May 20, 2006: invited paper, Transcendental Philosophy and Naturalism Project, Nietzsche

Workshop, University of Essex, Colchester, UK.

Moral Psychology and Transcendental Philosophy in Nietzsche’s Genealogy

David N. McNeill, University of Essex

In the final aphorism of the first book of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche declares
his psychology to be ‘the doctrine of the development of the will to power’ and suggests
that a ‘proper physio-psychology’ will contain the view that ‘the affects of hatred, envy,
covetousness, and the lust to rule (are) conditions of life.’ He closes this aphorism with a
demand that psychology ‘be recognized once again as the queen of the sciences, for whose
service and preparation the other sciences exist. For psychology is now again the path to
the fundamental problems’(BGE 23). Among the many striking things about this aphorism,
this final demand is perhaps the most striking. For, as most of us will have learned from
the introduction to Kant's first Critique, the title of queen of the sciences had been
traditionally given to metaphysics or first philosophy (CPR A.VIII). Instead of simply
dismissing the claim of metaphysics or any science to have the status of queen of the
sciences, Nietzsche appropriates the title for his psychology. In so doing he asks us to try
to conceive of a psychology, directed toward the reciprocal interdependence between
‘good’ and ‘evil’ impulses, which could have the status of first philosophy, a kind of moral
psychology which would be the path to the fundamental problems.

This apparent commitment to the theoretical priority of a kind of moral psychology

presents a prima facie difficulty for recent interpretations of Nietzsche's late works that
attribute to Nietzsche a commitment to ‘methodological naturalism.’1 Methodological
naturalism is the view that philosophic inquiry should be, in some sense, continuous with
or modeled on empirical inquiry in the sciences. Thus, as Brian Leiter argues in his
Nietzsche on Morality, whatever else is meant by ‘methodological naturalism,’ it centrally
involves the rejection of anything like a ‘first philosophy’ broadly understood as an inquiry
directed toward fundamental problems or principles, principles which provide (in some yet

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to be specified sense) conditions of possibility for any scientific or epistemic practice
(Leiter 2002:3).2 If, therefore, Nietzsche views his psychology as a ‘first philosophy’ in
this sense, as an inquiry into fundamental principles which are presupposed by the various
empirical sciences, it would seem that he cannot be a methodological naturalist.

But, of course, we have yet to understand what Nietzsche means by psychology, and
in what sense a moral psychology, in particular, could play the role of first philosophy in
his thought. In what follows, I am going to sketch out two different ways in which
Nietzsche appears committed to the view that moral or ethical principles of orientation
provide conditions for the possibility of our various epistemic and scientific practices.
Borrowing a trope from Karl Ameriks' work on Kant's Transcendental Idealism, we can call
these two arguments ‘the short argument’ and ‘the long argument’ for the theoretical
priority of moral psychology (Ameriks:1989). The short argument focuses on the implicit
commitment Nietzsche finds in every theoretical practice to some internalized ideal of a
good or choice-worthy human life. This argument will not be the focus this essay not
because I find it spurious, but rather due to the fact that even if it provides an argument
against the claim that Nietzsche is a methodological naturalist, it does not show the specific
relation between Nietzsche's moral psychology and transcendental philosophy. This
relation is shown by the long argument. Where the short argument claims that our
orientation to and appropriation of the world of our experience is guided by moral or ethical
principles, the long argument makes the apparently transcendental claim that morality, in
some sense, is a subjective condition for the possibility of experience as such.

My strategy with be as follows. After a short presentation of the short argument, I

will turn to Nietzsche's claim in aphorism 19 of Beyond Good and Evil that ‘a philosopher
should claim the right to include willing as such within the sphere of morality – morality,
that is, understood as the doctrine of the relations of mastery under which the phenomenon
of ‘life’ comes to be.’3 While Nietzsche here clearly presents 'morality' (Moral) as a
condition for the phenomenon of 'life', it is less clear what kind of condition morality is
meant to be. I will argue that we should understand this claim as delineating a
transcendental condition, in the specific sense of a condition of the possibility of a unified,
content-bearing experience. I will pursue this interpretation through a reading of the second

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essay of the Genealogy of Morality, in which I argue that Nietzsche presents the ‘bad
conscience’ as a subjective condition of our experience of temporal succession.

II

In aphorism 114 of The Gay Science, an aphorism entitled The scope of the moral,
Nietzsche writes: ‘We construct a new image, that we see…with the help of all the old
experiences which we have had, always according to the degree of our honesty and justice.
There are no experiences other than moral experiences, even in the realm of sense-
perception.’4 This aphorism is one of the most direct expressions of a familiar thought we
find in both Nietzsche's early and late work, that our various theoretical perspectives are
directly expressive of moral or ethical orientations, and that a decision between theoretical
perspectives is, at some level, a decision between ethical orientations. More broadly, I
want to suggest that Nietzsche contends that a decision between theoretical perspectives is,
in some sense, directly analogous to an ethical decision. Now this claim is easy to
misunderstand, and may strike some readers as obviously false. After all, didn’t Nietzsche
dedicate himself to fighting ‘at any risk whatever the moral interpretation and significance
of existence?’ (BT: 22) How then, one might ask, could it be the case that he conceived of
the adjudication between theoretical perspectives in ethical terms? This is a complex
question, one that I will not try to give a comprehensive answer to here, but we can begin to
respond to this worry by pointing out the need to distinguish between 1) the idea that our
claims about the character of the world should be determined by our beliefs about
morality—an idea that Nietzsche is resolutely opposed to, and 2) the idea that our choice
between theoretical perspectives, our choice of what guides or should guide our
interpretation of the world, is a choice with an ineliminable ethical dimension.
Nietzsche’s position seems to be this: if we accept, that the world that confronts us
is always an interpreted world, then to inquire into our world is always at the same time to
inquire into a given interpretation of that world. And to inquire into an interpretation is to
inquire into the principles or tendencies that guide that interpretation. Now, according to
Nietzsche, if we ask what, at the deepest level, gives coherence to a set of principles
guiding an interpretation, what we will find is some human ideal of perfect interpreter.5
Some vision of what sort of sensitivity, rigor, imagination, ambition, self-denial,
generosity, etc. such an interpreter should ideally have. On this account theoretical

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perspectives embody, consciously or, more often, unconsciously an internalized ethical
exemplar—a vision of some human type, and insofar as we hold to a particular theoretical
perspective we are holding that human type as an ideal. Moreover, a choice between
interpretive perspectives is at the same time a choice between ideals of what sort of
interpreter is the right sort of interpreter to try to become. The metaphysician, the ‘scholar’
and the philosopher as ‘commander and legislator’ are all examples for Nietzsche of such
ethical/theoretical perspectives. So too, however, is the 'methodological naturalist', or, at
least, the closest thing to one we find in Nietzsche's late work, the human being

…hardened by the discipline of science, (who) confronts the rest

of nature, with dauntless Oedipus eyes and stopped-up Odysseus
ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird-catchers
who have all too long been piping to him ‘you are more! you are
higher! you are of a different origin!’(BGE 230)

What is most significant here is Nietzsche's contention that even in opposing the
metaphysician's ‘faith in opposite values’ through ‘the discipline of science,’ even in the
aspiration to a scientific immoralism, we are still necessarily orienting ourselves to some
ethical ideal. In fact, if we return to the distinction between ‘the moral interpretation of…
existence’ which Nietzsche opposes, and the ethical decision between interpretive ideals,
we will see that Nietzsche consistently frames his very rejection of the moral interpretation
of the world in ethical terms. The moral interpretation of the world is an interpretation that
Nietzsche believes is a seduction that certain interpreters at least must not allow themselves
to succumb to—that they must hold themselves, as it were, to a higher standard.6 Thus, in
The Gay Science Nietzsche writes of morality’s self-overcoming (GS 357), and in Beyond
Good and Evil of resisting the ‘seduction’ of pity for human suffering by means of a pity
for the higher human being (BGE 225). In the Genealogy itself he writes of the attempt to
‘wed the bad conscience to all the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations to the
beyond, to that which runs counter to sense, nature, animal, in short to all ideals hitherto
which are one and all hostile to life...’ (GM 2.24).
This conception of the choice between theoretical perspectives as a choice between
human ideals is expressed in BGE 14, the aphorism in which Nietzsche declares ‘that
physics, too, is only an world-interpretation-and-arrangement…in accordance with us,’ as

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a contradiction between the imperatives that govern the contrasting world-interpretations
and exegeses of ‘the Platonic way of thinking,’ on the one hand, and the ‘Darwinists and
anti-teleologists among the physiological laborers,’ on the other. The former, Nietzsche
claims, is a noble way of thinking, which in resisting obvious sense evidence experiences
an aristocratic triumph in remaining master of the senses; the latter, is an expression of
modern democratic instincts, and is governed by the imperative ‘Where man has nothing
more to see or to grasp, he has nothing more to search for.’7 As this aphorism makes clear,
Nietzsche contends that these contrasting imperatives are in some sense constitutive
elements of our orientation to the world. They are, we might say, world disclosive ethical
orientations, and as such appear as necessary conditions of our having a particular world to
experience.
III

I have claimed that, on Nietzsche's account, our interpretive appropriation of the

world of our experience necessarily involves an implicit reference to an internalized moral
or ethical ideal. Insofar as this moral or ethical ideal is not itself given in experience, but
rather is in some sense constitutive of that experience, one might want to consider this ideal
what Mark Sacks calls a ‘transcendental feature’ of a specific interpretive appropriation of
the world.(Sacks 2003: 211-218). I do not believe, however, that this is limit to Nietzsche's
transcendentalism. Instead, as I have suggested above, I believe that we can find in
Nietzsche's late work an argument for the claim that morality has the status of what Sacks
would call a ‘transcendental constraint,’ that is, a condition for the possibility of any
experience we can conceive. More specifically, I will argue that, on Nietzsche's view,
morality is a transcendental condition for the possibility of our experience of temporal
succession, and hence for experience as such.
To make this argument, I will look to a most unlikely source, the Genealogy of
Morality. This is an unlikely source because the Genealogy is apparently devoted to an
account of the origin and historical development of morality. As such, it is a favored text
for contemporary naturalist readings of Nietzsche. What I will suggest, however, is that the
narrative Nietzsche presents of the origin and development of our moral sentiments implies
that, for Nietzsche, the structure of the human subjectivity is inherently a moral structure.

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That is, according to Nietzsche, to be human is necessarily is to live one’s life in relation to
some internalized ideal of the best human life, to some notion of the good that not only is
not simply equivalent to whatever one happens to desire, but against which one judges
one’s desires as good or bad. What I mean when I say that the soul has a moral structure is
that, according to Nietzsche, a responsiveness to some kind of ethical norms, and a
directedness toward some internalized ideal of a good human life is, a condition for the
possibility of human consciousness, self-consciousness and, most specifically, time
consciousness—of subjectivity as such.
Fairly obviously, this sort of transcendental reading of the Genealogy directly
contradicts Nietzsche's apparent intention of giving a genetic or historical account of the
origin of our moral evaluative practices. And indeed, I will suggest that Nietzsche's
intention in writing the Genealogy is different than his apparent intention. This would be a
mark against my interpretation of the Genealogy were it not the case that Nietzsche warns
us of this very fact. This is how Nietzsche describes it in his later Ecce Homo:

The three essays which constitute this genealogy are, with respect
to expression, intention, and the art of surprise, perhaps the most
uncanny that have ever been written. Dionysus is, one knows,
also the god of darkness.— Every time a beginning that is meant
to lead one astray, cool, scientific, even ironic, intentionally
foreground, intentionally holding out. (EH GM)8

Clearly, then, the Genealogy is a work that presents particular difficulties for the
interpreter, particular barriers to interpretation. I will have to defer for now the question of
why this might be so, that is, why Nietzsche might have written a work about the origins of
morality that is, at least in part, deliberately calculated to mislead. Instead, I will focus on
how he leads us astray. I suggest that we should see a nuance in Nietzsche’s claim in Ecce
Homo that each of the three essays is characterized by ‘a beginning (ein Anfang) that is
supposed to lead one astray.’ For it is not only the beginning of the each essay, but each
essay’s account of a beginning or origin, that is misleading. I will read the first and second
essay of the Genealogy as presenting a series of what we might call strategic failures in the
attempt to provide a genetic or historical account of the origin of morality.9 At each stage
of this putatively historical account we find that the very aspect of our experience that was
supposedly explained must be presupposed. And it is precisely in the failure to provide a

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coherent genetic account, and the paradoxes Nietzsche confronts in the attempt to provide
such an account, that his intention becomes manifest.
IV
The remainder of this essay will focus primarily on the account of the origin of ‘bad
conscience’ in the Second Essay of the Genealogy. However, to understand that
discussion, must begin by looking at the context provided by the First Essay, which deals
with the opposition between what Nietzsche calls ‘Master Morality’ and ‘Slave Morality,’
and the corresponding opposition between active and reactive human types. The
opposition between these two types of individual is, at least provisionally, relatively easy to
articulate. The noble type views himself as the standard for the values he applies to the
world. This is what, in the first instance, distinguishes noble from ignoble types. The
noble mode of valuation begins in self-affirmation, from an independent experience of
oneself as strong, powerful and valuable. It is only after this positive self-evaluation is
made that the noble type judges those weaker, less fortunate individuals as ‘bad’ in
comparison to himself. This is the characteristic evaluative dichotomy of the noble type, a
dichotomy between ‘good’ human beings, i.e., human beings like the noble individual, and
‘bad’ human beings, i.e., human beings unlike the noble individual.
In contrast, the characteristic evaluative dichotomy of slave morality is not between
‘good’ and ‘bad’, but rather between ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ And it is the judgment ‘evil’
applied to the enemies of the slavish type, i.e., the masters, that is the prior judgment.
Slave morality is essentially reactive. It begins in fear and resentment of the power of the
noble types. In response, this type of human being experiences 'reactive' affects like 'hatred,
envy, jealousy' (GM, II, 11) and attempts to neutralize strength by dubbing it 'evil' and
shameful. Thus, the reactive spirit never defines itself for itself, but always against
something higher and stronger which it interprets, and so resents, as the cause of its
oppression and suffering.10
On this account the judgment ‘evil’ as applied by slave morality is simply a fiction,
at bottom incoherent, based on a false conception of human action. Nietzsche goes on to
suggest that this false conception is ultimately motivated by a desire on the part of the
weaker to blame those who are stronger for their strength. In the service of this desire,
popular morality ‘separates strength from the expressions of strength as if there were

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behind the strong an indifferent substratum that is free to express strength.’ But, Nietzsche
famously contends, ‘there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind the doing,
effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is simply fabricated into the doing -- the doing is
everything’ (GM 1.13). As Nietzsche makes clear in the Second Essay, this conception of
human action is the popular analogue to the philosophic supposition of the free will—‘of
the absolute spontaneity of man in good and evil’ (GM 2. 7)—and it is this Kantian-
Christian conception of the absolute spontaneity of the will that Nietzsche most obviously
takes issue with in the Genealogy.
However, this very fact gives us reason to question the above provisional
articulation of the distinction between noble and slavish human types. For the same
arguments Nietzsche uses to undermine the notion of the spontaneity of the will have equal
or greater force when applied to Nietzsche's account of the spontaneous (spontan) character
of the noble mode of valuation.11 In both cases, the individual making value judgments
supposes a spontaneous source of the value he attributes to a way of being. Provisionally,
we could say that where the slave supposes a metaphysically free will, while the master
supposes a self, himself, as the source underlying and responsible for the deed. Consider in
this context the critique Nietzsche offers in BGE 21 of ‘the desire for “freedom of the will”
in the superlative metaphysical sense’ as the desire to be causa sui, the cause of oneself.
Nietzsche's withering dismissal of the attempt to ‘pull oneself up into existence by the hair,
out of the swamps of nothingness’ is a more fitting critique of the characterization of the
noble ‘who conceives the basic concept “good” in advance and spontaneously (spontan),
starting from himself’ than it is of anything he says of the slavish or reactive type. 12

Within the context of the First Essay, it is Nietzsche’s account of what he calls ‘the
pathos of distance’ that casts doubt on the supposed independence of ‘noble soul’s’ sense
of himself. Nietzsche writes:

(T)he noble, powerful, higher-ranking, and high-minded .. felt

and ranked themselves and their doings as good, which is to say,
as of the first rank, in contrast to everything base, low-minded,
common, and vulgar. Out of this pathos of distance they first took
for themselves the right to create values, to coin names for values.
(GM 2.2)

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The pathos of distance, Nietzsche continues, is ‘feeling of a higher ruling nature in relation
to a lower nature, to a “below”’13 If, however, it was out of this pathos of distance that the
nobles first seized their right to create values, their self-affirmation cannot, in fact, be
essentially independent or autochthonous.14 Rather the noble mode of valuation appears to
be essentially, if only implicitly, comparative and relative. The nobles first come to
experience themselves as noble only in contradistinction to a lower social stratum to which
they oppose themselves. Indeed, Nietzsche argues in Beyond Good and Evil that the noble
mode of valuation depends for its existence, at least historically, on ‘a society that believes
in the long ladder of rank and difference in value between man and man, and that needs
slavery in some sense or other’ (BGE 257).15 Thus it seems that what Nietzsche says about
‘slave morality,’—that ‘from the outset (it) says No to what is “outside,” what is
“different,” what is “not itself”; and this No is its creative deed’—is just as true of ‘noble
morality’ as it is of ‘slave morality.’

Furthermore, in contrast to the above provisional characterization of slave morality

as wholly reactive, Nietzsche’s account of ‘slave morality’ depends on the possibility of the
characteristic disposition of the reactive type, ressentiment, becoming an active, form-
giving force.16 Nietzsche writes that ‘the slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment
itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of beings denied the true
reaction, that of the deed, who recover their losses only through an imaginary revenge.’17
Finally and most significantly for our argument, Nietzsche concludes the first essay with an
imaginative a ‘descent’ into the ‘workshop’ where ideals are manufactured on earth, a
process that is described entirely in terms of the affects associated with the reactive type,
the affects of fear, hatred and revenge. What is significant here is that Nietzsche does not
introduce this imaginative journey as a descent into the realm where slavish ideals are
created, but rather the place of manufacture of ideals as such. This implies that all valuing
insofar as it involves the positing of an ideal is essentially the work of what Nietzsche calls
‘slave morality.’ On this account, noble morality looks less like the original value creating
force that Nietzsche seems to present it as, but rather a modification of the very
characteristics he associates with slave morality.

The incoherence of the alleged autochthony of noble's self-evaluation provides the

first and clearest example of what I have called a strategic failure in the attempt to provide

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a genetic or historical account of the origin of morality in the Genealogy. In the first essay,
Nietzsche apparently presents the evaluative opposition between ‘good and evil’ as, in
Brian Leiter’s words, ‘the product of a particular historical event’ and ‘a radically new and
different mode of evaluation compared to the “noble” mode of evaluation that preceded
it’(Leiter 2002: 194). However, he gives the reader a number of clear, if indirect,
indications that the putative chronology he invokes when describing the beginning of the
‘slave revolt in morality’ is not meant to describe an independent historical reality but is
instead a description of an aspect of human psychological comportment to the past.18 The
most important of these indications occurs in aphorism 11 of the First Essay. In the context
of his fullest description of the ‘blond beasts of prey,’ Nietzsche alludes to the fact that he
had ‘once called attention to Hesiod's embarrassment (in) devising the succession of the
cultural ages’ According to Nietzsche, Hesiod's successive gold, silver, and bronze age
were a response to ‘the contradiction posed by the glorious but likewise so gruesome, so
violent world of Homer’ a contradiction he had no other way of dealing with than ‘by
making one age into two, which he now placed one after the other.’ Any doubts we might
have concerning the relevance of Hesiod’s ‘embarrassment’ to Nietzsche’s own procedure
in the First Essay are resolved by looking at the passage from Daybreak to which Nietzsche
is obviously referring.

Strange madness of moral judgments! When man possesses the

feeling of power he feels and calls himself good: and it is
precisely then that the others upon whom he has to discharge his
power feel and call him evil! - In the fable of the ages of
mankind, Hesiod has depicted the same age, that of the Homeric
heroes, twice and made two ages out of one: from the point of
view of those who had to suffer the terrible iron oppression of
these adventurous Gewaltmenschen, or had heard of it from their
forefathers, it appeared evil; but the posterity of this knightly
generation revered it as the good old happy times. In these
circumstances, the poet had no other recourse than to do as he did
- for he no doubt had around him auditors of both races! (D 189)

By referring to this aphorism, Nietzsche indicates that the divergence between the
putative ‘epochs’ of ‘noble morality’ and ‘slave morality’ described in the First Essay of
the Genealogy is an artifact of different psychological attitudes towards a shared moral and
political ‘history,’ a ‘history’ that is itself presented in terms of a poetic reconstruction of

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the past. It suggests that the accounts of ‘master’ and ‘slave’ we are offered in the First
Essay are meant neither as descriptions of historical realities, nor as descriptions of
enduring moral typologies. Instead, they are diagnostic portraits of different moral-
psychological ways existing human beings orient themselves to and ‘poetically’ construct
their past.19 What I will now suggest is that in moving from the First Essay to the Second
Essay, Nietzsche moves from an account of differing subjective modes in which human
beings orient themselves to the past, to an account of the conditions under which beings
like us can orient ourselves to a future. Moreover, I will suggest that in so doing, he moves
from particular subjective temporalities, to the subjective grounds of temporality as such.

Nietzsche opens the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, the essay on
the origin of what he calls ‘bad conscience,’ with the following claim: ‘To breed an animal
that is permitted to promise -- isn't this precisely the paradoxical task nature has set for
itself with regard to human being [jene paradoxe Aufgabe selbst, welche sich die Natur in
Hinsicht auf den Menschen gestellt hat]? isn't this the true problem of human being?’ (GM
2.1). This is, to say the least, a paradoxical beginning. Nature is here presented as setting
itself a project, which project seems to involve the creation of the very capacity to set
projects. Moreover, the task nature sets itself is not only an animal that can promise, but
one that is permitted to promise. Thus it seems that the very capacity for standing within
the realm of ethical obligation is itself described in terms of a world already structured by
ethical restraints. So, what is Nietzsche doing here? Why does he begin in this paradoxical
manner? I suggest that by beginning in this way, Nietzsche is gesturing towards what he
sees as the inevitably paradoxical character of the attempt to give a philosophic account of
how human beings first became able to recognize and honor moral demands. The reason
Nietzsche believes this attempt to be paradoxical is that he considers it to involve giving an
account of the genesis of human consciousness, and this entails giving an account of the
genesis of temporality, of temporal succession. As temporal succession is apparently a
condition for the possibility of genetic or historical accounts as such, the attempt to give a
genetic or historical account of temporal succession looks at least paradoxical, if not
viciously circular.
Recently, R. Kevin Hill, Michael Green and Robin Small have each directed our

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critical attention to the significance for our understanding of Nietzsche's mature work of his
continuing confrontation with Kant's account of the transcendental ideality of time (Hill,
2003; Green, 2002; Small, 1998). Moreover, Hill in particular shows how Nietzsche’s
initial rejection of Schopenhauer’s response to Kant’s Transcendental Idealism focused
precisely on the problem of the temporal origin of the intellect. Nietzsche rejects as
incoherent Schopenhauer’s adoption of both 1) a causal historical narrative of the
development of the human intellect and 2) Kant’s arguments in the Transcendental
Aesthetic. However, as Hill also shows, Nietzsche himself apparently remains committed
both to the claim that the human intellect has developed in time, and to the claim that
judgments about space and time as we experience them do not have, or cannot be known to
have, objective validity apart from the specific cognitive interests of beings like us.
This is how Nietzsche puts in a note from 1885:

The prescribed movements of our minds, our lawful gymnastic,

e.g., in the representation of space and time, or in our need for ‘a
ground’: this philosophic habitus of the human mind is our real
potency: therefore that in many mental things we are no longer
able to do otherwise: [this is] what one calls psychological
necessity. This has come to be: and to believe that our space, our
time, our causality-instinct were something that had meaning
[Sinn] apart from human beings is pure childishness. (KSA
11.449)20

One question we can ask, therefore, is whether and how Nietzsche avoids lapsing into the
same incoherence he attributes to Schopenhauer.21
This is not, however, the question I will be addressing in this essay, except
indirectly. What I will be primarily concerned with is not whether or how Nietzsche
resolves the paradox of the origin of temporality; instead I will try to show that this
problem remains central for our understanding Nietzsche’s ‘immoralist’ project in his late
works. What I will suggest is that the narrative Nietzsche presents in the second essay of
the origin and development of conscience implies that the structure of human temporality is
itself incomprehensible apart from what he calls ‘bad conscience’. Or, to put this point
another way, I will suggest that on Nietzsche’s account, human time consciousness is, in
some sense, essentially moral.
Nietzsche’s investigation of how human beings acquired the prerogative to make

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promises focuses, in the first instance, on the question of how human beings became
capable of determining themselves in relation to a future, to make claims about what they
will do and who they will be at some future time, and stand by those claims. This is the
deepest problem with regard to the origin of conscience, a problem that Nietzsche
provisionally sets out in terms of the difficulty of creating a ‘memory of the will’ through
the operation of punishment.

As in the first essay’s account of the origin of the value oppositions ‘good and bad’
and ‘good and evil,’ the surface of Nietzsche’s narrative in the second essay is the
genealogical development of the concept of conscience. Looking to the deeper
significance behind the etymological relationship between the German words for ‘guilt’ and
‘debt’ (both translations of the German Schuld), Nietzsche tells us that the chief moral
concept of guilt originally arose out of the material concept of debt. The ‘guilty’ person
was originally the person who was materially indebted to another, and was expected to
make good that debt. It is in the creditor-debtor relationship that Nietzsche finds the dual
root of the practice of punishment. First, the pain of punishment inflicted on the debtor
who would not or could not settle up his debt was a means of ‘reminding,’ in the most
emphatic sense, both the debtor and those who witnessed the punishment that debts really
must be repaid. Second, the punishment itself acted as a kind of recompense to the
creditor— recompense in the form of the pleasure of inflicting pain on someone, or the
pleasure of seeing someone suffer.

It will turn out that the latter of these two putative pleasures, the pleasure of seeing
suffering inflicted on another, is actually the more significant. This is due to the fact that
the pleasure of inflicting pain on another is not described by Nietzsche as the satisfaction of
a brute desire, but rather one that already centrally participates in a proto-moral psycho-
social narrative of self-identification and self-justification. What is decisive for the creditor
in the experience of inflicting pain, what makes him ‘feel good,’ as it were, is his ability to
identify with those who call themselves ‘good,’ the nobles, and to imaginatively participate
in their characteristic ‘rights.’

Through his “punishment” of the debtor the creditor participates

in a right of lords: finally he, too, for once attains the elevating
feeling of being permitted to hold a being in contempt and

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 maltreat it as something “beneath himself” -- or at least, if the
actual power of punishment, the execution of punishment has
already passed over into the hands of the “authorities,” of seeing
it held in contempt and maltreated. (GM 2.5)

This implicit identification with the right of the masters, enjoying the theatre of punishment
as a means of implicit self-justification, turns out to be the real meaning of the entire drama.

So, thus far Nietzsche’s account of the development of conscience and the history of
punishment involves two interrelated moments. On the one hand, punishment develops a
‘memory of the will’ so that the debtor will recognize the necessity of being true to his
promises. On the other hand, witnessing the act of punishment provides an opportunity for
the creditor to feel themselves as valuable, good and possessing rights. Or so goes the
surface of Nietzsche’s account. However, we should recognize at this point that we have
yet to see how any of this itself has become possible.22 Consider how inadequate the
account we have been offered of the creditor-debtor relationship is as an answer to
Nietzsche‘s original question, the question of how human beings came to possess a capacity
for determining themselves in relation to their future. Beating is clearly one way of training
an animal, and may remain in us a way of establishing a certain kind of animal prudence.
But this is far from explaining how we come to be able to represent to ourselves, much less
someone else, what we will do, who we will be, at some not-yet-present time. The creditor-
debtor relationship, far from giving us an account of how such representation is possible,
depends for its possibility on this very capacity. Now consider again the question of how
inflicting punishment or seeing punishment inflicted acts as a form of recompense to the
creditor. We have already seen that punishment can only play this role insofar as it allows
the spectator to act out a part in a pre-existing proto-moral drama, but we have yet to see
how an act of violence, or feelings of aggression, can come to be experienced as conferring
value.

VI

To begin to answer these questions we must look to the account of the origin of ‘bad
conscience,’ of the consciousness of guilt, which Nietzsche apparently traces to the
beginnings of settled human communities. Now, I have suggested that, despite the
predominance of Nietzsche’s foreground claims to genealogically uncover the historical

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conditions under which ‘bad conscience’ came to be, he believes there is something
fundamentally paradoxical about this undertaking. Nietzsche indicates as much when he
claims that among the presuppositions of his hypothesis concerning the origin of the bad
conscience is the presupposition that ‘this change was not gradual, not voluntary, and that it
presented itself not as an organic growing into new conditions, but rather as a break, a leap,
a compulsion, an inescapable doom, against which there was no struggle and not even any
ressentiment’ (GM 2.17). We should pause to recognize how remarkable these claims are
for Nietzsche, how strikingly at odds they are with 1) Nietzsche's endorsement of
Boscovich's rejection of discontinous change,23 2) his Nachlass reflections on the will to
power, and 3) the apparent methodological presuppositions of genealogy itself. Earlier in
section 12 of the Second Essay, Nietzsche had claimed that

the entire history of a “thing,” an organ, a practice can be a

continuous sign chain of ever new interpretations and
arrangements….the succession of more or less profound, more or
less independent processes of overpowering that play themselves
out in it, including the resistances expended each time against
these processes, the attempted changes of form for the purpose of
defense and reaction, also the results of successful counter-
actions. The form is fluid but the “meaning” is even more so.

Here, in section 17, we are asked to conceive of a change that is radically discontinuous
with what went before it, that is not an organic adaptation, that precluded all struggle; in
short, we are asked to conceive a putative historical event that looks very much Kant’s
account in the Third Antinomy of an absolutely spontaneous cause (CPR A445/B473-
A451-B479).24 So here we must ask, what is it about the establishment of settled
communities that would call forth such claims from Nietzsche?

The answer, I suggest, is that Nietzsche’s account of the origin of human society is
at the same time his account of the paradoxical ‘origin’ of human subjectivity. He presents
us, not with a narrative of historical development, but rather with a heuristic myth of
origins and, as in a very old tradition of philosophic myth-making, the intention of this
myth is to disclose the logical relations of priority between a complex of phenomena that
must all be considered as coeval—the phenomena of human sociality, temporality, self-
consciousness and morality.25 According to Nietzsche’s myth, the decisive turning point in

- 15 -
the pre-history of human kind was the creation of the first human communities, the moment
when ‘these semi-animals’ (Halbtieren) were suddenly ‘enclosed within the walls of
society and peace’(GM 2.16). The creation of human communities—of the oldest ‘state’—
was, Nietzsche claims, the violent work of ‘some pack of blond beasts of prey’ that
instinctively and involuntarily created and imposed form on ‘this raw material of people
(Volk) and semi-animals.’ Wherever these ‘involuntary and unconscious artists’ appeared
something new arose, ‘a ruling structure that lives, (ein Herrschafts-Gebilde, das lebt) in
which parts and functions are delimited and coordinated, in which nothing whatever finds a
place that has not first been assigned a ‘meaning’ in relation to the whole’ (GM 2.17).

I would like to draw attention to the interrelated significance of Nietzsche’s

reiterated reference to ‘semi-animals’ and his claim that the tyranny of the blond beasts of
prey gave rise to a ‘ruling structure which lives.’ According Nietzsche’s account, once the
pre-human ‘semi-animal’ is contained within the boundaries of a nascent human
community its instinctive drives can no longer be discharged outwardly. Since, according
to Nietzsche, these drives must express themselves in some way, they ‘turn inward’. He
writes:

Those terrible bulwarks with which the organization of the state

protects itself against the old instincts of freedom...brought it
about that all those instincts of the wild free roaming human
turned themselves backwards against man himself.

This internalization of human animal instincts is responsible for human interiority; that is, it
is responsible for the development of human consciousness and self-consciousness. ‘The
entire inner world’ Nietzsche writes, ‘originally thin as if inserted between two skins, has
spread and unfolded, has taken on depth, breadth, height to the same extent that man's
outward discharging has been obstructed’ (GM 2.16). The depth the human soul thus
acquired is responsible, Nietzsche claims, for human superiority to other beasts; hence it is
responsible for what characterizes the human animal as such.

The earliest ‘noble’ type, the pre-human blond beast of prey, is noble as nature itself
is noble—unconscious, involuntary, indifferent—and it is only through this ‘noble’ and
‘natural’ tyranny, which constrains and confines other pre-human semi-animals, that a
human, purposive, meaningful life can come to be.26 The relation between consciousness

- 16 -
and purposiveness seems to be what is at stake when Nietzsche says that with the
internalization of drives something new comes to be—’a ruling structure that lives’. What
he cannot mean by this is that for the first time living beings are hierarchically structured,
for Nietzsche contends that all organic processes are examples of such structural
hierarchies. What is distinctive about human beings, as conscious beings, is that in them a
ruling structure can itself be said to live. Human beings are conscious beings insofar as
they implicitly identify themselves with some ruling principle, some mode of valuation or
justification. Moreover, this ruling structure can be said to have a life of its own, its own
mode of reproduction and its own canons of health and sickness. The instincts turned back
upon themselves resolve themselves into a new kind of hierarchy of drives, a ‘ruling
structure that lives.’ The primordial moral phenomenon of ‘bad conscience’ is a hierarchy
of drives become conscious of itself. The same active force, the same will to power,
through which the proto-tyrant imposes form on the nascent human community when
turned inward is the source, Nietzsche claims, ‘of all ideal and imaginative phenomena’ and
perhaps the origin of beauty itself—“After all,’ Nietzsche writes, ‘what would be
“beautiful” if the contradiction had not first become conscious of itself, if the ugly had not
said to itself: “I am ugly”?’ (GM 2.18)

Given the mythic character of Nietzsche’s speculative pre-history of the human race
we are ill advised to try to find in it a strict explanatory account of the genesis of human
consciousness—and, clearly, if it were meant to provide such an account it would have to
be seen as a failure. For even if we are persuaded that the phenomenon of conscience is a
kind of self-directed cruelty—somehow analogous to striking ourselves when we are
unable to strike out at another—we are no closer to understanding what made the conscious
phenomenon of guilt, as opposed to simple physical self-laceration, possible. Instead
Nietzsche’s account is meant to 1) give us an insight into the internal relation between
human consciousness and human purposiveness, and 2) allow us to see both human
consciousness and human purposiveness as manifestations of ‘bad conscience’—a self-
directed expression of the will to power. Consciousness in this account appears as a certain
higher order animal cruelty, a new sphere for the working of a will to power, wherein the
pre-human semi-animal becomes human by identifying itself as a unified being through
time. This involves, first of all, a kind of self-denial—a subjugation and subordination of

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those drives which are inconsistent with this self-identification. Moreover, this self-
identification through self-denial comes to consciousness as the affirmation of an ideal; it
comes to be interpreted as a purpose or a meaning.

VII

At a first pass, Nietzsche’s thought seems to be this—without a capacity to

experience some of our drives as fundamental, non-arbitrary, obligatory—as necessary
aspects of our identity, we could not experience ourselves having even a marginally
consistent identity through time. We could have no even relatively stable sense of
ourselves. To have such an identity requires, first of all, an ability to stand back from the
immediacy of instinctual impulse, to separate ourselves from a simple immersion in nature.
And for Nietzsche, as for the German Idealist tradition before him, this standing back from
the immediacy of nature is essentially bound up with the conscious capacity of
representation. Second, for this representation to function as a ground for the possibility of
any sort of stable identity, it must be a representation that essentially directs us toward a
future. Thus it must be a representation of what we are not yet, but what we are on our way
to becoming. Our identity as human beings is, on this account, a kind of never to be fully
redeemed promissory note, a claim about who we ought to be but are have not yet become.
It is this negative claim that restrains, disciplines and gives order to the multiplicity of
drives making up the soul. It establishes what Nietzsche calls in Beyond Good and Evil,
‘morality understood as the doctrine of the relations of supremacy under which the
phenomenon of “life” comes to be.’

However, to understand Nietzsche's claim in its full complexity, we must recognize

that the above description already assumes too much. In particular, it assumes that it is
meaningful to talk about temporal succession prior to or in the absence of human
purposiveness. But this, I suggest, Nietzsche denies. Indeed, he must deny this insofar as
he asserts the following two claims:

1. Kant is correct in the Second Analogy when he argues that something like the
relation between cause and effect is a condition of our experience of temporal
succession.27

2. All of our judgments concerning singular causal explanations are derived from and

- 18 -
 are dependent on an extension of ‘the model of the subject.’28

Taken together these two propositions apparently commit Nietzsche to the position that our
experience of temporal succession itself depends upon our common [and mistaken]
conception of intentional action, a conception wherein we view individual wills as agent-
causes, who act on the basis of motives, and achieve or fail to achieve their intentions. Our
conception of singular causes and effects, Nietzsche argues, is wholly derived from a prior
conception of agents and actions, and, on the account he gives in the Genealogy, that
conception of agents and actions must be understood as a manifestation of the ‘bad
conscience’, of the ‘animal soul turned against itself
On this view, guilt plays a similar role to that played by causality in Kant's Second
Analogy; it is a (subjective) condition of our experience of temporal succession. In the A
edition of Kant formulates the Second Analogy as follows: ‘Everything that happens, that
is, begins to be, presupposes something upon which it follows according to a rule’ (CPR
A189). In Nietzsche's account this rule is supplied by a ruling structure that lives, (ein
Herrschafts-Gebilde, das lebt) in which parts and functions are delimited and coordinated,
in which nothing whatever finds a place that has not first been assigned a “meaning” in
relation to the whole’. Where Kant argues in the Analogies that ‘experience is possible
only through the representation of a necessary connection between perceptions’(CPR B
218), Nietzsche argues in the Second Essay that in order to be able ‘to vouch for himself as
future,’ human being must ‘first have become calculable, regular, necessary in his own
representation of himself’ (GM 2.1).
On the interpretation I have offered, the ‘bad conscience’ is a kind of self-
subjugation that is at the same time a projective identification with some ideal future self.
More significantly, however, it is only by means of this projective identification that
‘future’ and ‘past’ become determinate concepts. Or, to put the point within the terms of
Nietzsche’s heuristic myth, it is only with the ‘invention’ of the ‘bad conscience’ that
‘future’ and ‘past’ came into existence. As Nietzsche writes: ‘(W)ith the appearance on
earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, something so new,
deep, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and full of future (Zukunftsvolles) had come into
being that the appearance of the earth was thereby essentially changed’

- 19 -
 VIII
I have argued that by attending to the strategic failures in Nietzsche's attempt to
provide a genetic or historical account of the origin of morality, we can discern an
argument wherein morality is conceived of as a condition for the possibility of our
experience of the world. More specifically, I have argued that in Nietzsche's account the
‘bad conscience,’ our directedness toward that which we ought to be but have not yet
become, performs the role played by causality in Kant's Second Analogy. It provides an a
priori rule through which we—both individually and as member of a broader historical
culture—experience succession as necessary and irreversible.29 However, it is important to
remind ourselves at this point the crucial difference between Nietzsche's 'transcendentalism'
and how transcendental arguments are traditionally conceived. Nietzsche famously
contends both that belief in the truth of synthetic a priori judgments are necessary, and that
such judgments are nevertheless in some sense false judgments. As he writes in aphorism 4
in BGE:

...we are fundamentally inclined to claim that the falsest

judgments (which include the synthetic judgments a priori) are
the most indispensable for us; that without accepting the fictions
of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented
world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant
falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not
live - that renouncing false judgments would mean renouncing
life and a denial of life.30

The explanation for Nietzsche's contention that synthetic a priori judgments are both
necessary and false can be found in his reversal of Kant's position with respect to the
relation between agent-causality and object-causality. In direct contradiction to Kant's
view, wherein our conception of the ‘I’ as a cause can only be conceived on the basis of an
analogy to causal relations between spatio-temporal objects (CPR A674/B702), Nietzsche
claims that ‘the concept of a thing is just a reflex of the belief in the I as cause’ (TI 6.3).
Thus, on Nietzsche's view it is our very fantasy of autonomy—our commitment to the
possibility of morally purposive action and the ‘fable’ or ‘fiction’ of the ‘I’ (TI 6.3)—that is
constitutive of our experience of the empirical world.

IX

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 There is, perhaps, no greater constant throughout Nietzsche's career than his claim
that human moral psychology is inextricably bound up with the human experience of time.
From his contention in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, that it is ‘only
through the power of employing the past for the purposes of life...did human being become
human being’ (UM: 64) through his admonitions in Thus Spoke Zarathustra against a ‘the
will’s ill will against time and its 'it was'‘ (Z: 139), down to the hopes expressed in Twilight
of the Idols to restore ‘the innocence of becoming’ and ‘thereby redeem the world’ (TI 6.8).
One advantage of the interpretation I have offered here is that it offers a way to see this as
something more than an empirical psychological observation, however well attested, about
how we happen to experience the passing of time—as if the 'errors' involved in laboring
under the burden of a past or the hope for a redemptive future were accidental moral
psychological attitudes added on to our basic underlying experience of temporal succession.
Nietzsche looks instead to be engaged in a phenomenological analysis of moral structure of
time experience. The 'errors' inherent in our 'moralised' experience of temporal succession
are the most central examples of constitutive falsifications, ‘synthetic a priori judgments’
to which we have no right, which are nonetheless necessary beliefs belonging to the
‘perspective optics of life’ (BGE 11).

This account can help to explain why Nietzsche seems compelled to continue
speaking in terms of something like a redemptive future in precisely those passages where
his analysis would seem to suggest that the fantasy of redemption is the most significant
symptom of the nihilism he is striving to overcome.31 It can also help us begin to
understand, if only begin to understand, why Nietzsche's 'immoralist' affirmation of human
existence compelled him to seek a ‘formula of affirmation’ beyond both humanity and
time.32

1
See Leiter 2002, Clark 1998 and 2001, Bittner, 2003, and Owen 2002. Cox 1999 and Richardson 2004 offer
more complex presentations of Nietzsche’s naturalism. In Richardson’s account, Nietzsche’s naturalist
revision of Darwinian principles needs to be understood as a complement to a metaphysical conception of the
will to power ‘as a universal force more basic than Darwinian selection’ (Richardson 2004:11), an account of
the will to power he elaborated in Richardson 1996. Thus the dispute between Richardson’s view and the one
I offer here will ultimately have to do with how we understand these more basic explanatory principles.
2
Christopher Janaway offers a detailed analysis and critique of Leiter's interpretation in Janaway 2006. See
also Christa Davis Acampora's response to the limits of Cox broader conception of naturalism in Davis
Acampora 2006.
3
Translation altered, see KSA 5.33-34. In this aphorism Nietzsche presents a multifaceted and
characteristically compressed phenomenological account of the act of willing. In every volitional act

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Nietzsche discerns the following elements: 1) sensations of location, position and direction, 2) a conceptual or
representational component, which he call the ‘commanding thought,’ and 3) an affective component, which
he specifically distinguishes from both sensation and conception. Each element is said to be a necessary part
of any act of will, but it is this third, affective component, that is central to Nietzsche's account. The will, he
writes, is ‘not only a complex of sensation and thinking, but it is above all an affect, specifically the affect of
command,’ which he describes in terms of a complex psycho-social relationship between parts of the self.
The complement to the affect of command, Nietzsche tells us, insofar as we are both the commanding and the
obeying parties, is an experience of sensations of ‘constraint, impulsion, pressure, resistance and motion.’
Nietzsche concludes by claiming that ‘all willing is absolutely a matter of commanding and obeying, on the
basis... of a social structure composed of many souls.’ The prima facie difficulty with this account is that it
appears to explain the phenomenology of willing in terms of a social structure of command and obedience to
commands, which social structure already seems to presuppose volitional activity on the part of the members
of an intra-psychic community. I will argue below that a version of this same paradox is central to
Nietzsche’s account of the ‘bad conscience’ in the Second Essay of the Genealogy.
4
Translation altered, KSA 3.474.
5
This is not to suggest that the principles or tendencies guiding an interpretation must be, or even can be,
perfectly or maximally coherent. However, if we are to identify any interpretation as a particular
interpretation we must assume that interpretation to have some principle in terms of which it can be conceived
as unified. On the relation between ‘life’ and ‘intepretation’ in Nietzsche’s account of the will to power, see
McNeill 2004.
6
BGE 200.
7
Translation altered, KSA 5.28.
8
Translation altered, KSA 6.352
9
A discussion of the Third Essay lies outside the scope of this essay
10
The best elucidation of the active and reactive types as set forth in the First Essay is provided by Simon
May (May 2004: 41-49).
11
‘(T)he noble manner of valuation...acts and grows spontaneously, it seeks out its opposite only in order to
say ‘yes’ to itself still more gratefully and more jubilantly’ GM 1.10, KSA 5.274.
12
GM 1.11, KSA 5.274. See also GM 2.11, KSA 5.311. Three aphorisms in Beyond Good and Evil taken
together further indicate the connection Nietzsche sees between the noble soul’s illusion of autochthony and
the hypothesis of the metaphysically free will. First, in aphorism 272, Nietzsche writes that the ‘(s)igns of
nobility’ are ‘never thinking of degrading ones duty into duties for everybody; not wanting to delegate, to
share, one’s own responsibilities; counting one’s privileges and their exercise among one’s duties’ (BGE 272)
Second, in aphorism 261, Nietzsche claims that ‘Among the things that may be hardest to understand for a
noble human being is vanity (die Eitelkeit): he will be tempted to deny it, where another type of human being
could not find it more palpable.’ Nietzsche describes the difficulty vanity represents for the noble human
being in this way:

The problem for him is to imagine people who seek to create a good opinion of
themselves which they do not have of themselves—and thus also do not deserve—
and who nevertheless end up believing this good opinion of themselves. This
strikes him half as such bad taste and lack of self-respect, and half as so baroquely
irrational, that he would like to consider vanity as exceptional, and in most cases
when it is spoken of he doubts it. (BGE 261)
The noble human being will say, Nietzsche claims, ‘I may be mistaken about my value and
nevertheless demand that my value, exactly as I define it, should be acknowledged by others as well—but this
is no vanity.’ Thus the noble human being asserts his independence from the opinions of others and considers
their opinions at most a confirmation of his belief in himself.
At first glance these two aphorisms might seem to support the noble human being’s self-assessment.
Until, that is, we consider the fact that disbelief in vanity may in fact be a necessary precondition for the most
extreme vanity. As Nietzsche writes in HH, ‘he who denies vanity in himself most often possesses it in so
brutal a form that he instinctively closes his eyes to it, in order not to have to despise himself’ (HH 2.Opinions
38). The beginning of BGE 21 confirms this suspicion. Nietzsche writes:

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 And in general, if I have observed correctly, the ‘unfreedom of the will’ is
regarded as a problem from two entirely opposite standpoints, but always in a
profoundly personal manner: some will not give up their responsibility, their
belief in themselves, the personal right to their merits at any price (the vain races
[die eitlen Rassen] belong to this class)... (BGE 21)

For the distinction between pride (Stolz) and vanity (Eitelkeit) in Nietzsche work, see Müller-Lauter
1995; for a discussion of the relation between vanity and the will to power, see Gerhardt 1992: 128-134.
13
Emphasis added.
14
See ‘Nietzsche’s Alleged Farewell: the Pre-modern, Modern, and Postmodern Nietzsche’ in Pippin 1989.
As Pippin contends, the cognizance of the social preconditions of any noble self-affirmation seems to point in
the direction of Hegel’s dialectic of ‘lord’ and ‘bondsman,’ and thus to ‘an ultimately necessary appeal to a
universal or mutually agreeable reassurance,’ that is, to ‘mutual recognition.’ Yet, as Pippin himself suggests
(350), it seems that the ‘tragedy’ of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is grounded in a realization of impossibility of
either foregoing or achieving any such recognition.
15
The pathos of distance thus depends on what Nietzsche calls a sublime ‘forgetting’ on the part of the
masters. This ‘forgetting’ includes precisely the inability of the masters to see the slaves as constituting in
themselves an alternate mode of valuation; they appear to the nobles not as embodying another way of
judging and valuing the world but rather as that part of the human world which lacks value, the extreme lower
limit of the world of the masters. As Nietzsche writes in The Gay Science, ‘the passion that attacks those
who are noble is peculiar, and they fail to realize this...Hitherto it was rarity and a lack of awareness of this
rarity that made a person noble’(GS 55).
16
See May 2004: 45-49.
17
Despite Nietzsche’s apparent antagonism to ‘slave morality,’ his description of its archetypical
representative, the ‘priestly type,’ is far for simply critical. Nietzsche writes that' it was on the soil of this
essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priestly form, that man first became an interesting
animal, that only here did the human soul acquire depth in a higher sense and become evil -- and these are,
after all, the two basic forms of the previous superiority of man over other creatures!' (GM 1.6). Moreover,
Nietzsche's apparent suggestion that the value judgment “evil” was an avoidable mistake on the part of a
certain human types—the slavish type—is manifestly inconsistent with the majority of his uses of böse in the
Genealogy. First, in the majority of those uses, Nietzsche is attributing “evil” in his own voice to one or
another aspect of human existence, most particularly, to the priestly type itself. Second, as the above
quotation demonstrates, in many of those uses the attribution of “evil” by Nietzsche is inextricably linked to
human depth and self-consciousness.
18
As Peter Berkowitz notes (Berkowitz 1996: 67-70), the Genealogy is remarkably free from historical
documentation. In fact, almost all of Nietzsche’s corroborating evidence comes from religious and poetic
texts, and as May argues (May 2004: 52), even those poetic texts do not seem to support Nietzsche’s
depiction of the noble type. Moreover, in the one instance that Nietzsche does make reference to an actual
history, his use of the passage seems intended to undermine the surface of his argument. In §11 of the First
Essay, right before the passage referring to Hesiod discussed below, Niezsche quotes the description of the
rhathymia of the Athenians in Pericles’ Funeral Oration from Thucydides as an exemplary acount of the
character of ‘noble races.’ However, as anyone familiar with Thucydides will recognize, Pericles depicts the
Athenian character as direct consequence of their democratic form of government as opposed to the
militaristic oligarchy of the Spartans.
19
In his defense of the claim that the origin of the value judgment ‘good’ is to be found in the self-valuation
of the ‘masters,’ Nietzsche refers to a very old idea, one we can find in Genesis 2:18-20 and in Plato’s
Cratylus, that naming as such is an expression of mastery. However, in the very same context, Nietzsche
indicates that his own account of ‘masters’ and ‘slaves’ is an expression of this conception of creative
mastery.
The right of lords to give names goes so far that we should allow ourselves to
comprehend the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part
of those who rule: they say ‘this is such and such,’ they seal each thing and
happening with a sound and thus, as it were, take possession of it. It is because

- 23 -
 of this origin that from the outset the word ‘good’ does not necessarily attach
itself to ‘unegoistic’ actions -- as is the superstition of those genealogists of
morality. On the contrary, only when aristocratic value judgments begin to
decline does this entire opposition ‘egoistic’ ‘unegoistic’ impose itself more
and more on the human conscience -- to make use of my language, it is the
herd instinct that finally finds a voice (also words) in this opposition. (GM I, 2,
my emphasis in bold)
20
„Die festgesetztesten Bewegungen unseres Geistes, unsere gesetzmäßige Gymnastik z.B. in Raum- und
Zeit-Vorstellungen, oder in dem Bedürfniß nach „Begründung“: dieser philosophische habitus des
menschlichen Geistes ist unsere eigentliche Potenz: also daß wir in vielen geistigen Dingen nicht mehr anders
können: was man psychologische Nothwendigkeit nennt. Diese ist geworden: und zu glauben, unser Raum,
unsere Zeit, unser Causalitäts-Instinkt sei etwas, das auch abgesehn vom Menschen Sinn habe, ist nachgerade
eine Kinderei.’
21
Hill argues that Nietzsche avoids Schopenhauer's incoherence through a ‘commitment to the existence of
two spaces and times. One pair is produced by the human intellect. The other pair is that space and time
within which the human intellect is embedded’(Hill 2003:132). The latter of these, Hill equates with
‘empirically real but unobservable posits not unlike atoms’ (Hill 2003: 137). At least one difficulty with this
strategy is the familiar problem of reconciling any conception of temporal succession with time
determinations as they appear in theories in the physical sciences, in particular reconciling the apparently
time-symmetric laws of microphysics, with the apparent time-asymmetry and irreversibility of both our
temporal experience and the macroscopic phenomenal properties of classical thermodynamics.
22
Cf. Risse, 2002: 58.
23
See Poellner 1995: 47-51.
24
Compare „Der willensfreie Akt wäre das Wunder, der Bruch der Natur-Kette. Die Menschen wären die
Wunderthäter’ KSA 8.595.
25
According to Plotinus, myths present aspects of one thing which differ in rank-order or powers as if they
were separated in time; they“represent the birth of the ungenerated and divide into parts where all is one
being”Enneads 3.5.9. See also 5.1.6-7.
26
Cf. BGE 188.
27
‘The one-after-another [das Nacheinander] first creates the representation of time. If we were to perceive
not cause and effect, but a continuum, we would not believe in time. For the movement of becoming does not
consist of motionless points [ruhenden Punkten], of uniform still expanses [gleichen Ruhestrecken].... A
continuum of force is without after-one-another [Nacheinander] and without next-to-one-another
[Nebeneinander] (these too presuppose human intellect and gaps between things).’ KSA 9: 11, as quoted in
Green 2002: 81.
28
‘It is only after the model of the subject that we have invented the reality of things and projected them into
the medley of sensations. If we no longer believe in the effective subject, then belief also disappears in
effective things, in reciprocation, cause and effect between those phenomena that we call things. There also
disappears, of course, the world of effective atoms: the assumption of which always depended on the
supposition that one needed subjects.’ (WP 552) See also, inter alia, WP 520, 546 and 550.
29
Thus the objectivity Kant claims for our experience of temporal succession is replaced in Nietzsche
account by necessarily intersubjective dimension of our moral experience.
30
As we have seen, Nietzsche believes that in some measure the will to power turned inward, ‘asceticism, ‘or
‘bad conscience,’ is a necessary aspect of a meaningful, purposive, human life; that to be human is to be
formed by an ethical mode of valuation and justification, which Nietzsche calls in On the Genealogy of
Morals ‘a ruling structure that lives.’ The internal relation between morality and life is a theme which is
sounded at various points throughout Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche claims ‘that a philosopher should
claim the right to include willing as such within the sphere of morals—morals being understood as the
doctrine of the relations of supremacy under which the phenomenon “life2 comes to be’ (BGE 19). Nietzsche
claims that ‘the moral imperative of nature’ appears to him to be, “You shall obey—someone and for a long
time: else you will perish and lose the last respect for yourself (sonst gehst du zugrunde und verliest die letzte
Achtung vor dir selbst)”’ (BGE 188). Nietzsche here describes loss of all self respect as a kind of death. This
passage, together with Nietzsche’s claim in GS 54 that he must go on dreaming in order not to perish (um
nicht zugrunde gehen), suggests that what Nietzsche means by ‘perishing’ in these two aphorisms is the loss

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of an ethical-historical ‘horizon,’ without which, according to On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for
Life, a living thing cannot be strong and fruitful.
31
Obviously, the most salient example in this context is Nietzsche's invocation in the Genealogy of the ‘man
of the future, who will redeem us not only from the hitherto reigning ideal but also from that which was
bound to grow out of it, the great nausea, the will to nothingness, nihilism...’(GM 2.24).
32
‘The fundamental conception of this work, the idea of eternal recurrence, this highest formula of
affirmation that is at all attainable, belongs in August 1881: it was penned on a sheet with the notation
underneath “6000 feet beyond man and time.”’ (EH, Z I)

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