises when one does not pay for something one has received at once, but if one does not pay eventually, one owes something more, namely, the substitute, equivalent, or pledge for the debt, which at the outset was agreed upon. The latter is guilt in the full, or at least distinctive, sense of the term; the act is a wrong or trespass proper and one can only expect the infliction of the penalty. It is interesting to note that in our English version of the Lord's Prayer, "debts" and "sins" (or "trespasses") are used interchangeably,[3]—a sin or trespass is simply an increased or
- ↑ Cf. Genealogy etc., II, §§ 16, 18, 24. Schopenhauer's view is given in his Werke (Grisebach ed.), II, 596, 669 f., 681 ff., 710 f.; IV, 78; V, 298 f., 317, 329 ff. See Volkelt's chap., "Das Dasein als Schuld," in his Schopenhauer (particularly pp. 280–2).
- ↑ Genealogy etc., II, § 7.
- ↑ Matthew vi, 12; Luke xi, 4. The Greek words are respectively ὀϕειλήματα and ἁμαρτίασ; the word for debtors is virtually the same in both places.
