Given the title, On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche focuses his arguments on historical context and how things have come to being. This way of analysis is applied to how he assesses the impacts of civilization. He argues that the “real problem regarding man” is the “paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man” to “breed [man] with the right to make promises” (Nietzsche 1967, 57), the fact that man is raised under the guidance of other men in civilization. In this context, breeding does not limit itself to the act of procreation, but to the act of raising man from his childhood and establishing his place within civilization.
Nietzsche argues that the consciousness of guilt, or the “bad consciousness” that is affirmed in the “slave morality” is essentially worthless due to its lack of historical instinct (62). He argues that the determining factors for what is essentially “bad” or deserving of punishment is related to the humanity that is accredited to civilization, “a high degree of humanity had to be attained before the animal ‘man’ began even to make the much more primitive distinctions between ‘intentional,’ ‘negligent,’ ‘accidental,’ ‘accountable,’ and their opposites and to take them into account when determining punishments” (62). The reasoning behind such appropriations of punishment is determined with the reasoning that the ‘criminal could have acted differently’ (63) rather than determined by the act itself. This essentially empowers that of the human consciousness, allowing this sort of logic to guide civilization to exert “mercy.”
Nietzsche goes on to argue that “The proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and over fate, has in his case penetrated to the profoundest depths and become instinct, the dominating instinct” (60). Consciousness is used as a mechanism to establish power and an individual or group’s domination over the rest of society. The consciousness that allocated power to certain parts of civilization is the same consciousness that established by what means a criminal should be punished. In turn, because the same consciousness worked in both these ways, one is able to witness “This self-overcoming of justice [those in power being unpunished for their crimes]… the beautiful name it has given itself—mercy; it goes without saying that mercy remains the privilege of the most powerful man, or better, his—beyond the law” (73). Through mercy and the establishment of the lack of intent on committing a deed, those in power are able to manipulate justice for their liking.
Through civilization, society is able to expand, contributing to the weakening of the individual and the strengthening of this bad consciousness: “As its power increases, a community ceases to take the individual’s transgressions so seriously, because they can no longer be considered as dangerous and destructive to the whole as they were formerly” (72). As civilization grows and concretes its existence, the capability of the individual to counteract society diminishes, “with every real growth in the whole, the ‘meaning’ of the individual organs also changes; in certain circumstances their partial destruction, a reduction in their numbers… can be a sign of increasing strength and perfection” (78). While the will on the individual is being suppressed, the dominant will within society feeds off of this and perfects its strength and influence over the whole.
Despite the pessimistic view of man being a product of civilization, Nietzsche argues that
the conception of gods in itself need not lead to the degradation of the imagination that we had to consider briefly, that there are nobler uses for the inventions of gods than for the self-crucifixion and self-violation of man in which Europe over the past millennia achieved its distinctive mastery—that is fortunately revealed by a mere glance at the Greek gods, those reflections of noble and autocratic men, in whom the animal in man felt deified and did not lacerate itself, did not rage against itself!
He argues that there may be hope of man not using the gods it has constructed to keep the slave morality dominant and in turn man will be able to overcome the inherent battle of slave morality. Nietzsche is skeptical yet hopeful that one day a “redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative spirit whose compelling strength will not let him rest in any aloofness or any beyond… may bring home the redemption of this reality: its redemption from the curse that the hitherto reigning ideal has laid upon it” (96). Should such a hero emerge, the misery as a product of civilization may be of no more.
