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Second EssayGuilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters2
Precisely that development is the history of the origin of responsibility. The task of breeding an animal with a right to make promises contains within it, as we have already grasped, as a condition and prerequisite, the more urgent prior task of making a human being necessarily uniform to some extent, one among many other like him, regular and consequently predictable. The immense task in what I have called the "morality of custom" (cf. Daybreak, p. 7, 13, 16), the essential work of a man on his own self in the longest-lasting age of the human race, his entire pre-historical work, derives its meaning, its grand justification, from the following point, no matter how much hardship, tyranny, monotony and idiocy it also manifested: with the help of the morality of custom and the social strait jacket the human being was rendered truly predictable.
Now, let`s position ourselves, by contrast, at the end of this immense process, in the place where the tree finally yields its fruit, where society and the morality of custom finally bring to light the end for which they were simply the means. We find - as the ripest fruit on that tree - the sovereign individual, something which resembles only itself, which has broken loose again from the morality of custom - the autonomous individual beyond morality (for "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually exclusive terms) - in short, the human being who possesses his own independent and enduring will, who is entitled to make promises - and in him a proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle, of what has finally been achieved and given living embodiment in him: a real consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of completion for human beings generally.
This man who has become free, who really has the right to make promises, this master of free will, this sovereign - how can he not realize the superiority he enjoys over everyone who does not have the right to make a promise and make pledges on his own behalf, knowing how much trust, how much fear, and how much respect he creates (he is worthy of all three) and how, with this mastery over himself, he has necessarily been given in addition mastery over his circumstances, over nature, and over all creatures with a shorter and less reliable will?
The "free" man, the owner of an enduring unbreakable will, by possessing this also acquires his own standard of value: he looks out from himself at others and confers respect or withholds it. And just as it will be necessary for him to honour those like him, the strong and dependable (who are entitled to make promises), in other words everyone who makes promises like a sovereign, seriously, rarely, and slowly, who is sparing with his trust, who honours another when he does trust, who gives his word as something reliable, because he knows he is strong enough to remain upright when opposed by misfortune - even when "opposed by fate," so it will necessary for him to keep his foot ready to kick the scrawny unreliable men, who make promises without being entitled to, and hold his cane ready to punish the liar who breaks his word in the very moment it comes out of his mouth.
The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and destiny have become internalized into the deepest parts of him and grown instinctual, have now become a dominating instinct. What will he call it, this dominating instinct, given that he finds he needs a word for it? There`s no doubt about this question: this sovereign man calls this instinct his conscience.
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