CHAPTER XXI
CRITICISM OF MORALITY (Cont.). BAD CONSCIENCE, A MORAL ORDER, OUGHT, EQUALITY
I
I confess that in taking up Nietzsche's analysis of "bad conscience," I find it difficult to trace a clear and consistent course of thought. The main treatment of the subject is in the second treatise of Genealogy of Morals.
First, it may be noted that elsewhere, and incidentally here, he often uses the phrase in a way that causes no perplexity. It simply designates the feeling which one has in departing from a standard which one acknowledges. The first standards of men were, as already explained, social; to disobey the group's mores in any particular was attended with an uneasy consciousness. Even to have different ideas from those commonly recognized did not seem quite right, and science has often come into the world stealthily, feeling like a transgressor, or at least like a smuggler.[1] The phenomenon continues in its essential features down to the present day. To a troubled young friend Nietzsche wrote: "It is curious to observe: he who early departs from traditional paths to enter on one that seems right to himself, has always half or altogether the feeling of a man who has been exiled and condemned by others and has fled away: this kind of bad conscience is the suffering of the independently good."[2] He thinks it impossible to estimate what just the rarer, selecter, more original minds in the past have suffered from the fact that they were looked upon as böse and dangerous—yes, appeared so to themselves.[3] But there may be individual as well as social standards, and one may have "bad conscience" when one forgets these too. "Why do we have
