Guilt and Punishment

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the genealogical account of guilt and punishment. I argue that Nietzsche’s focus on the relation between guilt and indebtedness is highly significant: it allows one to understand how punishment (or penance) can expunge guilt, by constituting an alternative way of repaying a debt. I argue that Nietzsche analyses guilt as a loss of self-esteem that accompanies the failure to keep faith with one’s commitments (understood as promises), rather than as a fear of the painful consequences incurred for breaking them. I then turn to his analysis of “bad conscience,” or conscience that speaks in a primarily admonishing and critical voice. Nietzsche locates its origin in the adoption of “negative ideals,” or ideals of self-denial or self-mastery, motivated by the ressentiment aroused by the constraints of socialization. The combination of these two trends then produces the concept of “guilt before God.”