Signing the Social Contract: Nietzsche, Normativity and Commitment

Introduction

There are two central questions that motivate this paper: first what does it mean to impose a law on oneself, and second, how does this differ from being compelled to follow the laws of others? My focus will be primarily on the former question, as I hope to show that this more fundamental question is vital to understanding the difference between consenting to a law and being compelled by law. This is the essence of the challenge that I think Nietzsche raises for us in a particular section of his work, namely the second essay of on the genealogy of morality. I think we can fruitfully read this second essay in contrast to social contract philosophies, and I think that Nietzsche challenges us to understand what the difference is between someone who consents to constitutional legislation, and those who are forced to abide by that legislation. Nietzsche’s challenge, in short, is to know what it is to impose laws on oneself – what kind of normativity we could have that isn’t determined by the compulsion of others.

Nietzsche’s Non-Egalitarian Alternative to the Social Contract

I’ll start this by introducing the idea that we can read the second essay as Nietzsche’s alternative to the social contract before developing the central problem.

The most obvious way in which Nietzsche’s second essay shares a theme with social contract philosophy is its focus on social relations, and in particular the way in which much of the essay is an origin myth about how societies are first formed. The second essay offers includes Nietzsche’s suggestion about the difference between a disparate collection of individuals and a community or a people, and in this respect is offering his own contribution to a tradition that has attempted to understand the central logic of legitimate social or political communities. We may think particularly here of Rousseau, and his thought that a group of individuals are not a people unless they already share a unanimous agreement:

‘A People,’ says Grotius, ‘may give themselves to a king.’ His argument implies that the said People were already a People before this act of surrender. The very act of gift was that of a political group and presupposed public deliberation. Before, therefore, we consider the act

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by which a People chooses their king, it were well if we considered the act by which a People is constituted as such…The institution of the franchise is, in itself, a form of compact, and assumes that, at least once in its operation, complete unanimity existed. (SC I 5)

On Nietzsche’s account the most basic social relation, that which is essential to even the most basic society, is that between debtor and creditor:

the oldest and most primitive relationship there is [is] the relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor: here for the first time person stepped up against person, here for the first time a person measure himself by another person. No degree of civilisation however low has yet been discovered in which something of this relationship was not already noticeable. (OGM II 8)

His reason for this seems to be that this is the most basic way in which individuals can come to see themselves relative to other people – it is, according to Nietzsche, the first time a person measures himself by another person, and thus the first and most primitive way in which my self-understanding is partly a matter of how I think I compare to others around me. The suggestion seems to be that any debt relation means I have given some consideration to what others have that I don’t have – perhaps material goods, or perhaps expertise or technical skill that I may want to hire. Moreover, Nietzsche’s suggestion seems to be that the most basic intersubjectivity is a comparative measurement – any social relation to other will involve AT the most fundamental level an evaluation of myself relative to others in society.

Though most of the detail of this will not concern me, I do want to emphasise that Nietzsche here claims that the most basic social relation is a contract between individuals. More specifically, Nietzsche this social contract is one in which one individual will borrow and promise to repay something owned by another. On Nietzsche’s account an integral part of this contract is the right given to the creditor to punish the debtor in cases of default.

In order to instill trust in his promise of repayment, to provide a guarantee for the seriousness and the sacredness of his promise, to impress repayment on his conscience as a duty, as an obligation, the debtor – by virtue of a contract – pledges to the creditor in the case of non-payment something else that he “possesses,”…the creditor could

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subject the body of the debtor to all manner of ignominy and torture (OGM II 5)

…in place of an advantage that directly makes good for the injury (hence in place of a compensation in money, land, possession of any kind) the creditor is granted a certain feeling of satisfaction as repayment and compensation…the enjoyment of doing violence (OGM II 5)

The institution of debt has always, Nietzsche tells us, needed a clause in the debt contract by which the debtor agrees to corporal punishment if he fails to pay up. The creditor’s right to punish, both guarantees the trust of the creditor needed for her to agree to the loan, and is the debtor’s way of encouraging his future self to abide by a commitment that he is making at the time of signing the debt contract. As with Hobbes’ account of a constitutional legal covenant, punishment plays an integral pragmatic role in Nietzsche’s account of the debt contract. As Hobbes’ puts it with regard to the social covenant:

…Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure man at all. (Lev Chap 17)

Nietzsche shares this view with regard to the debt contract – the trust necessary for debt to work is secured by the right that the creditor has to punish the debtor if he fails to repay.

So in this sense Nietzsche shares the principle of social contract philosophy that the model of social relations is an agreement entered into freely by both parties. But the major contrast here is between the way Nietzsche and social contract philosophers think of the relative status of the contracting parties. In the case of the social contract tradition it is very important that all who consent to the contract are given equal status with regard to the contract, in the sense that the rights and obligations stipulated by the basic foundational contract will apply to all consenting parties in the same way.

In Nietzsche’s case, the social contract that constitutes the most basic social relation is inherently hierarchical, in the sense that one of the two contracting parties is handed dominion over the other:

Through his “punishment” of the debtor the creditor participates in a right of lords: finally he, too, for once attains the elevating feeling of being permitted to hold a being in contempt and maltreat it as something

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“beneath himself” – or at least, if the actual power of punishment, the execution of punishment has already passed over into the hands of the “authorities”, of seeing it held in contempt and maltreated. The compensation thus consists in a directive and right to cruelty. – (OGM II 5)

On Nietzsche’s description, the foundational social relation is not between parties of an equal status but between a superior and an inferior party. Nietzsche seems to think of this inequality not so much in material terms as in terms of status and, in particular, status relative to a social hierarchy. By virtue of the credit contract, and in particular the punishment guaranteed by the contract, the creditor is conferred a right that the debtor is not entitled to. Nietzsche thinks of this as an aristocratic right – the right of lords – by which I take him to mean that the status conferred to the creditor in her right to punish is not a legal or political status but a social status, social status here meaning a matter of the respect due to her by others in her community.

One important point to note here about the superior status granted the creditor is that Nietzsche suggests this feeling of superiority will act as motivation for the creditor to punish the debtor. Again, like Hobbes Nietzsche gives punishment an essential pragmatic role in his account of the founding social relation. But Hobbes, admittedly for good reason, doesn’t really consider what would guarantee that punishment, in particular what would motivate the sovereign to punish – with the contract drawn up and the sovereign appointed, it is assumed that the sovereign just will punish trangressions, because he she or they are the sovereign, without really asking why he she or they would do this. Nietzsche, interested as ever in the conscious or unconscious motivations for our behaviour, does ask this question. Nietzsche’s answer to this is usually read as a statement about bare sadism – the creditor is motivated to punish not because it is just to punish the guilty, but because the joy of cruelty is compensation for the failed repayment. But I think it is clear from Nietzsche’s elaboration on the creditor’s psychology that the motivation is not pure sadism, but pride, and specifically the pride granted the creditor by making her feel superior to her debtor. This explains, for instance, why Nietzsche thinks the lower in the social order a creditor is, the more she will get a kick out of the punishment (a psychological claim that would be difficult to understand were Nietzsche talking just about sadistic pleasure).

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The point here is that the different social status given to creditor and debtor is on Nietzsche’s account integral to the debt contract, which wouldn’t work without this inequality. The threat of punishment is integral to the functioning of the debt contract – that the debtor ought to repay the creditor would on this account mean nothing without the threat of the creditor’s punishment, “without the sword” as it were. But the motivation for this punishment comes from the feeling of superiority granted the creditor. Nietzsche suggests that without the recognition that being a creditor somehow raises one’s status, and thus without the feeling of superiority granted to the creditor when she punishes her debtor, the punishment would be less likely to happen in cases of transgression, and the trustworthiness of a debt contract would fall apart.

The Gap in the Social Contract, and how Nietzsche shows it

In brief, then, Nietzsche’s alternative to the social contract is a founding social relation between a debtor and creditor. By virtue of this debt contract and the right to punish given to the creditor, this most basic social relation introduces social hierarchy at the very foundation of the community.

This is the first sense in which Nietzsche’s alternative to the social contract is non-egalitarian, and I think it is an interesting idea, but it is not the most important contrast that I want to talk about. The most important contrast between Nietzsche’s account and the social contract tradition is a matter of the scope of their respective analyses of social agreement. We’ve seen that the two differ on the content of the social agreement, and in particular on the role of equality in social agreement. But my contention is that Nietzsche’s analysis raises a more fundamental question than those of Hobbes, Rousseau and others.

Nietzsche, like the social contract tradition, maintains that this founding social relation between debtor and creditor begins with a contract, to which both parties have consented. This means that Nietzsche’s account, much like a social contract account, assumes a distinction between consenting to that contract and compulsion. The debt contract is not, supposedly, one that has been forced on the debtor – such a contract wouldn’t be contract at all without the free promise of the debtor to take on the debt and repay in the future. Similarly, social contract philosophies appeal to consent as a fundamental feature of either legitimate or good political authority. For social contract philosophers, the important issue is whether any particular regime could or should be

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consented to by citizens under that regime. Hypothetically the question is whether right minded citizens under a regime would sign a contract that is compatible with that regime. And of course having an answer to this questions means that we must first at least know the difference between what it would mean for citizens to freely sign that contract, even hypothetically, and what it would mean for citizens to be forced to live by that contract.

However, Nietzsche’s own presentation of this founding social contract shows us that a more fundamental question has been overlooked. Nietzsche’s story about foundational debt commitments is written in the form of a historical essay. The second essay of OGM is ostensibly about the historical development of our ability to make promises – the origins of an animal that is ‘permitted to promise’

To breed an animal that is permitted to promise – isn’t this precisely the paradoxical task nature has set for itself with regard to man? Isn’t this the true problem of man? (OGM II 1)

The ability to promise, according to Nietzsche, was the product of a long process of human development. This ability to promise needs first and foremost a memory, the ability to remember the commitments one has made in order to see through those commitments at a later date. Nietzsche tells us that memory was forged in the first instance by violent means:

“How does one make a memory for the human animal?”...”One burns something in so that it remains in one’s memory: only what does not cease to give pain remains in one’s memory” – that is a first principle from the most ancient (unfortunately also longest) psychology on earth (OGM II 3)

Nietzsche claims that the violence that helped us develop memories was the violent punishment that is integral to the institution of debt. The primary reason violence was so widespread in more basic societies was that even these basic societies had an institution of debt that was inherently cruel and violent. This kind of punishment helped to develop memories for the punished and for others witness to the violent punishment of defaulting debtors. Debt relations, then, is how the development of our ability to make promises got started.

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This would be a perfectly coherent, if perhaps somewhat implausible history of promise making were it not for the fact that the institution of debt itself requires the ability to promise. Nietzsche’s history is supposed to have us believe that we developed the ability to promise through means of debt relations that preceded promise making. But entering into a debt contract is itself a promise – the debtor in particular is making a promise to loan and later repay something from the creditor. And Nietzsche himself is fully aware of this. Not only is he fully aware of this, but he makes it obvious in his presentation of this history that the institution of debt needs the ability to promise in order for it to work:

Precisely here there are promises made; precisely here is a matter of making a memory for the one who promises; precisely here, one may suspect, will be a place where one finds things that are hard, cruel, embarrassing. In order to instil trust in his promise of repayment, to provide a guarantee for the seriousness and the sacredness of his promise, to impress repayment on his conscience as a duty, as an obligation, the debtor – by virtue of a contract – pledges to the creditor in the case of non-payment something else that he “possesses” (OGM II 5)

The point here is that Nietzsche’s historical story in the second essay is circular, and I would maintain deliberately circular. According to Nietzsche’s narrative, the institution that is responsible for the development of promising, that which putatively precedes promising, is an institution that itself requires promising. Nietzsche’s account of the origin of promising assumes the very thing it is supposed to explain.

The obvious question to ask here is why Nietzsche would intentionally write a circular history – I think he does have at least one very important reason for doing this which a methodological point he wishes to demonstrate about his contemporary historians of morality – something I don’t really have the time to go into here. But I think it plausible to say that Nietzsche is also intentionally drawing our attention to something fundamental to making contracts, something that is already assumed in the accounts of social contract philosophy. That something is the ability to consent to the content of a contract, the ability to freely sign or commit oneself to a contract.

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As I mentioned earlier, Nietzsche shares with social contract philosophy a distinction between consent and compulsion. There is a difference assumed in Nietzsche’s account between someone forced to repay simply through a threat of punishment, and a debt contract that has been consented to by the debtor. What the circularity shows us is that Nietzsche thinks of the distinction between consent and compulsion in terms of promising or commitment. Nietzsche thinks, in my view quite rightly, that the consenting debtor is someone who has made a kind of commitment. Most importantly, for the distinction between the compelled debtor and the consenting debtor to be maintained, there must be a distinction between those who are forced to live by the laws of others – those who are committed to doing something by force – and those who live by the commitments that they impose on themselves. Nietzsche shows us that social contracts need not just an idea of consent, but more precisely an idea of promising – the contracting parties must be the kind of beings that can commit themselves to the content of the contract, and thus bind themselves, self-legislate, in the terms of the contract.

What’s important here is that social contract philosophies are concerned with caching out the content of a regime under which citizens could be self-determining and self-legislating. This takes a variety of forms in the tradition, and of course there are a variety of other values that are appealed to with the value of self-determination – naturalistic values in Rousseau, for instance, the value of self-preservation in Hobbes or Locke’s appeal to natural moral law. But the right or good regime for this tradition is at least in part one that is compatible with citizens who commit themselves to the principles of that regime, rather than being compelled to conformity by that regime. Nietzsche is, I contend, sensitive to this idea in his predecessors. But moreover he thinks that this distinction between self-legislating and being compelled is in fact rather opaque, and that all of this assumes that we already know what it would mean for anyone to commit themselves to something.

How the social contract tradition tries to plug this gap, and what is missing

To briefly recap, I’m suggesting that we read Nietzsche’s account of social relations as a kind of perverse addition to the social contract tradition. Nietzsche’s version of the social contract contrasts with his predecessors’ insofar as it is inherently hierarchical, and driven by a feeling of superiority

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granted to the creditor. But it is also a self-undermining social contract account, insofar as his version of the social contract is ostensibly designed to explain the development of promising, the very thing that social contracts already assume in order to function. I’m suggesting that in this sense, Nietzsche’s contribution to the social contract tradition raises a significant challenge to that tradition: what do we mean when we talk about the difference between consenting to government and being compelled by government, and how is it possible for us to live in accordance with laws that we have imposed on ourselves?

Before moving to Nietzsche’s own solution to this problem, I want to be a little more precise about exactly what this challenge is. If the challenge were just to give some content to the distinction between being compelled to follow the law, and consenting to the law, then clearly Nietzsche’s predecessors would have no problem answering this challenge. Rousseau for instance has a pretty substantial account of the difference between a self-legislating population and citizens compelled to live under the direction of others. For Rousseau, unequal societies make some individuals economically dependent on others and dependent on others for social recognition and esteem. Rousseau thinks such dependence will inevitably be exploited, and that those of us who are dependent on others of higher status or wealth will have to do the bidding of those on whom we are dependant. Free self-determination must, firstly, be in a society without such inequalities and without such dependence between individuals.

But importantly for Rousseau the proper alternative is not just being free from the determination of others, not just being independent. Simply being free from external hindrance or direction is what we might call negative freedom – and this kind of freedom is for Rousseau simply the ability to do whatever one wants to, a freedom that he thinks insufficient. The aim is not to be free from external compulsion such that one lives by no laws at all, but to live in accordance with laws of one’s own creation. The reason for this is that living by no law at all is to live unreflectively, failing to exercise a distinctively human capacity to subject our desires to reflection and evaluation. Living in accordance with one’s own law, however, is to apply norms to our desires and to make decisions on which desires to act upon in accordance with those norms. The goal is what Rousseau calls moral freedom, not negative freedom – living in accordance with self-legislated norms.

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This means, then, that freely consenting to a social contract is not to be free of obligation. In fact, it is just the opposite – Rousseau in particular is aware that free self-legislated government means binding oneself to norms that govern our behaviour. Freedom does not mean that there are no normative prescriptions relevant to my behaviour – being free for Rousseau involves subscribing to particular distinctions between right and wrong action. The point here is that in true moral freedom these distinctions are not forced on me by the threat of punishment from a political authority – they are self-imposed.

This is the more precise point at which Nietzsche’s challenge is raised. In both Rousseau and Hobbes, those that sign the social contract or will the general will set up a social authority to impose the content of the social contract. But this involves first agreeing, consenting or committing to the content of the contract – I have not consented to, for instance, peace guaranteed by absolute sovereignty if I have not first committed myself to the goal of peace at any cost. In social contract philosophy, a subjective commitment made by those who sign the contract is set up objectively – in the case of the general will, I am first subjectively committed to economic equality, and then set up an objective institution, perhaps a state institution, capable of more effectively acting on this commitment – in the case of the Leviathan, I am first subjectively committed to self-preservation, and then see fit to transfer my rights by means of an objective commitment, a contract, to a sovereign that can more effectively protect me.

The subjective commitment that is realised objectively in, for instance, legislation, cannot just be a psychological fact about me, in the sense that it is a fact about what my desires happen to be, what my dispositions are, what I tend to and will continue to do in the future. The law that I self-legislate, the law that I determine myself and that I impose on myself, cannot be in the form of a natural or empirical law, in the sense that the laws of thermodynamics are laws. Self-imposed laws are not natural necessities about me that accord with causal laws connecting neurological causes to behavioural effects. Again, for someone like Rousseau, this would fail to distinguish self-legislated human action from simply consistent and predictable animal action. The laws that I impose on myself must normative: if the law is “respect your elders”, this doesn’t mean that I simply will respect my elders, but that I impose on myself the norm that I ought to respect my elders.

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This is why, I think, Nietzsche is right to talk about the basic social contract in terms of promises and commitments. In order for the social contract to work – and not just debt contracts, but any social agreement to work – those who sign it are committing to its content, imposing a norm on themselves by which they govern their behaviour. It is only with this self-imposed law that we can say that anyone has freely agreed for a social authority to arbitrate that law – if I consent to a sovereign to maintain the peace, I must first have imposed on myself the normative prescription that I ought to do what I can to establish and maintain peace. In other words, to have freely signed the contract, I must first be acting in accordance with a self-imposed norm that guides me in deciding whether I want to sign this contract. The social contract tradition has all kinds to say about the nature and content of the norms that come after the basic contract has been signed. What Nietzsche wants, however, is an account of this initial act of imposing a law on oneself assumed in the very first act of signing the contract.

How does Nietzsche plug this gap – sovereign conscience and proud subjective normativity

With a more precise understanding of the challenge that Nietzsche here raises, I want to spend the rest of the paper explaining Nietzsche’s solution. Nietzsche’s own approach to how we can understand self-legislation has its own parameters set by other commitments Nietzsche has in his work. To put it succinctly, Nietzsche’s task is to understand how his contemporaries can govern their own behaviour in accordance with a new ethics now that religious norms no longer hold the central and powerful position they once did. Nietzsche’s approach is a significantly historical one – for Nietzsche, as we will see shortly, normatively governed behaviour may once have been effectively guaranteed by a Christian culture, but this is no longer an option in 19th century Europe. So making a distinction between right and wrong action, and committing oneself to that distinction, cannot be achieved through belief in God and the disincentive of eternal damnation. I’ll say more about this later.

And Nietzsche is also prevented from appealing to moral considerations to account for how people could determine their own norms. While this is a topic for a whole other paper, we could say briefly that Kant’s response to this challenge, for instance, is not open to Nietzsche, because Nietzsche is not a moral realist. Nietzsche does not think that morality inheres in reality in any

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way, and that moral norms are reducible to other social and human factors. So while Kant could say we will successfully self-legislate when we discern the moral law and act out of respect for the moral law, this is not something Nietzsche can fall back on.

The challenge for Nietzsche is, then, even more complicated that it might be for others in the social contract tradition – within his parameters, Nietzsche must be able to give us a naturalistic account of what it is to hold oneself to a norm, without reducing this to the threat of punishment by a social authority, the threat of punishment by God or to metaphysical moral facts that could determine what we ought to do.

Nietzsche’s answer to the challenge is, in short, that we can live by our own norms by means of our conscience. If I subscribe to norms that are determined by my conscience, then what I ought to do is that which is encouraged or incentivised by means of my conscience. In this sense, self-imposed norms are different to laws that I am compelled to follow, because the normative content of self-imposed commitment comes not from the punishments threatened by a social authority, but by means of an internalised authority, a conscience, that would punish me in cases in which I do the wrong thing. Pangs of conscience could be said to be analogous to the punishment I suffer at the hands of the sovereign. But the difference is that the punishment of conscience is self-inflicted – I am not compelled by others but compelled by myself.

This is the basic structure of the kind of self-imposed norms that Nietzsche thinks could constitute freely signing a social contract. But there is more than one way in which conscience could work. In particular, there is more than one way of punishing oneself for failing to meet our self-legislated norms, and thus more than one way of understanding how the content of those norms is determined in practice. For the rest of the paper I want to be more precise about what Nietzsche thinks conscience is, and how it can determine self-legislated norms.

There are in fact two kinds of conscience that appear in the second essay of OGM, and it’s important that we distinguish the two. These two types of conscience I will call bad conscience, following Nietzsche’s terminology, and the other I will call proud conscience, for reasons that should become clear later. Both bad and proud conscience are developments of self-inflicted

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punishment , and in this sense Nietzsche thinks of both as internalised forms of the social punishment that is integral to the institution of debt – an internalisation of the threat of punishment that determines what I ought to do. According to Nietzsche, the masochism at the origin of conscience is the result of the creation of the state – somewhat oddly, Nietzsche thinks that when individuals become citizens they become masochists:

Those terrible bulwarks with which the organization of the state protects itself against the old instinct of freedom – punishments belong above all else to these bulwarks – brought it about that all those instincts of the wild free roaming human turned themselves backwards against man himself (OGM II 16)

The second essay gives the psychology of the conscience: it is not, as is no doubt believed, ‘the voice of God in man’ – it is the instinct of cruelty turned backwards after it can no longer discharge itself outwards. (EH, ‘Genealogy of Morals’)

Nietzsche maintains that formerly violent communities are restricted when under state-government. Communities once found expression of their instincts of cruelty in the punishment central to debt relations –under the governance of a state, this punishment falls into the hands of public authorities, and individual citizens no longer get to indulge in their sadist impulses. With nowhere else to go, Nietzsche tells us, these instincts to cruelty previously discharged towards bad debtors are turned on their bearers. The pain at the hands of these instincts is what eventually, according to the story, becomes interpreted as pangs of conscience.

Nietzsche seems to suggest in his description of this inward directed cruelty that this is the first point at which we become reflexive beings – in fact Nietzsche seems to suggest that this is the origin of self-consciousness:

All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn themselves inwards –this is what I call the internalizing of man: thus first grows in man that which he later calls his “soul.” (OGM II 16)

Our first self-directed act, according to Nietzsche, is one of cruelty.

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I don’t really know how we could justify this claim, and Nietzsche is here entering into territory that is much debated by his predecessors in German idealism – how we come to be aware of ourselves, and indeed how we can know ourselves, is a topic of incredibly complex debate running of course from at least Descartes to the 19th century, but perhaps at its most interesting in the developments of Kant’s notion of apperception – the “I” present with every cognition – most notably those developments and objections we find in Fichte and Hegel. In the context of a complex history of philosophies of self-consciousness, Nietzsche’s idea that self-consciousness is first and foremost masochism needs a bit of justification.

But whether or not Nietzsche can offer us such a justification, it is important that we just note that Nietzsche does think, at least in the context of the second essay, that our most basic self-consciousness is an internalisation of the cruel relation once held between a creditor and a debtor. In the second essay, the relation between the self as subject of knowledge and the self as object of knowledge takes on this very specific form – in this sense Nietzsche suggests that self-consciousness in its most basic form is a relation between I-as-creditor and I-as-debtor. This will be important for understanding the difference between bad conscience and proud conscience, as we’ll see that how an individual carries this form of self-consciousness will determine the kind of conscience she bears.

One of the ways in which this basic masochism can be developed is what Nietzsche calls bad conscience. Bad conscience is made possible, Nietzsche tells us, by means of a Christian interpretation of masochistic suffering.

OGM II 22: ‘this man of bad conscience has taken over the religious presupposition in order to drive his self-torture to its most gruesome severity and sharpness’

According to Nietzsche Christianity has interpreted this suffering as punishment by God, and in particular punishment by God for our failure to give what is due to him. Bad conscience is an extreme guilt that is made possible by thinking that the human condition as such is a failure to meet our commitment

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to God. Nietzsche also thinks that this commitment we have to God is a commitment we cannot possibly keep, and thus the punishment for failing to keep this commitment is inevitable.

bad conscience now fixes itself firmly, eats into him, spreads out, and grows like a polyp in every breadth and depth until finally, with the impossibility of discharging the debt, the impossibility of discharging penance is also conceived of, the idea that it cannot be paid off (“eternal punishment”) (OGM II 21)

This interpretation of our suffering encourages us to think of ourselves as deserving of punishment and irredeemably guilty, and so we may use this interpretation to indulge in our instincts for cruelty – if we think we are and always will be deserving of divine retribution in the form of psychological suffering, then we can take our masochism to extremes. Or so Nietzsche tells us.

This masochism is on Nietzsche’s description an internalisation of a relation that was once held between a creditor who punishes and a debtor who is punished. The same is true of bad conscience; thus what in debt is a social relation is in bad conscience a reflexive relation. Having said this, the theology responsible for bad conscience encourages the bearer of bad conscience to project the agency of his suffering onto another party, namely God. If I am a bearer of bad conscience, I interpret my masochistic suffering as divine punishment for sin. Though I am in fact both the agent and the victim of this suffering, I identify only with the victim, and project the agency of the suffering onto God. The debt relation that Nietzsche describes in the second essay is also, on his account, operative in a different form in Christian guilt.

It is possible, I think to answer Nietzsche’s challenge in terms of Christian guilt – I think we can construct a model of self-governance along these lines, and moreover a model that is within almost all of Nietzsche’s parameters. The guilt in bad conscience is indexed to particular sins or vices prohibited and condemned by Christian norms. In bad conscience, we suffer more when we feel we have sinned and less when we have not. We govern our action, then, by indexing what we consider to be sinful action with our suffering – we suffer because we have sinned, and so we should not do it again. On Nietzsche’s naturalistic account, this needn’t mean that there really are divinely ordained

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norms to guide my action, nor that my guilt is actually punishment by God. This means only that norms that are created by the church, a human institution, are internalised by me in the sense that I interpret my suffering as a result of failing to live by those norms. If I am a bearer of bad conscience I hold myself to religious norms because I think that failing to do so is why I feel guilty. Using the disincentive of guilt, I am able to govern my behaviour in accordance with religious law without the need for actual punishment by a social authority.

However, this model of self-governance or self-legislation will not suffice for either the social contract tradition or for Nietzsche. The space for religion in the political philosophies of for instance Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke and Rawls is of course an incredibly complex issue, and their ways of accommodating or rejecting religion in the social contract model vary. But it is clear that no figure in the social contract tradition would think that consenting to the social contract would amount to simply following the contract because I think it is divinely ordained. And it is precisely because Nietzsche’s forebears reject religious dogma as a basis for legitimate authority that Nietzsche writes about the death of God

After Buddha was dead, people showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a cave,—an immense frightful shadow. God is dead: but as the human race is constituted, there will perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which people will show his shadow.—And we—we have still to overcome his shadow! – The Gay Science §108

Nietzsche thinks that norms determined by divine commandment and threat of punishment by God are no longer tenable. And if the social contract philosophers that precede him are anything to go by, he’s probably right about the death of God – Enlightenment political philosophy has clearly distanced the principles of legitimate political authority from religious justification, and by the late nineteenth century religious norms that are consented to just because they are divine commands are no longer desirable or possible. It may once have been the case, Nietzsche would say, that we could think of consent as a sufficiently internalised fear of punishment by God. But in late-modernity, this isn’t going to do the job anymore.

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So what about proud conscience? This second way in which debt relations can become internalised is in the kind of conscience Nietzsche attributes to what he calls the sovereign individual. Nietzsche describes this conscience as follows:

The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and fate, has sunk into his lowest depth and has become instinct, the dominant instinct: - what will he call it, this dominant instinct, assuming that he feels the need to have a word for it? But there is no doubt: this sovereign human being calls it his conscience… (OGM II 2)

Like bad conscience, the conscience of the sovereign individual is an internalisation of the relation between debtor and creditor. Both the agent and victim of suffering in this case are the sovereign individual. But unlike bad conscience, the sovereign individual identifies not with the debtor or victim of punishment, but instead identifies with the creditor or punisher.

As a result, rather than inheriting the feeling of indebtedness and guilt from the debtor, the sovereign individual instead inherits from the creditor a feeling of pride or esteem. Recall that when Nietzsche described the psychology of the creditor in the debt relation, he maintained that the creditor’s motivation to punish is not just bare sadism but the feeling of superiority granted to those who punish – participating in the right of lords and feeling the punished beneath him.

‘through his punishment of the debtor the creditor participates in a right of lords: finally he, too, for once attains the elevating feeling of being permitted to hold a being in contempt and maltreat it as something “beneath himself”.’

This kind of pride for the creditor in social relations is a socialised esteem, insofar as it only makes sense in terms of a social hierarchy. The creditor punishes because it makes him feel higher on that hierarchy. Identifying with the agent of punishment, the sovereign individual also allows himself to participate in this kind of pride. Rather than see himself first and foremost as the punished, he sees himself as the punisher, and thus associates pride with

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the masochistic pain that he suffers as a result of self-directed cruelty. In other words, Nietzsche thinks that whereas a Christian will interpret suffering as a sign of guilt, the sovereign individual will see suffering as a source of pride.

The sovereign individual, according to Nietzsche, gets a feeling of superiority two ways. First, the sovereign individual who keeps to her commitment feels superior to those who repeatedly break commitments.

looking from himself toward the others, he honors or holds in contempt; and just as necessarily as he honors the ones like him, the strong and reliable (those who are permitted to promise…just as necessarily he will hold his kick in readiness for the frail dogs who promise although they are not permitted to do so, and his switch for the liar who breaks his word already the moment it leaves his mouth. (OGM II 2)

Secondly, and most importantly, I think the sovereign individual also feels a reflexive superiority, a feeling of superiority over herself. This is again, an internalisation of the relation between debt and creditor. But as the sovereign individual identifies with the creditor, then she inherits the feeling of superiority over the punished. And of course, in the case of the masochistic sovereign individual, the punished is the sovereign individual herself.

with the appearance on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, something so new deep, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and full of future had come into being that the appearance of the earth was thereby essentially changed (ogm ii 16)

I think the best way we can make sense of the sovereign individual’s pride is to think of it in terms of self-overcoming. Self-overcoming would here mean making a distinction between the better and worse sides of oneself, making evaluative judgements of my inclinations and desires, and in particular associated pride with some behaviour and shame with others. The feeling of superiority and pride would come when we successfully act on the desires that we consider to be more honourable. The sovereign individual holds herself to this distinction with the incentive of pride in cases of overcoming lesser parts of ourselves and the disincentive of shame when we allow our lesser selves to surface. According to this model, I govern my own actions in terms of pride and

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shame, and I successfully self-legislate norms when my pride and shame fully reflect the distinctions I make between a better and worse side of myself.

What Nietzsche gives us is a way of understanding how an individual might keep herself to normative distinctions between right and wrong action, and thus impose a law on herself by which she will live. When I self-legislate, on Nietzsche’s view, I govern my behaviour in accordance with a normative picture that I have of what a superior version of me would be. I hold to an idea of what a better me would be and drive myself to this better me through the incentive of pride and superiority – as I continually improve myself in accordance with this norm, I get an increased feeling of pride and an increased satisfaction through self-overcoming. I thus regulate my action in accordance with feelings of pride or shame that accord with the picture I have of what a better version of me is, and which actions would benefit this better version.

For Nietzsche, if I have such a proud conscience I regulate my behaviour in this way regardless of whether there is a social authority to keep me in check, and thus I am not compelled to keep to this norm. And moreover these self-imposed are laws are not empirical laws – they are not regularities of my behaviour. The distinction determined through feelings of pride and shame in a normative distinction, a matter of what I ought to do, not a matter of what I am most likely to do. And this model is within Nietzsche’s parameters – it is a naturalistic account that avoids appealing to moral obligations or religious obligation, and reduces my obligation to a psychological features that can explain what it is to self-legislate.

With this somewhat sketchy account of Nietzsche’s model of self-legislation, we should ask how this could work for the social contract. The idea here would be that I properly consent to a social agreement only if that agreement correctly reflects my internalised norms. We can say that I actually do want to commit myself to a social contract only if the content of that contract is in accordance with my own standards of better and worse actions, and superior and inferior ways of being. In this sense, if I think that self-preservation at all costs is an inherently dishonourable pursuit, then I wouldn’t be the kind of person that would sign a contract on the grounds that Hobbes gives in the Leviathan. If, to take another example, I think that redistribution of material wealth is in

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accordance with the better side of me – that a better person would do all she could for economic equality – then I could be said to will the general will, and not simply be forced to live by it. That this is the case would be clear in the way I react to the institutions established to do this – my deep shame when the government fails to prevent tax evasion, and moreover my judgement that those government institutions themselves should be ashamed, reflects my commitment to a robust tax system capable of more equitable wealth distribution. But the main point here would be that Nietzsche thinks the affective reactions I have to such a situation reflects what my own internalised norms are – and that it is through shame, rather than guilt, that I determine what I should commit myself when I sign a social contract

I’d like to end by being clear about exactly what kind of claim I’d like to defend here. My claim is not that Nietzsche’s is an account of self-legislation that is better than any others given in the history of modern philosophy. (that’s way too bold) Nor is my claim that the social contract tradition cannot possibly furnish us with a better account of governing one’s own action. If either of these were my claims I’d be very far from having defended them well in this paper. My claim is if we want to understand what it would mean for a community to self-legislate, we must also understand what it means for individuals to commit themselves to laws, rather than being compelled by them. My suggestion is that Nietzsche is right to raise this concern, and that within the naturalistic parameters of his philosophy, it makes sense to say that our best resources for self-legislation are pride, honour and shame.

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