Nietzsche's On The Genealogy Of Morality

1) Explain the origin of guilt or bad conscience as understood by Nietzsche in Essay 2 of "On The Genealogy of Morality."

In Friedrich Nietzsche’s book, On the Genealogy of Morality, he brings up the concept of guilt or bad conscience. He starts out talking about how we should remember things needed to survive and repress everything else and that being forgetful is an active thing people should be doing. This is because humans become sick with guilt when they cannot forget things. This can be seen in slave morality because they dwell on the past and become sickly. Master morality, on the other hand, is considered healthy because they forget things easily. However, memory can be also be seen in a positive light. Some see memory as a sickly inability

In the book, he points out that there are two processes in creating an inferiority in a colonized subject. The first is that blacks are literally economically inferior. Their economic circumstance translates into the view that black skin is inferior. The second is an internalized notion of inferiority, they think there is something that makes them inferior, in this situation it is the color of their skin. However, an inferiority complex is not a problem of the individual, but a problem of society. He makes this clear when he points out that “a white man talking to a person of color behaves exactly like a grown-up with a kid, simpering, murmuring, fussing, and coddling” (Fanon, 2008, p.14). He’s showing that it is society that creates this in them. Fanon talks about how blacks feel economically and culturally inferior and so they internalize this inferiority. He reiterates his take on the topic by stating that “If he is overcome to such a degree by a desire to be white, it’s because he lives in a society that makes his inferiority complex possible, in a society that draws its strength by maintaining this complex, in a society that proclaims the superiority of one race over another; it is to the extent that society creates difficulties for him that he finds himself positioned in a neurotic situation” (Fanon, 2008, p.80). Again, rather than blaming the individual for the inferiority complex, he puts it on society, since it is society that ingrained this way of thinking. These inferiority complexes develop in children who are exposed to predominately white culture. So, from young ages these colonized subjects are trained to view themselves as inferior. Fanon eventually clearly states this by saying “let us have the courage to say it: It is the racist who creates the inferiorized” (Fanon, 2008,