How moral values acquire a history › Second Essay: memory, debt, and bad conscience

The Second Essay starts with a capacity that moral responsibility requires: making a promise (§§1–2). Promising binds a present intention to a future action despite intervening circumstances. Nietzsche asks how an animal capable of forgetting becomes sufficiently reliable to answer for a future undertaking. His account links that development to a long discipline of custom and coercion.

He then connects guilt with debt, using the relationship between the German words Schuld and Schulden (§4). In creditor–debtor relationships, he proposes, an injury could be treated as something for which compensation was owed. The power to inflict suffering supplied a form of compensation. This is Nietzsche's proposed history of responsibility, not an argument that suffering actually repays an injury in any morally satisfactory sense.

Several developments must be separated. The capacity to remember an obligation is one issue. The relation between injury and compensation is another. Feeling inwardly guilty is a third. The essay does not describe a single moment in which punishment manufactures a fully developed conscience. In §§14–15 Nietzsche explicitly questions whether punishment typically produces guilt, suggesting that it can instead make people more calculating or hardened.

The account of bad conscience appears in §§16–17. Instincts that formerly found outward expression are constrained by a coercive social order. Nietzsche proposes that they turn inward, making the self into a field for aggression, discipline, and cruelty. He presents this as a hypothesis about a transformation in human life. It is not a contemporary clinical theory of how every child develops a conscience.

Nor does he portray the inward turn as wholly barren. In §18 he also connects the capacity to form and work upon oneself with new possibilities of beauty and ideal-making. The historical process can be painful and coercive while enabling capacities he finds significant. That ambivalence matters: calling a development costly does not yet mean that nothing valuable could emerge from it.

Later sections examine the growth of indebtedness toward ancestors and gods, and its intensification in Christian guilt (§§19–22). A debt that can never be discharged creates a different relation to oneself from an obligation with a finite repayment. Nietzsche's account seeks to explain how guilt can cease to concern a particular remediable act and become a judgment on one's existence.

A hypothetical comparison makes the distinction clearer. “I broke a promise and owe an apology” identifies an act and something that might answer for it. “My very being is guilty” has no similarly bounded remedy. The example clarifies a difference in the structure of guilt. It does not show that every religious understanding of guilt takes the second form, or that Nietzsche has established its historical development.