|
Second EssayGuilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters18
We need to be careful not to entertain a low opinion of this entire phenomenon simply because it is from the outset hateful and painful. Basically it is the same active force which is at work on a grander scale in those artists of power and organization and which builds states. Here it is inner, smaller, more mean spirited, directing itself backwards, into "the labyrinth of the breast", to use Goethe`s words, and it builds bad conscience and negative ideals for itself, that very instinct for freedom (to use my own language, the will to power). But the material on which the shaping and violating nature of this force directs itself is man himself, all his old animal self, and not, as in that greater and more striking phenomenon, on another man or on other men.
This furtive violation of the self, this artistic cruelty, this pleasure in giving a shape to oneself as if to a tough, resisting, suffering material, to burn into it a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a denial - this weird and horribly pleasurable work of a soul voluntarily divided against itself, which makes itself suffer for the pleasure of creating suffering, all this active "bad conscience," as the womb of ideal and imaginative events, finally brought to light - we have already guessed - also an abundance of strange new beauty and affirmation, perhaps for the first time the idea of the beautiful. . . . For what would be "beautiful," if its opposite had not yet come to an awareness of itself, if ugliness had not already said to itself, "I am ugly." . . .
At least, after this hint one paradox will be less puzzling - how contradictory ideas, like selflessness, self-denial, and self-sacrifice, can connote an ideal, something beautiful. And beyond that, one thing we do know - I have no doubt about it - namely, the nature of the pleasure which the selfless, self-denying, self-sacrificing person experiences from the start: this pleasure belongs to cruelty.
So much for the moment on the origin of the "unegoistic" as something of moral worth and on the demarcation of the soil out of which this value has grown: only bad conscience, only the will to abuse the self, provides the condition for the value of the unegoistic.
|
