i GUILT AND THE CONSCIENCE IN NIETZSCHE, FREUD AND KAFKA Doctoral Dissertation Student

290 Pages·2015·1.63 MB·English

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GUILT AND THE CONSCIENCE
IN NIETZSCHE, FREUD AND KAFKA

Doctoral Dissertation

Student: Deepak Mistrey (student number: 911350951)
Supervisors: Dr. A. Gouws (University of KwaZulu-Natal) and Prof. D. Herwitz (University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor)

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree in Philosophy, in the School
of Religion, Philosophy and Classics, College of Humanities, University of KwaZulu-Natal,
2013.
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DECLARATION - PLAGIARISM

I, ……………………………………….………………………., declare that

1. The research reported in this thesis, except where otherwise indicated, is my original
research.

2. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or examination at any other university.

3. This thesis does not contain pictures, graphs or other information belonging to some other
person/s unless this/these person/s are specifically acknowledged as their source.

4. This thesis does not contain the writing of another person unless they are specifically
acknowledged as the source. Where written sources have been used, then:
a. Their words have been re-written but the general information they contain has been
referenced and properly attributed.
b. Where exact words have been used, these have either been placed inside quotation marks or
in indented paragraphs, and have been referenced.

5. This thesis does not contain text, graphics or tables copied and pasted from the Internet,
unless specifically acknowledged and the source detailed in the thesis and in the References
sections.

Signed

………………………………………………………………………………
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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements v

Abstract vi

Introduction: ‘The Most Important Problem in the Development of Civilization’ 1

I That Whip the Will: On Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ 12
Introduction  The Prohibition, the Invitation  The Refusal, the Repetition  The
Bribes, and Transgression  Desire for the Law, Singularity

II At Home in a Cage: Kafka and Nietzsche on How to Become Human 40
To Be Human is To Be At Home in a Cage  For Human Beings the Natural Life Is a
Human Life (Some Differences between Nietzsche and Kafka)  Conclusion

III What’s Eating the Cannibal? Freud on the Bite of Conscience 66
The Origin of the Superego Out of the Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (Out of
Identification with the Objects of the Child’s Love) (New Introductory Lectures –
1933)  The Origin of the Superego Out of the Fantasy of Revenge (Out of
Identification with the Objects of the Child’s Aggression) (Civilization and its
Discontents – 1930)  The Origin of the Superego Out of the Parricide in the
Cyclopean Family (Out of Ambivalence) (Totem and Taboo – 1912-13, Civilization
and its Discontents – 1930)  The Origin of the Superego Out of Identification as
Fortification for the Task of Repressing the Oedipus Complex (The Ego and the Id –
1923)  Conclusion

IV The Cosmological Bases of a Moral Emotion: Guilt among the Ancient Greeks 105
Williams’s Hypothesis  Why Convicts Don’t Feel Guilty  Automatic Punishment
and Speculative Guilt  Why the Greek Gods Should Feel More Guilty than Other
Greeks  Guilty or Not Guilty?

V The Memory of the Will: Sovereignty and the Social Straitjacket 126
Introduction  The Morality of Mores (The Morality of Custom): The Bad
Conscience of the Individual as Such  Herd-Individual ‘Morality’ and Higher
Morality  The Gods and Traditions Inside Oneself: The Iconoclast’s Bad
Conscience  The Obedience of the Promise, and the Freedom of the Sovereign  An
Automatic Autonomy  Fate and Determinism, Sickness and Health  A Sketch of an
Alternative Theory

VI Siding against Oneself 169
Instincts that Turn against You: Nietzsche’s Tierpsychologie (Genealogy II:16)  The
Dialectic of Prudence  The Diabolization of Instincts  Stupidity  Cruelty against
Oneself, Power over Oneself  Ideals  Conclusion
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VII Above the Law, Or God at Our Mercy 199
The Moral Interpretation of Being  The Good God, and the “Pushing Back into the
Bad Conscience”  Guilt, Debt and Fear  Guilt and Power  Conclusion

Conclusion 224

Bibliography and Citation Methods 236

Notes 244
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy (University of Natal and University of
KwaZulu-Natal) for having allowed me time to work on this and for the freedom they accorded me
to teach material related to it. I would also like to thank Yolanda Hordyk, without whose help
everything is so much more difficult, and so much is impossible. I am very grateful to Andries
Gouws, for spending valuable time, especially this year, on his fine and acute commentary. My
deepest gratitude goes to Danny Herwitz, who, in conversations since around the year 2000, has
contributed to the basic shape of this work, and I am thankful that he has stuck with me all this
time to see it through. I am especially grateful for the time I spent with him at the University of
Michigan in 2004, when we discussed, among other things, early versions of the first two chapters.
I thank the University of Michigan for that opportunity and the funding, and I would like to
acknowledge the invaluable help of the staff at the Institute for the Humanities, especially
Elizabeth Woodford, and of the Office of International Programs, particularly Linda Carr, Jordan
Pollack, and Carol W. Dickerman.

Most chapters have been presented in earlier versions: Chapter One at the UND English Studies
Research Seminar (March, 2003) and at the PSSA Conference (Rhodes University, 2003); Chapter
Two at the PSSA Conference (Fern Hill, 2004); a very minimal version of Chapter Three at the
Nietzsche Conference (Rhodes University, 2006); Chapter Four at the PSSA Conference (Durban,
2001) and at the UND Classics Research Colloquium (May, 2004); a part of Chapter Five at the
Spring Colloquium (Rhodes University, 2012); and Chapter Seven at the PSSA Conference (Salt
Rock, 2013). I thank the conveners of the two seminar series (John Hilton and Corinne Sandwith)
for the opportunity to present these papers, and Rebecca Bamford for partial funding for the
Nietzsche Conference; and I thank the audiences at these presentations for their comments and
criticisms.
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ABSTRACT

This thesis attempts to examine and clarify the ideas of conscience and guilt through an
examination of the texts of Nietzsche, Freud and Kafka, and to arrive at some conclusions about
the truth of the views of Freud and Nietzsche regarding guilt and conscience. I attempt to show
that there are significant overlaps in the ways in which Nietzsche (in the second essay of On the
Genealogy of Morals), Freud and Kafka (in certain texts) understand the problem of the
conscience, and I argue that Freud’s and Nietzsche’s attempts to answer the question of the nature
and origin of guilt do not succeed. For both of them, guilt – in the form of the bad conscience in
Nietzsche, or in the form of the ego’s experience of the superego in Freud – arises from the
redirection of aggressive instincts or instincts of cruelty away from the normal targets – others –
and towards oneself, and I try to demonstrate that this view is beset by serious problems. Although
I discuss the specific problems with each of their views in detail, the most important general reason
why their views of guilt miss the mark is, I argue, that neither adequately distinguishes between
guilt and the conscience (including the bad conscience), and so they run together phenomena that
in fact call for different explanations. Nietzsche errs in understanding guilt on the basis of debt,
and Freud in his theory of the superego does not take sufficient cognizance of an insight into the
nature of guilt that he himself provides in Civilization and its Discontents (namely that guilt
expresses itself as a need for punishment). Both, however, misunderstand guilt in understanding it
as fear, and Nietzsche’s interpretation of Christianity in line with this conception of guilt fails to
adequately capture the character of Christianity, and its psychological power.
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INTRODUCTION:
‘The Most Important Problem in the Development of Civilization’

This thesis deals with an ensemble of ideas, concerning conscience and guilt, loosely shared by
Nietzsche, Kafka, and Freud. I wish to arrive at some conclusions about the truth of these ideas, to
illuminate the relevant texts to some extent, and to clarify the concepts of conscience and guilt.

These aims overlap in the execution, but it is useful for the moment to clarify them severally.

The first aim is exegetical. The thesis contains, I believe, original readings of Nietzsche, Freud and
Kafka, and of the relations between them, that, I hope, help to illuminate their thought.

Secondly, it attempts to contribute to an understanding of the concepts of guilt and conscience (and
the superego). As such it is a contribution to a growing philosophical literature on the emotions,
and on the ‘moral emotions’; but it is more broadly a contribution to moral philosophy since the
notions of guilt and conscience form an important part of our moral self-understanding.

Thirdly, it is a contribution to the history of ideas, in so far as it attempts to understand these
notions, especially guilt, historically. (A pivotal chapter concerns the ancient Greek conceptuality
of guilt.)

Fourthly, it is a contribution to a certain question of political or social philosophy since, in a
manner I will explain shortly, it deals with guilt and the conscience as political phenomena.

* * *
Deleuze and Guattari write:

[The] fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw
so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: “Why do men fight for their servitude as
stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” How can people possibly reach the point of
shouting: “More taxes! Less bread!”? As Reich remarks, the astonishing thing is not that
some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who
are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not
continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being
humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and
slavery not only for others but for themselves? […] [No], the masses were not innocent
dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this
perversion of the desires of the masses that needs to be accounted for (2004:31).

And Foucault writes:

It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary,
it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the
functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished […]. […] The man described for
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us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more
profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a
factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body (1979:29-30).

Nietzsche, Freud and Kafka can be seen as providing in effect a theory of this subjected soul that
opposes its own interests, and it is in this sense that the thesis has a certain resonance with political
philosophy.

The Freudian answer, very crudely, is that people obey prohibitions propounded by authorities of
one kind or another because they “internalize” these prohibitions. There comes about in them an
internal representative or agent of an external authority such that the ‘external’ authority no longer
has to expend large amounts of energy in policing them; they police and accuse themselves.
(Deleuze and Guattari therefore do not do justice to Freud when they acknowledge Reich but not
Freud or Reich’s relation to Freud.1)

Jean Starobinski captures rather well what is at issue when, in The Living Eye, he writes in a very
Freudian vein:

When the mechanisms of projection lead Rousseau to invent hostility in other people, he
mistakes their attitude because he fails to recognize the wholly internal nature of his feelings
of guilt. Yet if we ask where those feelings come from, we must number society and its
values among their causes. Is projection therefore correct in its indictment of others? No. It is
a misplaced response, a deviant reaction, that will not admit how early the pain began and
that strikes out blindly at the enemy. There is error not only as to the person but also as to the
time: present hostility is blamed for a conflict whose origins lie much deeper in the past. In
reality, the psychology of guilt implies a system of collective values in terms of which Evil is
defined and punished. Guilt anxieties never arise except in the presence of an authority and a
law that anticipate and punish the infraction. In order to feel guilty, one must have
encountered in the outside world an accusation or threat in which the commission of a crime
was presumed. Even before I am accused of anything, I become obsessed with the possibility
of guilt from the moment I glimpse on my horizon an accusatory power that compels me to
see myself from its point of view and to declare myself wicked: ‘Knowledge of sin comes
from the law.’ It is as if feelings of guilt were a means used by authority to anticipate or
forestall possible recalcitrants by preoccupying them, by conquering them from within
(1989:17-18).

If this Freudian view or something like it were true, we would have an interesting answer to an
important question.

Now the Freudian answer as sketched above is a very crude form of the theory of the formation of
the superego. But as such, it is a theory of something like the conscience, and I shall attempt to
show that Nietzsche and Kafka also endorse a theory of internalization in the looser sense (relative
to the Freudian usage) of the adoption by the subject of externally imposed curbs and prohibitions.
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There are of course differences too, and the exegetical task of the thesis includes making those
clear.2

This ensemble of ideas that floats between them is therefore a certain interestingly differentiated
theory (in a sense of ‘theory’ that is more or less loose depending on whether it is Nietzsche, Freud
or Kafka that we are talking about) of the formation of subjectivity in the face of a structure of
power or prohibition of one kind or another (“mommy-daddy,” the state, God, civilization in
general, law), and because this ensemble subsists between them, it is not helpful to think of this as
a thesis on Nietzsche or Freud, say. It is a thesis on this ensemble of ideas as prevailing in a micro-
tradition composed by these three figures, and it is of interest because of the possible light that it
can throw on the political question of subjection, and on the question of the nature of guilt and
conscience which is the central question of the thesis.3

The set of ideas that Nietzsche, Kafka and Freud share, in the relevant texts, about the origin of the
conscience, is as follows. The genesis of the conscience (a) occurs at the interface between
individuals and certain larger societal or organisational structures, and sometimes more than one
(e.g., the family, but therefore also society in the large); (b) is a process, that (c) has the form of an
internalization, or, at the very least, of a change in the subjectivity of the individual in line with
these larger structures (so that there occurs, ultimately, a transformation of the original individual
into something significantly different). (d) It concerns one form or another (morality, law, norms
of civilization) of curbs proceeding from some or other organisation larger than the individual
(perhaps the smallest of which is the family, or the parent). This process is understood as (e) a
transition from some pre-human (or not fully and properly human) condition – animality or
savagery or childhood – to a fully-fledged humanity, (f) involves pain or aggression, including in
the form of confinement, and (g) depends crucially not only on the aggression or pain inflicted by
the ‘larger structure’ but on the capacity for or joy in or tendency to aggression (which defines the
animality or savagery or pre- or proto-humanity) of the individual that is transformed. In these
overlapping pictures, then, the original individual is animal or wild or savage, immoral or amoral,
asocial, free or desirous of freedom, and somehow maladapted to these larger structures. But in
any event, (h) these curbs (law, morality, norms) are not taken for granted by Nietzsche, Kafka or
Freud, as a natural endowment of the human animal, and so what is required for these to take hold
on the individual (in the form of the conscience or superego) is (i) the violent or aggressive
intervention of an external agency (“blonde beasts” in Nietzsche, parents in Freud). The result is
ultimately that the individual is transformed and (j) split into a double ‘nature’, since its older and
original nature is not entirely extinguished (to a greater or lesser extent in Nietzsche, Freud or
Kafka) and continues to assert itself in one form or another. In all of these thinkers the present
form of humanity is therefore not taken for granted but is arrived at in one kind of historical
development or another.

Undoubtedly, there are significant differences between Nietzsche, Kafka, and Freud – otherwise
the exercise I am proposing would be considerably less interesting. These will be investigated in
some detail, but, for the sake of orienting the reader, some of the most significant that might be
mentioned are that: in Kafka and Freud, there is a certain emphasis on love, in addition to
aggressivity, in the relationship between the individual and its authorities, while in Nietzsche there
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is almost no affective relation between those who will be transformed and those who bring about
their transformation. There are also differences in the degree of reversibility of the process that
these thinkers allow (Freud allowing a great likelihood of ‘regression’ to an earlier stage, and
Kafka allowing almost none), and there are differences in whether the process is understood as
phylogenetic or ontogenetic, or both.

I emphasise that I shall not be concerned to trace the precise borrowings and debts. It is well
known that Freud is indebted to Nietzsche4, for example, but the question of the originality or
otherwise of Freud’s ideas is for me of little philosophical interest. (However, I believe it will
become clear that Freud is indeed original in this domain, even if there are considerable overlaps
between his thought and Nietzsche’s.) What interests me is that there is considerable overlap, and
that this ensemble of ideas has the purchase it does on the minds of these three figures, and above
all I am concerned with the soundness of these ideas and with what they can teach us about guilt
and the conscience.

In pursuing these questions I will not be much concerned, at least in the first instance, to
differentiate law or other such structures from morality or moral prohibitions. I do not deny that
there are differences between them, but Nietzsche, Freud and Kafka do not take it for granted that
there is a clear distinction here. What is important for them is that ultimately commands
propounded by an external authority are assumed by an individual that is not innately a moral or
law-abiding citizen. From their point of view, therefore, the distinctions (law or prohibitions or
morality, and so forth) are secondary, and I wish at least at first to examine these writers on their
terms.

* * *

It is necessary to make the conceptual terrain somewhat clear at the outset, but of course what I say
here is not to be taken as my final word about it since the job of the thesis is to gain some clarity
about these concepts.

I obviously defer to Freud on the relation between the superego and the conscience. Freud writes in
Civilization and its Discontents:

The super-ego is an agency which has been inferred by us, and conscience is a function
which we ascribe, among other functions, to that agency. This function consists in keeping a
watch over the actions and intentions of the ego and judging them, in exercising a censorship.
The sense of guilt, the harshness of the super-ego, is thus the same thing as the severity of the
conscience. It is the perception which the ego has of being watched over in this way, the
assessment of the tension between its own strivings and the demands of the super-ego. […]
We ought not to speak of a conscience until a super-ego is demonstrably present (PFL 12,
329-330).