In his second essay from “On The Genealogy of Morals,” Nietzsche uses the relationship between creditor and debtor to explain the origins and evolution of guilt and its relation to suffering and pain, what he calls the ‘bad conscience.’ He provides examples of this dynamic at play between individuals, a community and its members, a tribe and its ancestors, and humanity and gods. He begins by first explaining that the concept of guilt is linguistically related to debt. In German, the word ‘guilt’ can be translated as ‘schuld’ and the word ‘debts’ is translated as ‘schulden.’ In section 5, Nietzsche begins to explain the history of the relationship between debtors and creditors and the legal actions that could be taken. The basic premise of the relationship is that a creditor would loan money (or an equivalent) to someone, called the debtor, who promised some form of payment as a promise in the event of a failure to pay. The debtor would usually promise something that they owned as the collateral. This could include the debtor’s body and there were legal codes in place to determine how much and which parts of the body could be taken as fair payment. Thus, we can see that someone who gets into debt could be made to experience physical pain as payment by the debtor. To experience guilt was to be guilty of having debts then. He further …show more content…
The community will try to measure its worth by determining how much suffering it can receive, in the form of lawbreakers, before reciprocating that punishment. A single criminal in a large and powerful community will not be punished as severely as a single criminal in a fledgling community. In theory if a community were to become powerful enough, crime would go unpunished. This is what Nietzsche calls