What Becomes of Blame?
Human, All Too Human — Essential Reading Path · Reading 3 of 10
Read: Volume I, §39, then §107 (1878). Read each in full, stopping before §40 and §108 respectively.
Allow: About 60–80 minutes, including the passages, this guide, rereading, and a short written response.
Preferred translation: R. J. Hollingdale. Free alternatives: I §39 · I §107 (Helen Zimmern).
I means Volume I; AOM means Assorted Opinions and Maxims (called Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions in the free edition); WS means The Wanderer and His Shadow. Numbers restart in each collection. The numbered 1886 prefaces are separate texts. If highlighting fails, use the collection and numbered heading.
Before you read
You break a promise and leave someone in difficulty. You can identify what happened, acknowledge the damage, and ask how to repair it. You can also reach a further judgment: you deserve to suffer because, at the decisive moment, you could have made yourself act otherwise.
Nietzsche’s challenge reaches that further judgment. It also reaches the satisfaction of believing that your best action proves a goodness for which you deserve ultimate credit. The price of innocence will include losing a familiar source of pride.
Reading 2 examined competing attachments within a person. Here Nietzsche asks whether those attachments, the character they form, and the actions they produce could have been otherwise under exactly the conditions that produced them.
The main question: If a person’s actions and character arise necessarily from prior conditions, what becomes of deserving blame or praise?
Read Human, All Too Human, Volume I, §§39 and 107 in full. The first attacks the foundation of responsibility; the second follows the emotional loss and possible transformation that attack brings.
Three things to notice
- The retreat into the person. In I §39, follow the movement from consequences through actions and motives to character. Why does each supposed foundation fail?
- The argument from guilt. Identify what Schopenhauer, as Nietzsche presents him, infers from remorse. Why does Nietzsche reject the inference?
- The changing meaning of liberation. In I §107, notice the loss of merit, the butterfly image, and the long timescale. How could knowledge transform people if knowledge itself is necessary?
A way to read the passages
How moral judgment moves inward
Volume I, §39 opens with a proposed history of the feelings through which people assign responsibility. Initially, actions receive approval or condemnation because of their consequences for the community. Their usefulness or harmfulness supplies the distinction. Volume I, §39
The origin of that distinction is then forgotten. Goodness or badness appears to belong to the action itself. Judgment subsequently moves into the motive: outwardly similar actions can express different intentions. Finally, the motive is explained through the whole nature of the person, who becomes the bearer of moral worth.
Imagine someone publicly correcting an error. We might first approve because the correction prevents harm. We might then call correcting errors good in itself, ask whether this correction arose from honesty or malice, and finally judge its author an honest or malicious person.
The example makes the stages intelligible. It does not establish Nietzsche’s sequence as actual universal history. His account directs attention to a recurring movement: when one location of moral value becomes questionable, judgment seeks a deeper foundation within the agent.
Character cannot provide the final stopping point
Nietzsche then denies that character can bear the weight placed upon it. A person’s nature is itself a necessary result of past and present conditions. Moving responsibility inward therefore postpones the difficulty. What made the person who formed this motive?
His claim goes beyond saying that upbringing influences choices. He says the resulting nature, motives, actions, and effects are necessary. Given the full conditions that produce them, there is no independent power that could originate a different outcome.
The corresponding target is ultimate responsibility: being the final source of an action in a way that makes praise or blame deserved. If your action follows necessarily from your character, and that character follows necessarily from conditions you did not originate, Nietzsche denies that either can ground such desert.
Do not weaken this into a request to consider mitigating circumstances. He concludes that nobody is responsible for their nature or actions and that moral condemnation is unjust. Nor should his confidence count as proof: the aphorism asserts its comprehensive necessity much more decisively than it establishes it.
Schopenhauer relocates freedom before action
The middle of I §39 turns to Schopenhauer. Follow the argument as Nietzsche presents it here. Schopenhauer accepts that actions occur necessarily, but wants to preserve the significance of guilt. He therefore places freedom in what a person is, rather than in particular things the person does.
The Latin terms mark this distinction: esse means being; operari means acting. Actions follow from character under causality. Character supposedly expresses a free willing beyond that causal sequence. Responsibility attaches to this deeper being.
This is not the ordinary claim that a teenager chose habits that later became hard to break. Nietzsche describes a will anterior to the person’s existence, a supposedly intelligible freedom that grounds what the person is. Moving a choice earlier within someone’s biography would simply invite another question about its causes.
The proposed evidence is remorse: if people feel guilt, there must be a genuine responsibility for that feeling to register. Nietzsche attacks precisely this passage from the existence of a feeling to its entitlement.
A feeling does not certify its own judgment
Someone can experience guilt because they believe they were free to act otherwise. That belief could explain the feeling even if it were false. Schopenhauer’s inference, Nietzsche argues, treats the feeling’s reasonable justification as already established.
Nietzsche also points to variation. People experience remorse over different actions, and some feel none where others suffer intensely. Conscience changes with customs and culture; habits of guilty feeling can be broken. These observations support an explanation through learned expectations rather than an appeal to a freedom outside causality.
Consider someone who feels ashamed for resting because they were taught that constant work proves worth. The shame is real. Its reality does not establish the rule’s validity. Guilt and shame are not identical feelings, but the example illustrates the inferential error Nietzsche identifies.
His conclusion is more radical than this example alone warrants. He regards remorse about a supposedly avoidable act as unreasonable because he has already denied that the act could have failed to follow. The critique of the feeling’s authority and the thesis of universal necessity are distinct parts of his argument.
Innocence initially feels like a loss
Volume I, §107 begins with bitterness. Someone who located human nobility in responsibility loses a central source of value. The consequences extend to feelings for the sufferer and the hero, and to the proud satisfaction of having done what duty required. Volume I, §107
Nietzsche removes merit along with blame. You cannot reserve an exemption for the acts that make you pleased with yourself. If necessity rules throughout, admirable conduct belongs to it as completely as cruelty does.
He nevertheless distinguishes admiration from awarding merit. You can appreciate the beauty of an artwork or a plant without supposing it earned its qualities through an ultimately free choice. Likewise, strength, beauty, and abundance remain available for admiration in human beings.
That distinction opens a possibility for joy after guilt, but it also makes the loss concrete. Admiring an achievement and believing its maker deserves moral credit are different relations to it. Nietzsche asks what happens when the second loses its foundation.
The strongest motive decides
Nietzsche describes conflicting impulses that end when the strongest motive determines the outcome. Our familiar description says we finally decide for it. His description says it decides for us. The grammatical reversal removes a separate chooser standing above the struggle.
He then makes an additional, sweeping psychological claim: good and evil actions differ in degree rather than kind, and both grow from the individual’s pursuit of gratification and fear of losing it. Vanity, revenge, sacrifice, pity, and knowledge belong to this shared field.
This develops Reading 2’s account of divided attachments, but extends its reach. Different powers of judgment and changing scales of valued things direct the common striving toward different outcomes. Acts condemned as evil may instead reveal limited understanding.
He also turns this judgment against the present: future intelligence will, he expects, recognize our own actions as limited and hasty. His reader has no permanent exemption from the ignorance being diagnosed.
The extension needs scrutiny. Necessary causation does not by itself prove that every motive has self-gratification as its root. Nor does naming the victorious motive the strongest independently explain why it won. The aphorism joins causal and psychological claims that we should assess separately.
Necessity includes the causes of change
If everything is necessary, why read, learn, deliberate, or try to change? Nietzsche explicitly includes the new knowledge itself within necessity. Understanding is another event in the causal world, capable of changing subsequent habits and judgments.
Return to the broken promise. Recognizing how overcommitment, fear of disappointing others, and poor planning produced it could affect what happens next. A reminder, an honest conversation, or a changed arrangement becomes part of the new conditions. Necessary causation does not mean the result will remain the same whatever conditions change.
This distinguishes necessity from fatalism understood as the view that an outcome will occur regardless of what anyone does. In Nietzsche’s account, what people do belongs among the causes. Deliberation can matter without being an escape from causality.
Pause here: Explain how a lesson learned from a harmful action could change future conduct without making the earlier action freely avoidable under exactly its original conditions.
The hoped-for transformation remains difficult
I §107 turns from bitterness to an image of birth: the butterfly tears its way out of its chrysalis and finds the new light confusing. The freedom suggested here is release from an inherited interpretation of oneself. It does not restore the power to stand outside necessity.
Nietzsche imagines humanity becoming wise in place of moral. Understanding would gradually weaken habits of moral love and hatred. His prospect includes greater distance from the attachments through which we now judge, not simply warmer forgiveness toward everyone.
The future is remote: he speaks of thousands of years and says the new habit may eventually become powerful enough. Conscious innocence would emerge through the very guilt, error, vanity, and egoism that inquiry has exposed. Recognizing their role in development changes the temptation to despise the entire past.
Yet his confidence that moral development streams toward one goal exceeds this cautious timescale. The aphorism offers a hopeful interpretation of history without demonstrating its destination. Its comparison with peoples it treats as primitive also carries a hierarchy that historical inquiry should question. The promising end is part of Nietzsche’s proposal, not a result the reader must grant.
A difficulty to keep in view
Does abandoning ultimate desert require abandoning accountability?
We use responsibility for several things: identifying who caused harm, requiring an explanation, assigning a duty to repair damage, and claiming that someone ultimately deserves suffering. Nietzsche’s rejection most directly attacks the last foundation, while his language also challenges established practices of praise and blame broadly.
A contemporary response might retain accountability for reasons concerning protection, repair, trust, and future conduct. In the broken-promise example, understanding the causes does not itself restore the other person’s lost time. An explanation can coexist with a demand to address what happened.
Those distinctions help us assess the argument; these aphorisms do not supply a modern policy of punishment or restorative justice. We must ask which responses survive Nietzsche’s criticism and what would justify them. Simply renaming punishment accountability would leave its purpose unexamined.
A further objection challenges his conception of freedom. Perhaps acting from one’s own considered reasons, without coercion, is enough for responsibility even when those reasons have causes. This is a compatibilist possibility: freedom and causation might coexist. Nietzsche has not refuted every such account by showing that character has a history.
The pressure of his question remains: why should those capacities warrant ultimate desert, rather than distinguish ways of acting that matter for our relationships and responses? Keep that dispute open without turning his complete denial into an ordinary recommendation to be less judgmental.
Check your understanding
Try answering before opening each suggested response.
Why does moving responsibility from an action to character fail for Nietzsche?
Character itself necessarily results from past and present conditions. It cannot become an independent origin simply because judgment has moved inward. The same causal question applies to the person as to the motive and action.
What is wrong with inferring freedom from remorse?
The inference assumes that the feeling must be justified. Nietzsche argues that belief in freedom can produce remorse without freedom being real. Customs and learned habits help explain why guilt occurs and why its objects vary.
What does I §107 remove besides blame?
It removes ultimate moral merit and the pride grounded in deserving it. Admiration for qualities and achievements remains possible. Nietzsche compares this appreciation to enjoying an artwork or plant without assigning it responsibility for its qualities.
Why need necessity not make learning pointless?
Learning can change the conditions from which later actions follow. Knowledge, reflection, and altered habits belong within causality. Nietzsche’s proposed transformation depends on their effects, without treating them as freely originating outside the causal world.
Does Nietzsche establish a particular system of accountability here?
No. His attack makes the justification of our responses urgent, but these aphorisms do not settle institutional policy. Distinguishing repair and protection from ultimate desert helps formulate the remaining questions; it should not be attributed to him as a complete program.
What should I write in my notes?
Use a modest example of a broken commitment, real or invented. Write 180–250 words:
- Describe the action, its effects, and one judgment of character it invites.
- Explain how I §39 challenges that judgment’s claim to ultimate responsibility.
- Identify what someone might lose emotionally by accepting the challenge, using I §107.
- Propose one response concerned with repair or future conduct. Explain its purpose without appealing to deserved suffering.
- State one unresolved objection to Nietzsche’s argument.
A successful response distinguishes causes, feelings, and justifications. It explains how change could matter within necessity and acknowledges that the proposed practical response is your own.
Continue the reading
Reading 4: Can We Live Without Consoling Illusions? →
The next session reads Volume I, §§108 and 110, and Assorted Opinions and Maxims, §1. The last passage belongs to the separate 1879 collection; its numbering starts again.
Carry this question forward: If an inherited belief gives suffering meaning, does exposing its error require giving up its consolation—and has Nietzsche’s promise of future innocence supplied a new consolation of his own?