I’m going to take a quotation from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals somewhat out of context:
The bad conscience is an illness, there is no doubt about that, but an illness as pregnancy is an illness. [second essay, section 19 from the translation by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books, 1989]
What is the `bad conscience’ to Nietzsche? It’s associated with self-denial, selfishness, self-sacrifice. It’s a slavish sort of illness allied closely to Christianity. It casts a morbid coloring over the entire being of those infected with this `bad conscience’.
Nietzsche’s concept of the `bad conscience’ arose from his analysis of the aristocratic view that `bad’ is what we should fight against; the Christian view that `evil’ is what we should fight against. In Nietzsche’s view, seeing the world in aristocratic good vs. bad is far preferable to the `slavish’ good vs. evil. Sort of. He actually considered both to be defective and the `slavish’ view to be the one which might prove to be a temporary illness from which a better moral view could be born, that is, the slavish moral attitude is “an illness as pregnancy is an illness.”
A `bad conscience’ is what I might call unmoored guilt, a general guilt which comes from feelings that I am inherently defective. In my Christian viewpoint, one which might have fascinated and annoyed Nietzsche, a `bad conscience’ or guilt is a gnawing of the insides, a useless activity for a creature created as a clever ape. We are what we are and shouldn’t worry so much about our defects but should rather deploy our energies to look at Creation and the Creator, to imitate God by way of understanding His work in Creation, a work which can be explored and analyzed and about which we can speculate. In more spiritual terms, we should aim to replace our bad consciences, our guilt, by a burning desire to become like Christ, to achieve a proper union with God, by way of enfolding ourselves into the Body of Christ. If we do so, we will be accepting God’s offer to bring us into the Body of Christ, to complete and perfect us as individual human beings and also as communal human beings. This could be called a rebirth of sorts, though certainly not the birth anticipated by Nietzsche.
Still, as is often the case, Nietzsche saw into the world, into modern human societies, into the modern human soul, more deeply and more clearly than did his opponents, Christian and otherwise. He was, in my opinion, a doctor of the soul who was brilliant at diagnosing the disease and somewhat askew in seeing and recommending a cure. He himself had a variety of the disease and never saw his own way out of his illness. I also have a variety of the disease and have recommended a real cure and will discuss it at the end of this essay.
There is a blindness in the aristocratic view of the world as being a battle between `good’ and `bad’, in simplistic terms think of a battle between warrior courage and any type of cowardice. There is a similar blindness in the `slavish’ view of the world as being a battle between `good’ and `evil’ where evil is some sort of demonic force; in some but not all infected with a `bad conscience’, this shows up in a feeling that sexual activity is inherently evil in some sense, a compromise that `good’ makes with the `evil’ of this mortal realm. A better view, and one in line with modern empirical knowledge of men as well as the moral theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, is that sexual love is a legitimate part of a more total marital love and lust is a distorted, and often exploitive, form of sexual love.
As I currently view history, ancient ideas of being would lead to a radical dichotomy between good and evil. (Despite Nietzsche’s claim, at times, that ancient Greeks all had an aristocratic understanding of morality.) Women are virgins or whores, leaving most women in an ambiguous state. Men are celibate or consumed by their desires. Any virgin woman or any celibate man is always on the edge of falling into lust.
Let me continue mining that vein of thought. Reproduction involves us in efforts some of us have avoided. This isn’t good, not something I’m proud of as I head through my sixth decade of life. Yet, there were times when I was almost driven by sexual desire to start a family though I had rational and utilitarian reasons not to do so. A more common reason to avoid starting a family is a poverty in which it would be stupid to have children, at least by modern utilitarian standards. Yet, children were born in the worst periods of history and often as a result of strong sexual desire even unto lust.
Our clearer thoughts are often clouded and even overwhelmed by ordered or disordered desires which force us to have children when it hurts, to rush into a burning building when we hear someone screaming in terror and maybe pain. It’s our emotions, we can hope disciplined emotions, which often send us to our heroic acts of self-sacrifice, which despite the thoughts of Nietzsche and his opponents, is often justified by reason deployed over the time-scale of a family-line or the space-scale of a community such as a nation.
We are all imperfectly ordered, even so saintly a saint as Francis of Assisi. How do we head toward a better state of order? How do we heal our outright disorder as well as our ambiguously undordered state?
I don’t think it’s hard to imagine good Christian leaders thinking to lead their followers toward a state of Christ-like order by teaching them to be ashamed of their natural state of fragmentation and incoherence and incompleteness, to think of this state as being a matter of sin, of rebellion against God. After all, even so clearheaded a thinker as Augustine ended up endorsing the claim that we were created in some state of creaturely perfection and purity and fell by way of a bad decision by a distant pair of ancestors. This despite the fact that Augustine considered a conflicting theory that human beings arose in the same natural world as other animals rather than by way of a special creation. He knew those that a theory of such an origin was in conflict with the theory of the fall of Adam and Eve. Modern Christian theologians seem not so clearheaded about the implications of the modern theory of evolution, accepted by the Catholic Church, most Protestant churches, and—I believe—by most Orthodox churches as well.
So, we’re clever apes driven by `imperfectly implemented’ emotions which often force our best acts but also force some of our truly despicable acts. In addition, our minds and hands are also disordered in ways that also affect not only the heart but each other. How do we get to a better state of order? Can such a better state exist in this mortal realm?
I do think we could have done better but what happened in Christian history was good enough to get us to a point where a man with strong faith and an openness to Creation can see the better man in terms of an image from James Joyce’s The Artist as a Young Man: with left hand on Darwin’s Origin of Species, we can say, “This tells us how we got to be what we are”; with right hand on the Bible, we can say, “This tells us what we can be and what God calls us to be.”
Whether the best way or not, the path taken by the Christian mainstream was the `bad conscience’, feelings of shame and unmoored guilt. Nietzsche clearly saw this path and was optimistic it could lead to a better state of moral order in the future. “Beyond evil and good” where “evil and good” is the view allied with the `bad conscience’. The birth of a better man. Though having rejected Christianity, Nietzsche probably wouldn’t have been too upset if a Christian described that better state as “Christ-like.”