4 - The second essay

Summary

The second essay offers the psychology of the conscience – which is not, as people may believe, “the voice of God in man”: it is the instinct of cruelty that turns back after it can no longer discharge itself externally. Cruelty is here exposed for the first time as one of the most ancient and basic substrata of culture that simply cannot be imagined away.

(EH III, GM)

FORGETTING, MEMORY, AND PROMISING (SECTIONS 1–2)

The Second Essay builds on the psychology of slave morality while also pointing beyond its early forms toward its later progeny in modern culture and the crisis of this inheritance for human life that represents the ultimate target of Nietzsche's genealogy. Section 1 begins with a claim that gathers Nietzsche's historical treatment into a specific focus on “promising,” which marks the course of morality's conflict with more natural drives: “To breed an animal with the prerogative to promise – is that not precisely the paradoxical task that nature has set herself with regard to humankind?” In fact Nietzsche calls this process the “real problem of humankind.” As we will see, the capacity to make promises functions as a central phenomenon in moral and political life, and it also serves to regulate time and becoming in important new ways. In any case, Nietzsche indicates that the task of producing a promising animal “has been solved to a large degree,” which means that the human world has indeed come to be shaped by the measure of promising.