Nietzsche can help you overcome Guilt
By: Shikhar Chaudhary
Tags: Life Lessons, Guilt, Learning, Philosophy, Nietzsche

Nietzsche can help you overcome Guilt

and anger and feel free for the first time

Image by Michael Heuser

Ever noticed that you never feel sad or guilty while you are doing an activity, the same activity which makes you sad or guilt-ridden afterwards. When you are shouting with anger, hitting someone, betraying someone, getting drunk to the point of being blacked out or having sex, You do all these activities with the utmost indulgence of mind, yet the guilt comes only after the activity has ended.

“Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.” — German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche

This is because when you do these activities, you are asleep. You have fallen back to being an animal which deprives you of the awareness that you are an intelligent being. That’s why people who do such acts often say, “It just happened, I don’t know why I did that”. It’s only when they wake up afterwards they realize that they had done something that they didn’t want to do.

Why people do things that they regret?

Activities of violence, anger, betrayal, alcoholism and intimacy are enjoyable when they are in progress. At that moment, you feel relief. It’s like the kind of satisfaction one feels after scratching an itch. You’ve just fallen back from the hypothetical bridge and become an animal.

Thus, the relief you feel in anger, violence, alcoholism or sex are all satisfaction of becoming an animal. It is the lightness you feel as the burden of being an intelligent being gets removed for a while.

But isn’t that relief always short-lived? As soon as the effect of anger, violence, sex or violence wears down, you are automatically pulled forward on to the bridge. You become a man from an animal again. This is because evolution is a linear process that moves in one direction only i.e- forward. You can’t grow backwards, you can’t de-age. That’s the rule of nature. Nature allows only forward movement. Even if you stay at a place, time will push you forward to the death like a wall closing in from behind



You can do all those activities for a while only. You can neither be drunk nor be angry for the rest of your life. Reality can’t be avoided for long. You can forget that you’re an intelligent being for a while but it cannot go forever. The illusion shatters very soon.

And once that period of being a beast is over, you’ll be back onto the bridge and then starts the guilt. A man will always find regret waiting for him on the bridge when he comes back from being an animal. Interestingly, all these pleasures can be enjoyed only after becoming an animal, becoming wild and free and human can not be animalistic forever simply because he is no longer an animal. He has evolved to be an intelligent being. As Nietzsche says, He is a bridge between an animal and over-human.

Animals do not suffer from guilt after sex or violence because it is in their very nature to be wild and free but as soon as you put slight intelligence in animal, it becomes guilt-ridden too. This can be noticed in the eyes of a pet dog after he does something that his owner doesn’t like. He becomes aware that he too has fallen backwards, done something which is anti-nature.

What to do when filled with such negative emotions?

If you don’t let out that anger, you’ll be a human with an animal trapped inside. It will then come out someday at the wrong time, at the wrong place and on the wrong person like an unexpected eruption of a volcano. And If you put that anger out, you’ll slip backwards to be an animal.

Man will always be troubled with uneasiness that comes with energies of anger, violence or sex. This is because he is not yet completely away from animalistic self. He is on a bridge filled with ever-present uneasiness. Some with little uneasiness that can be dealt with, some with huge which is hard to live with.

The Only Way to get relief is to either fall backwards and become animalistic for a while (but repercussion is a period of guilt much longer than the period of pleasure) or Rise higher i.e move forward towards over-human. Falling backwards is easier. It doesn’t require much effort. All you need to do is shut your brain and let your animalistic instinct take you where it may.

Whereas rising higher or moving forward is difficult. You have to tame your animalistic self in the right way. Be cautious. Taming doesn’t mean suppression. Any kind of suppression is against nature. Taming means letting it out in the right direction. It means very carefully moulding the clay of your being.

For example, Michelangelo says, ‘Every block of stone has a statue inside and it’s the task of the sculptor to discover it.’ It is said that whenever he used to get filled with anger, he would take it out on a stone and that anger helped him carve out something great every time. He wouldn’t be as famous as he is today if he’d let that anger out before getting to work.

“Civilized life has grown altogether too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting” — Bertrand Russell

Usain Bolt runs, Keanu Reeves acts, I write. Everyone has their own ways to let that anger help them move forward on that bridge. A man with a strong mind will always be attracted towards the right side of the bridge, towards the future and he will always fall forward, thus not letting guilt subjugate his mind. Of course, he will still occasionally fall back because one can’t speed up the process of evolution but he’ll be much farther away from people falling backwards regularly and wasting their life.

A man will always find himself when he chooses to move forward.