A má consciência na genealogia de Nietzsche: décadence animal e mora

Abstract

This research investigates the concept of bad conscience in On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche, analyzing its development through the internalization of instincts and its subsequent degeneration within Judeo-Christian morality. The study understands bad conscience as a double phenomenon: first, as the adaptation of the animal man to social life, in which vital instincts are turned inward; and later, as a moral decadence, when this internalized energy is captured by priestly morality and transformed into guilt, resentment, and the ascetic ideal. Using a qualitative and hermeneutic methodology, and based mainly on On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) and its main interpreters, the research aims to understand the role of bad conscience in the formation of Western subjectivity and its implications for Nietzsche’s critique of traditional morality. It can be concluded that bad conscience, although resulting from suffering and acting as a life-denying force, plays a decisive role in the formation of interiority. Not as an affirming force of an ascending life, but as that which makes man an 'interesting animal', marked by the depth and complexity that arise from this process of internalization.