The Concept of Nietzsche's Tragedy - Case Study Example

Nietzsche’s Pregnant Conscience Friedrich Nietzsche is one of history’s more well-known philosophers of the nineteenth century. His interests spanned the horizon from religion and morality to contemporary culture, science and philosophy heavily canted to the German worldview. He was influential in the development of ideas regarding existentialism and postmodernism. One of the major ideas consistently illustrated within his work was the concept of tragedy as a means of affirming life and progress within a non-Christian context. It is one of the founding principles in his book On the Genealogy of Morality in which Nietzsche offers three treatises that each demonstrate how moral concepts and institutions have developed as a result of non-moralistic power struggles and its resulting cruelty. In the second treatise of this book, Nietzsche introduces the idea of a bad conscience as something that arises from this pre-moral environment in which punishment emerges as a result of the exclusive attributes inherited by man – namely his ability to make and break promises and thus be held accountable. When man loses his ability to prey upon those weaker than himself, Nietzsche says, he begins to turn his ‘animal nature’ on himself in the form of a bad conscience. In discussing this idea, Nietzsche says, “The bad conscience is an illness, there is no doubt about that, but an illness as pregnancy is an illness” (Nietzsche, Genealogy, II: 19). Before determining whether one can agree with this statement, it is helpful to understand more fully what Nietzsche meant by relating a bad conscience to an illness and then understanding how this illness was like a pregnancy. Through his use of the term ‘bad conscience’, Nietzsche means one that has turned its energies back in on itself. According to Nietzsche, the human conscience is a sort of side-effect of the development of trade. As one individual gained power through his ability to make and keep promises and other individuals lost power as a result of a necessity to break promises, memory was developed as a means of keeping track of these promises, both broken and kept. The more complex these relationships became, the more memory was stored, the more people began trying to become more like everyone else and developing a sense of conscience to know how they measured up. As punishment for failing to deliver on a promise, several very brutal consequences were enacted, including the loss of limbs or other vital body parts as a means of exacting ‘justice’. From this emerged a ‘natural’ desire to be among those who could dominate, leading to the development of a cruel streak that would, in times of quiet, serve to turn back on the owner in the form of a conscience. According to Nietzsche, “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward” (Nietzsche, Genealogy, II: 17), which gives birth to the soul or inner life. This force, no longer able to express itself outwardly, is forced to exert itself inwardly and becomes what Nietzsche refers to as the ‘bad conscience.’ Because the will is forced to action within the individual, it is seen as an illness that infects the mind and body with its own negative and sometimes violent forces. However, as Nietzsche says, this is not always a bad thing. Like a pregnancy brings incredible change and destruction upon the female body, but is limited in time and scope to eventually produce something as wonderful as an entirely new human being, the ‘bad conscience’ also leads to greater development. Only by being forced into taking this inward journey through guilt is an individual able to develop the sort of depth and complexity that feeds our most creative energies. While the benefits of the process represent ever greater development of the individual, as in the creation of another individual, there is also, like an illness, a terrible power conveyed in it. Depending upon how the mother lives while the baby is gestating, a number of significant lifelong issues can be conveyed upon the child. Thus, the pregnancy of a ‘bad conscience’ may produce society’s greatest works of art, most in-depth ideas and incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, it may also produce less positive things to be used as a means of further restricting and cruelly controlling the human mind. Nietzsche suggests one of these distorted creations is the creation of God as an all-knowing, all-judging, all-powerful being predisposed against us because of ‘original sin’. “In this psychical cruelty there resides a madness of the will which is absolutely unexampled: the will of man to find himself guilty and reprehensible to a degree that can never be atoned for ... his will to erect an ideal – that of the ‘holy God’ – and in the face of it to feel the palpable certainty of his own absolute unworthiness” (Nietzsche, Genealogy, II: 19). Thus, the ‘bad conscience’ is a pregnant idea in that it turns inward, forces the development of a deeper conscience, which gives seed to a belief in a greater being as the will becomes convinced it must atone for something that can never be repaid regardless of the extent of the suffering. Nietzsche’s idea is compelling because it provides for the possibility that the same source causes, at the same time, both joy and suffering. I find it easy to agree with Nietzsche that the unexpressed emotion has a tendency to burrow inward as a means of finding some means of expression. It makes sense that this expression would work its way out through feelings of guilt, anger, shame or other negative attitudes that would in other fields be considered forms of illness. It also seems clear that this is the source of the great artists as biographies frequently make reference to unexpressed emotion coming out in the art and thus explaining the relationship with a pregnancy. It is a new idea, though, to think that humans may have created God as a means of justifying or explaining this inflated sense of guilt rather than, as the Bible and our parents have taught us, that God created man. I find the pregnancy analogy very helpful in trying to consider these ideas and put them into context for better understanding. The way I interpret this analogy, the seed (soul developing as a result of memory) becomes fertilized with conscience (which is energy that cannot be expressed outwardly) and gives birth to the ascetic attributes of humanity – the great artists and thinkers. However, if that conscience is a bad conscience, infected with guilt, it is like a bad gene, infecting the seed with its guilt even while its fertilizing it and, while still being able to give birth to something full of light and higher ideals, the resulting product is limited by the guilt, such as in the creation of God as he is expressed above. While I can understand what Nietzsche is saying and do agree with him that conscience can act as a pregnancy and an illness at the same time, particularly since I have the ability to see this ‘illness’ with knowledge of human genomes, I cannot so easily agree with him in expanding the idea to the creation of God. It is an important question to consider, though, as it may lead to greater understanding of the self, the way one interprets the world and the way in which these interpretations may have an effect on future events. Works Cited Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Douglas Smith (Trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Read More