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I am having trouble to understand why Nietzche wants to get rid of guilt. From what I understand he claims that guilt was introduced by the ressintiment of the oppressed slaves as a way to vent their revenge. However humans don't have free will neither are ends of some purpose or god. As such all accountability and thus all guilt can be redeemed. I agree with all of that, however I still see value in guilt regardless of the existence of "free will". I believe the only way humans can guarantee to keep a promise is through guilt. For example, lets say I promise to my self to go to the gym:

If I can't experience guilt and my will to go to the gym is weaker than my will to not go to the gym then I will not go to the gym.

If however I experience guilt then regardless of what my will wills guilt will motivate to go to the gym.

So I believe guilt to be necessary condition of responsibility. Because there can be no responsibility if I can't keep a promise to my self.

Thus I believe guilt to be necessary for self overcoming and the will to power because it allows humans to take responsibility for their selves, thus having control of the future actions of their selves.

Any thoughts are highly appreciated

TheGeometer
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  • Two reasons. First, to Nietzsche guilt is a fiction based on another fiction of "free will" that falsely attributes causes of action to the mind, and was invented by moralists to justify punishment. Guilt "internalizes" punishment. One may get angry over a promise not kept, but both are in the natural course of things. Interpreting anger as "guilt" is a fiction born of misattributing promise breaking to the "will" (or lack thereof). Second, he thinks that indulging in this fiction increases suffering, because those who suffer tend to assuage it by inflicting it on others, and even themselves. – Conifold Sep 20 '21 at 03:33

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There is a lot to unpack here.

First of all "a promise to oneself" is a figure of speech. What is really happening is we are simply making a plan to go to the gym. Then when we don't go, we just change our plan based on new information that wasn't available to us when we took the decision to go to the gym, namely our state of mind at the time to go.

So, we made a plan, had some expectations, and those expectations didn't match our real state of mind. But when our expectations don't match reality, the problem is not with reality, which is what it is for better or worse, but with our expectations, that were unrealistic to begin with.

What Nietzsche says is, instead of internalizing punishment by feeling guilty like a child who disappointed their parents, which is childish and a sad passion that will impair our power to live, we should act positively and reassess these expectations. Maybe we didn't want that much to go to the gym, but felt like doing it because of an advertisement. Maybe we are really too tired on weekdays and should make some time for ourself, or go on week ends. Maybe we should go with friends. Understand if we really want to go, and why we didn't go, and make a new plan that will match with reality this time.

Guilt will just sadly push us to do something we don't want to do and hinder our self confidence. Why would we want to hold ourselves to the unrealistic standard set when we were less informed? Also, guilt is often imprinted on us by external sources, the impossible standards of advertising and mass media, religion, governments that want us to sacrifice our life for their policy, etc... By letting guilt driving our decisions, more often than not we are obeying those people, not living for ourselves.

Promise to other people are another problem, and also require no guilt to be held. It's a simple matter of trust: if we don't hold on our promises to people, or don't try at least to own up to it when we promised more than we can deliver, people will soon understand our word has no worth and refuse to collaborate with us. Here again, guilt is just an internalized punishment, a sad passion, that will impair our judgement and make us feel bad where there is no need, instead on focusing on self improvement and avoidance of future mistakes.

armand
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