_____________________________________________________
Friedrich Nietzsche
On the Genealogy of
Morals
A Polemical Tract
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SECOND ESSAY
GUILT, BAD CONSCIENCE, AND RELATED MATTERS
1
To breed an
animal that is entitled to make promises—is that not precisely the
paradoxical task nature has set itself where human beings are concerned? Isn’t
that the real problem of human beings? . . . The fact that
this problem has to a great extent been solved must seem all the more astonishing
to a person who knows how to appreciate fully the power which works against
this promise-making, namely forgetfulness.
Forgetfulness is not merely a vis
interiae [a force of inertia], as
superficial people think. Is it much rather an active capability to repress,
something positive in the strongest sense, to which we can ascribe the fact
that while we are digesting what we alone live through and experience and
absorb into ourselves (we could call the process mental ingestion [Einverseelung]), we are conscious of what is going on as little as we are with the entire
thousand-fold process which our bodily nourishment goes through (so-called
physical ingestion [Einverleibung]). The
doors and windows of consciousness are shut temporarily; they remain
undisturbed by the noise and struggle with which the underworld of our
functional organs keeps working for and against one another; a little
stillness, a little tabula rasa [blank slate] of the consciousness,
so that there will again be room for something new, above all, for the nobler
functions and officials, for ruling, thinking ahead, determining what to do
(for our organism is arranged as an oligarchy)—that is, as I said, the use of
active forgetfulness, a porter at the door, so to speak, a custodian of psychic
order, quiet, etiquette. From that we can see at once how, if
forgetfulness were not present, there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no
hoping, no pride, no present. The man in whom this repression apparatus
is harmed and not working properly we can compare to a dyspeptic (and not just
compare)—he is “finished” with nothing. . . . Now, this particular animal,
which is necessarily forgetful, in which forgetfulness is present as a force,
as a form of strong health, has had an opposing capability
bred into it, a memory, with the help of which, in certain cases, forgetfulness
will cease to function—that is, for those cases where promises are to be made.
This is in no way a merely passive inability ever to be rid of an impression
once it has been etched into the mind, nor is it merely indigestion over a word
one has pledged at a particular time and which one can no longer be
over and done with. No, it’s an active wish not to be free of
the matter again, an ongoing and continuing desire for what one willed at a
particular time, a real memory of one’s will, so that between the
original “I will,” “I will do,” and the actual discharge of the will, its action,
a world of strange new things, circumstances, even acts of the will
can be interposed without a second thought and not break this long chain of the
will. But how much all that presupposes! In order to organize the future in
this manner, human beings must have first learned to separate necessary events
from chance events, to think in terms of cause and effect, to see distant
events as if they were present, to anticipate them, to set goals and the means
to reach them with certainty, to develop a capability for figures and calculations
in general—and for that to occur, a human being must necessarily have
first himself become something one could predict, something bound by
regular rules, even in the way he imagined himself to himself, so that
finally he is able to act like someone who makes promises—he can make himself
into a pledge for the future!
2
Precisely that
development is the long history of the origin of responsibility.
That task of breeding an animal which is permitted to make promises contains
within it, as we have already grasped, as a condition and prerequisite, the
more precise task of first making a human being necessarily uniform
to some extent, one among others like him, regular and consequently
predictable. The immense task involved in this, what I have called the
“morality of custom” (cf. Daybreak 9, 14, 16)—the essential
work of a man on his own self in the longest-lasting age of the human race, his
entire pre-historical work, derives its meaning, its grand
justification, from the following point, no matter how much hardship, tyranny,
monotony, and idiocy it also manifested: with the help of the morality of
custom and the social strait jacket, the human being was made truly
predictable. Let’s position ourselves, by contrast, at the end of this immense
process, in the place where the tree at last yields its fruit, where society
and the morality of custom finally bring to light the end for which they were simply the means:
then we find, as the ripest fruit on that tree, the sovereign individual, something which resembles only itself, which
has broken loose again from the morality of custom, the autonomous individual beyond
morality (for “autonomous” and “moral” are mutually exclusive terms), in short,
the human being who possesses his own independent and enduring will, who is entitled
to make promises—and in him a consciousness quivering in every muscle, proud
of what has finally been achieved and
has become a living embodiment in him, a real consciousness of power and
freedom, a feeling of completion for human beings generally. This man who has become
free, who really is entitled to make promises, this master of free will,
this sovereign—how is he not to realize the superiority he enjoys over
everything which is not permitted to make a promise and make pledges on its own
behalf, knowing how much trust, how much fear, and how much respect he
creates—he “is worthy” of all three—and how, with this mastery over
himself, he has necessarily been given in addition mastery over his circumstances,
over nature, and over all less reliable creatures with a shorter will? The
“free” man, the owner of an enduring unbreakable will, by possessing this, also
acquires his own standard of value: he looks out from himself at
others and confers respect or contempt. And just as it will be necessary for
him to honour those like him, the strong and dependable (who are entitled to
make promises)—in other words, everyone who makes promises like a sovereign,
seriously, rarely, and slowly, who is sparing with his trust, who honours another
when he does trust, who gives his word as something reliable, because he knows
he is strong enough to remain upright even when opposed by misfortune, even
when “opposed by fate”—in just the same way it will be necessary for him to
keep his foot ready to kick the scrawny unreliable men, who make promises
without being entitled to, and to hold his cane ready for the liar, who breaks
his word in the very moment it comes out of his mouth. The proud knowledge of
the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of
this rare freedom, of this power over oneself and destiny, has become internalized
into the deepest parts of him and grown instinctual, has become an instinct, a
dominating instinct:—what will he call it, this dominating instinct, assuming
that he finds he needs a word for it? There’s no doubt: the sovereign man calls
this instinct his conscience.
3
His conscience? . . . To begin with, we can conjecture that the
idea “conscience,” which we are encountering here in its highest, almost
perplexing form, has a long history and changing developmental process behind
it already. To be entitled to pledge one’s word, and to do it with pride, and
also to be permitted to say “Yes” to oneself—that
is a ripe fruit, as I have mentioned, but it is also a late fruit:—for
what a long stretch of time this fruit must have hung tart and sour on the
tree! And for an even much longer time it was impossible to see any such
fruit—no one could have promised it would appear, even if everything about the
tree was certainly getting ready for it and growing in that very
direction!—“How does one create a memory for the human animal? How does one
stamp something like that into this partly dull, partly flickering, momentary
understanding, this living embodiment of forgetfulness, so that it stays
current?” . . . This ancient problem, as you can imagine, was not
resolved right away with tender answers and methods. Indeed, there is perhaps
nothing more fearful and more terrible in the entire prehistory of human beings
than the technique for developing his memory. “We burn something in
so that it remains in the memory. Only something which never ceases to
cause pain remains in the memory”—that is a leading principle of the
most ancient (unfortunately also the longest) psychology on earth. We might
even say that everywhere on earth nowadays where there is still solemnity, seriousness,
mystery, and gloomy colours in the lives of men and people, something of that
terror continues its work, the fear with which in earlier times
everywhere on earth people made promises, pledged their word, made a vow. The
past, the longest, deepest, most severe past, breathes on us and surfaces in us
when we become “solemn.” When the human being considered it necessary to make a
memory for himself, it never happened without blood, martyrs, and sacrifices,
the most terrible sacrifices and pledges (among them the sacrifice of the first
born), the most repulsive self-mutilations (for example, castration), the
cruellest forms of ritual in all the religious cults (and all religions are in
their deepest foundations systems of cruelty)—all that originates in that
instinct which discovered in pain the most powerful means of helping to develop
the memory. In a certain sense all asceticism belongs here: a couple of ideas
are to be made indissoluble, omnipresent, unforgettable, “fixed,” in order to
hypnotize the entire nervous and intellectual system through these “fixed
ideas”—and the ascetic procedures and forms of life are the means whereby these
ideas are freed from jostling around with all the other ideas, in order to make
them “unforgettable.” The worse humanity’s “memory” was, the more terrible its
customs have always appeared. The harshness of the laws of punishment, in
particular, provide a standard for measuring how much trouble people went to in
order to triumph over forgetfulness and to maintain a present awareness of
a few primitive demands of social living together for this slave of momentary
feelings and desires. We Germans certainly do not think of ourselves as an
especially cruel and hard-hearted people, even less as particularly careless
people who live only in the present. But just take a look at our old penal code
in order to understand how much trouble it takes on this earth to breed a
“People of Thinkers” (by that I mean the European people among
whom today we still find a maximum of trust, seriousness, tastelessness, and
practicality, and who, with these characteristics, have a right to breed all
sorts of European mandarins). These Germans have used terrible means to make
themselves a memory in order to attain mastery over their vulgar basic instincts
and their brutal crudity: think of the old German punishments, for example,
stoning (—the legend even lets the mill stone fall on the head of the guilty
person), breaking on the wheel (the most characteristic invention and specialty
of the German genius in the realm of punishment!), impaling on a stake, ripping
people apart or stamping them to death with horses (“quartering”), boiling the
criminal in oil or wine (still done in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries),
the well-loved practice of flaying (“cutting flesh off in strips”), carving
flesh out of the chest, and probably covering the offender with honey and
leaving him to the flies in the burning sun. With the help of such images and
procedures people finally retained five or six “I will not’s” in the memory,
and, so far as these precepts were concerned, they gave their word in
order to live with the advantages of society—and it’s true! With the assistance
of this sort of memory people finally came to “reason”!—Ah, reason, seriousness,
mastery over emotions, this whole gloomy business called reflection, all these
privileges and showpieces of human beings: how expensive they were! How much
blood and horror is at the bottom of all “good things”! . . .
4
But then how
did that other “gloomy business,” the consciousness of guilt, the whole “bad conscience”
come into the world?—And with this we turn back to our
genealogists of morality. I’ll say it once more—or have I not said anything
about it yet?—they are useless. With their own merely “modern” experience
extending through only a brief period [fünf Spannen lange], with no knowledge
of and no desire to know the past, even less a historical instinct, a “second
sight”— something necessary at this very point—they nonetheless pursue the
history of morality. That must justifiably produce results which have a less
than tenuous relationship to the truth. Have these genealogists of morality up
to now allowed themselves to dream, even remotely, that, for instance, that
major moral principle “guilt” [Schuld] derived
its origin from the very materialistic idea “debt” [Schulden]?
Or that punishment developed as a repayment, completely without
reference to any assumption about freedom or lack of freedom of the will?—and
did so, by contrast, to the point where it always first required a high degree
of human development so that the animal “man” began to make those much more
primitive distinctions between “intentional,” “negligent,” “accidental,”
“responsible,” and their opposites and bring them to bear when meting out
punishment? That idea, nowadays so trite, apparently so natural, so
unavoidable, which has even had to serve as the explanation how the feeling of
justice in general came into existence on earth, “The criminal deserves
punishment because he could have acted otherwise,” this idea
is, in fact, an extremely late achievement, indeed, a sophisticated form of
human judgment and decision making. Anyone who moves this idea back to the
beginnings is sticking his coarse fingers inappropriately into the psychology
of older humanity. For the most extensive period of human history, punishment
was certainly not meted out
because people held the instigator of evil responsible for his actions, and
thus it was not assumed that only the guilty party should be
punished:—it was much more as it still is now when parents punish their
children out of anger over some harm they have suffered, anger vented on the
perpetrator—but anger restrained and modified through the idea that every injury
has some equivalent and that compensation for it could, in
fact, be paid out, even if that is through the pain of the
perpetrator. Where did this primitive, deeply rooted, and perhaps by now
ineradicable idea derive its power, the idea of an equivalence
between punishment and pain? I have already given away the answer: in the
contractual relationship between creditor
and debtor, which is, in general, as ancient as the idea of “legal
subject” and which, for its part, refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling,
bartering, trading, and exchanging goods.
5
It’s true that
recalling this contractual relationship arouses, as we might initially expect
from what I have observed above, all sorts of suspicion of and opposition to
older humanity, which established or allowed it. It’s at this particular moment
that people make promises. At this very point the pertinent issue
is to create a memory for the person who makes a promise, so
that precisely here, we can surmise, there will exist
a place for harshness, cruelty, and pain. In order to inspire trust in his
promise to pay back, in order to give his promise a guarantee of its seriousness
and sanctity, in order to impress on his own conscience the idea of paying back
as a duty, an obligation, the debtor, by virtue of a contract, pledges to the
creditor, in the event that he does not pay, something else that he still
“owns,” something else over which he still exercises power, for example, his
body or his woman or his freedom or even his life (or, under certain religious
conditions, even his blessedness, the salvation of his soul, finally even his
peace in the grave, as was the case in Egypt, where the dead body of the debtor
even in the tomb found no peace from the creditor—and among the Egyptians, in
particular, such peace certainly mattered). That means that the creditor could
inflict all kinds of ignominy and torture on the body of the debtor, for instance,
slice off the body as much as seemed appropriate for the size of the debt:—and
this point of view early on and everywhere gave rise to precise, sometimes
horrific estimates going into the smallest detail, legally established
estimates about individual limbs and body parts. I consider it already a step
forward, as evidence of a freer conception of the law, something which
calculates more grandly, a more Roman idea of justice, when
Rome’s Twelve Tables of Laws decreed it was all the same, no matter how much or
how little the creditor cut off in such cases: “let it not be
thought a crime if they cut off more or less.”1 Let us clarify for
ourselves the logic of this whole method of compensation—it is weird enough.
The equivalency is given in this way: instead of an advantage making up
directly for the harm (hence, instead of compensation in gold, land,
possessions of some sort or another), the creditor is given a kind of pleasure as
repayment and compensation—the pleasure of being allowed to discharge his power
on a powerless person without having to think about it, the delight in “de
fair le mal pour le plaisir de le faire” [doing wrong
for the pleasure of doing it], the enjoyment of violation. This enjoyment
is more highly prized the lower and baser the creditor stands in the social
order, and it can easily seem to him a delicious mouthful, in fact, a foretaste
of a higher rank. By means of the “punishment” of the debtor, the creditor
participates in a right belonging to the masters. Finally he also
for once comes to the lofty feeling of despising a being as someone “beneath
him,” as someone he is entitled to mistreat—or at least, in the event that the
real force of punishment, of executing punishment, has already been transferred
to the “authorities,” the feeling of seeing the debtor despised
and mistreated. The compensation thus consists of an order for and a right to
cruelty.
6
In this area,
that is, in the laws of obligation, the world of the moral concepts “guilt,”
“conscience,” “duty,” and “sanctity of obligation” has its origin—its beginning,
like the beginning of everything great on earth, was watered thoroughly and for
a long time with blood. And can we not add that this world deep down has never
again been completely free of a certain smell of blood and torture—(not even
with old Kant whose categorical imperative stinks of cruelty)? In addition,
here that weird knot linking the ideas of “guilt and suffering,” which perhaps
has become impossible to undo, was first knit together. Let me pose the
question once more: to what extent can suffering be a compensation for “debts”?
To the extent that making someone suffer
provides the highest degree of pleasure, to the extent that the person hurt by
the debt, in exchange for the injury as well as for the distress caused by the
injury, got an extraordinary offsetting pleasure: creating suffering—a
real celebration, something that, as
I’ve said, was valued all the more, the greater it contradicted the rank and
social position of the creditor. I have been speculating here, for it’s
difficult to see through to the foundations of such subterranean things, quite
apart from the fact that it’s embarrassing. And anyone who crudely throws into
the middle of all this the idea of “revenge” has
buried and dimmed his insights rather than illuminated them (—revenge itself,
in fact, simply takes us back to the same problem: “How can making someone
suffer give us a feeling of satisfaction?”). It seems to me that the delicacy
and, even more, the Tartufferie [hypocrisy] of
tame house pets (I mean modern man, I mean us) resist imagining with all our
power how much cruelty contributes to the great celebratory
joy of older humanity, as, in fact, an ingredient mixed into almost all their
enjoyments and, from another perspective, how naive, how innocent, their need
for cruelty appears, how they fundamentally think of its particular
“disinterested malice” (or to use Spinoza’s words, the sympathia
malevolens [malevolent sympathy]) as a normal
human characteristic:—and hence as something to which their
conscience says a heartfelt Yes!2 A more deeply
penetrating eye might still notice, even today, enough of this most ancient and
most fundamental celebratory human joy. In Beyond Good and Evil,
229 (even earlier in Daybreak, 18, 77, 113), I pointed a cautious
finger at the constantly growing spiritualization and “deification” of cruelty,
which runs through the entire history of higher culture (and, in a significant
sense, even constitutes that culture). In any case, it’s not so long ago that
people wouldn’t think of an aristocratic wedding and folk festival in the
grandest style without executions, tortures, or something like an auto-da-fé [burning at the stake],
and similarly no noble household lacked creatures on whom people could vent
their malice and cruel taunts without a second thought (—remember, for instance,
Don Quixote at the court of the duchess; today we read all of Don
Quixote with a bitter taste on the tongue; it’s almost an ordeal. In
so doing, we would become very foreign, very obscure to the author and his
contemporaries—they read it with a fully clear conscience as the most cheerful
of books. They almost died laughing at it). Watching suffering makes people
feel good; creating suffering makes them feel even better—that’s a harsh
principle, but an old, powerful, and human, all-too-human major principle,
which, by the way, even the apes might perhaps agree with as well. For people
say that, in thinking up bizarre cruelties, the apes already anticipate a great
many human actions and are, as it were, an “audition.” Without cruelty there is
no celebration: that’s what the oldest and longest human history teaches us—and
with punishment, too, there is so much celebration!
7
With these
ideas, by the way, I have no desire whatsoever to give our pessimists grist for
their discordant mills grating with weariness of life. On the contrary, I want
to state very clearly that in that period when human beings had not yet become
ashamed of their cruelty, life on earth was happier than it is today, now that
we have our pessimists. The darkening of heaven over men’s heads has always
increased alarmingly in proportion to the growth of human beings’ shame before
human beings. The tired, pessimistic look, the mistrust of the riddle of
life, the icy denial stemming from disgust with life—these are not the signs of
the wickedest eras of human beings. It’s much more the case
that they first come to light as the swamp plants they are when the swamp to
which they belong is there—I mean the sickly mollycoddling and moralizing,
thanks to which the animal “man” finally learns to feel shame about all his instincts.
On his way to becoming an “angel” (not to use a harsher word here), man
cultivated for himself that upset stomach and that furry tongue which not only
made the joy and innocence of the animal repulsive but also made life itself
distasteful:—so that now and then he stands there before himself, holds his
nose, and with Pope Innocent III disapproves and makes a catalogue of his
nastiness (“conceived in filth, disgustingly nourished in his mother’s body,
developed out of evil material stuff, stinking horribly, a secretion
of spit, urine, and excrement”).3 Now, when suffering
always has to march out as the first among the arguments against existence,
as its most serious question mark, it’s good for us to remember the times when
people judged things the other way around, because they couldn’t do without making people
suffer and saw a first-class magic in it, a really tempting enticement for living. Perhaps,
and let me say this as a consolation for the delicate, at that time pain did
not yet hurt as much as it does nowadays. That at least could be the conclusion
of a doctor who had treated a Negro (taking the latter as a representative of
pre-historical man) for a bad case of inner inflammation, which drives the
European, even one with the best constitution, almost to despair, but which
does not have the same effect on the Negro. (The graph of the
human sensitivity to pain seems in fact to sink down remarkably and almost
immediately after one has moved beyond the first ten thousand or ten million of
the top members of the higher culture. And I personally have no doubt that, in
comparison with one painful night of a single hysterical well-educated female,
the total suffering of all animals which up to now have been interrogated by
the knife in search of scientific answers is simply not worth considering).
Perhaps it is even permissible to concede the possibility that that pleasure in
cruelty does not really need to have died out. It would only require a certain
sublimation and subtlety, in proportion to the way pain hurts more nowadays; in
other words, it would have to appear translated into the imaginative and
spiritual and embellished with nothing but names so unobjectionable that they
arouse no suspicion in even the most delicate hypocritical conscience (“tragic
pity” is one such name; another is “les nostalgies de la croix” [nostalgias
for the cross]). What truly enrages people about suffering is not the
suffering itself, but the meaninglessness of suffering. But neither for the
Christian, who has interpreted into suffering an entire secret machinery for
salvation, nor for the naive men of older times, who understood how to
interpret all suffering in relation to the spectator or to the person
inflicting the suffering, was there generally any such meaningless suffering.
In order for the hidden, undiscovered, unwitnessed
suffering to be removed from the world and for people to be able to deny it honestly,
they were then almost compelled to invent gods and intermediate beings at all
levels, high and low—briefly put, something that also roamed in hidden places,
that also looked into the darkness, and that would not readily permit an
interesting painful spectacle to escape its attention. For
with the help of such inventions life then understood and has always understood
how to justify itself by a trick, how to justify its “evil.” Nowadays
perhaps it requires other helpful inventions for that purpose (for example,
life as riddle, life as a problem of knowledge). “Every evil a glimpse of which
edifies a god is justified”: that’s how the pre-historical logic of feeling
rang out—and was that really confined only to prehistory? The gods conceived of
as friends of cruel spectacle—O how widely this primitive idea
still rises up even within our European humanity! We might well seek advice
from, say, Calvin and Luther on this point. At any rate it is certain that even
the Greeks knew of no more acceptable snack to offer their
gods to make them happy than the joys of cruelty. With what sort of expression,
do you think, did Homer allow his gods to look down on the fates of men? What
final sense was there basically in the Trojan War and similar tragic terrors?
We cannot entertain the slightest doubts about this: they were intended as celebrations for
the gods: and, to the extent that the poet is in these matters more “godlike”
than other men, as festivals for the poets as well. . . . Later the Greek moral
philosophers in the same way imagined the eyes of god no differently, still
looking down on the moral struggles, on heroism and the self-mutilation of the
virtuous: the “Hercules of duty” was on a stage, and he knew he was there.
Without someone watching, virtue for this race of actors was something entirely
inconceivable. Surely such a daring and fateful philosophical invention, first
made for Europe at that time, the invention of the “free will,” of the
absolutely spontaneous nature of human beings in matters of good and evil, was
created above all to justify the idea that the interest of gods in men, in
human virtue, could never run out? On this earthly stage there was
never to be any lack of really new things, really unheard of suspense,
complications, and catastrophes. A world conceived of as perfectly
deterministic would have been predictable to the gods and therefore also soon
boring for them—reason enough for these friends of the gods, the philosophers,
not to ascribe such a deterministic world to their gods! All of ancient humanity
is full of sensitive consideration for “the spectator,” for a truly public,
truly visible world, which did not know how to imagine happiness without
dramatic performances and festivals. And, as I have already said, in great punishment there
is also so much celebration!
8
To resume the
path of our enquiry, the feeling of guilt, of personal obligation has, as we
saw, its origin in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship there
is, in the relationship between seller and buyer, creditor and debtor. Here for
the first time one person moved up against another person, here an individual measured
himself against another individual. We have found no civilization
still at such a low level that something of this relationship is not already
perceptible. To set prices, to measure values, to think up equivalencies, to
exchange things—that preoccupied man’s very first thinking to such a degree
that in a certain sense it’s what thinking itself is. Here the
oldest form of astuteness was bred; here, too, we can assume are the first
beginnings of man’s pride, his feeling of pre-eminence in relation to other animals.
Perhaps our word “man” (manas) continues to
express directly something of this feeling of the self: the
human being describes himself as a being which assesses values, which values
and measures, as the “inherently calculating animal.” Selling and buying,
together with their psychological attributes, are even older than the beginnings
of any form of social organizations and groupings; out of the most rudimentary
form of personal legal rights the budding feeling of exchange, contract, guilt,
law, duty, and compensation was instead first transferred to
the crudest and earliest social structures (in their relationships with similar
social structures), along with the habit of comparing power with power, of
measuring, of calculating. The eye was now adjusted to this perspective, and
with that awkward consistency characteristic of thinking in more ancient human
beings, hard to get started but then inexorably moving forward in the same
direction, people soon reached the great generalization: “Each thing has its
price, everything can be paid off”—the oldest and most naive
moral principle of justice, the beginning of all “good nature,” all
“fairness,” all “good will,” all “objectivity” on earth. Justice at this first
stage is good will among those approximately equal in power to come to terms
with each other, to “come to an agreement” again with each other by compensation—and
in relation to those less powerful, to compel them to arrive at
some settlement among themselves.—
9
Always measured
by the standard of prehistory (a prehistory which, by the way, is present at
all times or is capable of returning), the community also stands in relation to
its members in that important basic relationship of the creditor to his debtor.
People live in a community. They enjoy the advantages of a community (and what
advantages they are! Nowadays we sometimes underestimate them); they live
protected, cared for, in peace and trust, without worries concerning certain
injuries and enmities from which the man outside the
community, the “man without peace,” is excluded—a German understands what
“misery” [Elend] or êlend [other country] originally means—and how
people pledged themselves to and entered into obligations with the community
bearing in mind precisely these injuries and enmities. What will happen
with an exception to this case? The community, the defrauded
creditor, will see that it gets paid as well as it can—on that people can rely.
The issue here is least of all the immediate damage which the offender has
caused. Setting this to one side, the lawbreaker [Verbrecher] is
above all a “breaker” [Brecher] all a “breaker” [Brecher],
a breaker of contracts and a breaker of his word against the totality, with respect to all the good features
and advantages of the communal life in which, up to that point, he has had a
share. The lawbreaker is a debtor who does not merely not
pay back the benefits and advances given to him, but who even attacks his
creditor. So from this point on not only does he forfeit, as is reasonable, all
these good things and benefits—but he is also now reminded what these good things are all about. The anger of the injured
creditor, the community, gives him back again to the wild outlawed condition,
from which he was earlier protected. It pushes him away from itself—and now
every form of hostility can vent itself on him. At this stage of cultural behaviour
“punishment” is simply the copy, the mimus,
of the normal conduct towards the hated, disarmed enemy who has been
thrown down, who has forfeited not only all legal rights and protection but
also all mercy; hence it is a case of the rights of war and the victory celebration
of vae victis [woe
to the conquered] in all its ruthlessness and cruelty:—which accounts
for the fact that war itself (including the warlike cult of sacrifice) has
given us all the forms in which punishment has appeared in history.
10
As it acquires
more power, a community no longer considers the crimes of the single individual
so serious, because it no longer is entitled to consider him as dangerous and
unsettling for the existence of the totality as much as it did before. The
wrongdoer is no longer “outlawed” and thrown out, and the common anger is no
longer permitted to vent itself on him without restraint to the same extent as
earlier— instead the wrongdoer from now on is carefully protected by the community
against this anger, especially from that of the immediately injured person, and
is taken into protective custody. The compromise with the anger of those
particularly affected by the wrong doing, and thus the effort to localize the
case and to avert a wider or even a general participation and unrest, the
attempts to find equivalents and to settle the whole business (the compositio), above all the desire, appearing with
ever-increasing clarity, to consider every crime as, in some sense or other, capable of being paid off, and
thus, at least to a certain extent, to separate the criminal
and his crime from each other—those are the characteristics stamped more and
more clearly on the further development of criminal law. If the power and the
self-confidence of a community keep growing, the criminal law also grows constantly
milder. Every weakening and deeper jeopardizing of the community brings its
harsher forms of criminal law to light once again. The “creditor” has always became proportionally more humane as he has become richer. Finally
the amount of his wealth even becomes measured by how much
damage he can sustain without suffering from it. It would not be impossible to
imagine a society with a consciousness of
its own power which allowed itself the most privileged luxury which
it can have—letting its criminals go without punishment. “Why should I
really bother about my parasites?” it could then say. “May they live and
prosper; for that I am still sufficiently strong!” . . . Justice, which started
with “Everything is capable of being paid for; everything must be paid off” ends
at that point, by shutting its eyes and letting the person incapable of payment
go free—it ends, as every good thing on earth ends, by doing away with
itself. This self-negation of justice: we know what a beautiful name it
calls itself—mercy. It goes without saying that mercy remains the privilege
of the most powerful man, or even better, his beyond the law.
11
A critical
comment here about a recently published attempt to find the origin of justice
in a completely different place—that is, in ressentiment. But first a word in
the ear of the psychologists, provided that they have any desire to study ressentiment
itself up close for once: this plant grows most beautifully nowadays among
anarchists and anti-Semites; in addition, it blooms, as it always
has, in hidden places, like the violet, although it has a different fragrance.4 And since like always
has to emerge necessarily from like, it is not surprising to see attempts
coming forward again from just such circles, as they have already done many
times before—see above, Section 14 [First Essay]—to sanctify revenge under
the name of justice—as if justice were basically only a further development
of a feeling of being injured—and to bring belated honour to reactive emotions
generally, all of them, using the idea of revenge. With this last point I
personally take the least offence. It even seems to me a service,
so far as the entire biological problem is concerned (in connection with which
the worth of those emotions has been underestimated up to now). The only thing
I am calling attention to is the fact that it is the very spirit of
ressentiment out of which this new emphasis on scientific fairness grows (which
favours hate, envy, resentment, suspicion, rancour, and revenge). This
“scientific fairness,” that is, ceases immediately and gives way to tones of
mortal enmity and prejudice as soon as it deals with another group of emotions
which, it strikes me, have a much higher biological worth than those reactive
ones and which therefore have earned the right to be scientifically assessed
and respected first—namely, the truly active emotions, like desire
for mastery, acquisitiveness, and so on (E. Dühring, The
Value of Life: A Course in Philosophy, the whole book really).5 So much against this
tendency in general. But in connection with Dühring’s single principle that we
have to seek the homeland of justice in the land of the reactive feeling, we
must, for love of the truth, rudely turn this around by setting out a different
principle: the last territory to be conquered by the spirit of
justice is the land of the reactive emotions! If it is truly the case that the
just man remains just even towards someone who has injured him (and not merely
cold, moderate, strange, indifferent: being just is always a positive attitude),
if under the sudden attack of personal injury, ridicule, and suspicion, the
gaze of the lofty, clear objectivity of the just and judging eye,
as profound as it is benevolent, does not itself grow dark, well, that’s a
piece of perfection and the highest mastery on earth—even something that it
would be wise for people not to expect here; in any event, they should not believe in it too easily. It’s certainly
true that, on average, among the most just people themselves even a small dose
of hostility, malice, and insinuation is enough to make them see red and chase
fairness out of their eyes. The active, aggressive,
over-reaching human being is still placed a hundred steps closer to justice
than the reactive person. For him it is simply not necessary in the slightest
to estimate an object falsely and with bias, the way the reactive man does and
must do. Thus, as a matter of fact, at all times the aggressive human being, as
the stronger, braver, more noble man, has had on his side a better conscience
as well as a more independent eye; by contrast, we can already
guess who generally has the invention of “bad conscience” on his conscience—the
man of ressentiment! Finally, let’s look around in history: up to now in what
area has the whole implementation of law in general as well as the essential
need for law been at home on earth? Could it be in the area of the reactive
human beings? That is entirely wrong. It is much more the case that it’s been
at home with the active, strong, spontaneous, and aggressive men. Historically
considered, the law on earth—let me say this to the annoyance of the
above-mentioned agitator (who once even confessed about himself “The doctrine
of revenge runs through all my work and efforts as the red thread of justice”)—represents
that very struggle against the reactive feelings, the war with
them on the part of active and aggressive powers, which have partly used up
their strength to put a halt to or to restrain the excess of reactive pathos
and to compel some settlement with it. Wherever justice is practised, wherever
justice is upheld, we see a stronger power in relation to a weaker power standing
beneath it (whether with groups or individuals), seeking ways to bring an end
among the latter to the senseless rage of ressentiment, partly by dragging the
object of ressentiment out of the hands of revenge, partly by setting in the
place of revenge a battle against the enemies of peace and order, partly by
coming up with compensation, proposing it, under certain circumstances making
it compulsory, partly by establishing certain equivalents for injuries as a
norm, into which from now on ressentiment is directed once and for all. The most
decisive factor, however, which the highest power carries out and sets in place
against the superior numbers of the feelings of hostility and
animosity—something that power always does as soon as it is somehow strong
enough to do it—is to set up law, the imperative explanation of
those things which, in its own eyes, are generally considered allowed and legal
and things which are considered forbidden and illegal, while after the
establishment of the law, the authorities treat attacks and arbitrary acts of individuals
or entire groups as an outrage against the law, as rebellion against the
highest power itself, and they steer the feeling of those beneath them away
from the immediate damage caused by such outrages and thus, in the long run,
achieve the reverse of what all revenge desires, which sees only the viewpoint
of the injured party and considers only that valid. From now on, the eye
becomes trained to evaluate actions always impersonally, even the
eye of the harmed party itself (although this would be the very last thing to
occur, as I have remarked earlier).—Consequently, only with the setting up of
the law is there a “just” and “unjust” (and not, as Dühring will
have it, from the time of the injurious action). To talk of just and unjust in
themselves has no sense whatsoever; it’s obvious that in themselves
harming, oppressing, exploiting, destroying cannot be “unjust,” inasmuch as
life essentially works that way, that is, in its basic
functions it harms, oppresses, exploits, and destroys, and cannot be conceived
at all without this character. We have to acknowledge something even more
disturbing: the fact that from the highest biological standpoint, conditions of
justice must always be only exceptional
conditions, partial restrictions on the basic will to live, which is set
on power; they are subordinate to the total purpose of this will as individual
means, that is, as means to create larger units of power. A
legal system conceived of as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the
struggle of power complexes, but as a means against
all struggles in general, something along the lines of Dühring’s communist
cliché in which each will must be considered as equal to every will, that would
be a principle hostile to life, a destroyer and dissolver of human
beings, an assassination attempt on the future of human beings, a sign of exhaustion,
a secret path to nothingness.—
12
Here one more
word concerning the origin and purpose of punishment—two problems which are
separate or should be separate. Unfortunately people normally throw them
together into one. How do the previous genealogists of morality deal with this
issue? Naively—the way they have always worked. They find some “purpose” or
other for punishment, for example, revenge or deterrence, then in a simple way
set this purpose at the beginning as the causa
fiendi [creative cause] of punishment
and—they’re finished. The “purpose in law,” however, is the very last idea we
should use in the history of the emergence of law. It is much rather the case
that for all forms of history there is no more important principle than that
one which we reach with such difficulty but which we also really should
reach—namely that what causes a particular thing to arise and the final
utility of that thing, its actual use and arrangement in a system of purposes,
are separate toto coelo [by
all the heavens, i.e., absolutely] from each other, that something
existing, which has somehow come to its present state, will again and again be
interpreted by the higher power over it from a new perspective, appropriated in
a new way, reorganized for and redirected to new uses, that all events in the
organic world involve overpowering, acquiring mastery and
that, in turn, all overpowering and acquiring mastery involve a new interpretation,
a readjustment, in which the “sense” and “purpose” up to then must necessarily
be obscured or entirely erased. No matter how well we have understood the usefulness of
some physiological organ or other (or a legal institution, a social custom, a
political practice, some style in the arts or in a religious cult), we have
still not, in that process, grasped anything about its origin—no matter how
uncomfortable and unpleasant this may sound in elderly ears. From time immemorial
people have believed that in demonstrable purposes, in the usefulness of a
thing, a form, or an institution, they could also understand the reason it came
into existence—the eye as something made to see, the hand as something made to
grasp. So people also imagined punishment as invented to punish. But all
purposes, all uses, are only signs that a will to power has
become master over something with less power and has stamped on it its own
meaning of some function, and the entire history of a “thing,” an organ, a
practice can by this process be seen as a continuing chain of signs of
constantly new interpretations and adjustments, whose causes do not even need
to be connected to each other—in some circumstances they rather follow and take
over from each other by chance. Consequently, the “development” of a thing, a
practice, or an organ has nothing to do with its progressus
[progress] towards a single goal, even less is it the logical and
shortest progressus
reached with the least expenditure of power and resources—but rather the sequence
of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of
overpowering which take place on that thing, together with the resistance which
arises against that overpowering each time, the changes of form which have been
attempted for the purpose of defence and reaction, as well as the results of successful
counter-measures. Form is fluid; the “meaning,” however, is even more so. . . .
Even within each individual organism things are no different: with every
essential growth in the totality, the “meaning” of the individual organ also
shifts—in certain circumstances its partial destruction, a reduction of its
numbers (for example, through the obliteration of intermediate structures) can
be a sign of growing power and perfection. What I wanted to say is this: the
partial loss of utility, decline, and degeneration, the loss of
meaning, and purposiveness, in short, death, also
belong to the conditions of a real progressus
[progress], which always appears in the form of a will and a way to a greater
power and always establishes itself at the expense of a huge number of
smaller powers. The size of a “step forward” can even be estimated by
a measure of everything that had to be sacrificed to it. The humanity as mass
sacrificed for the benefit of a single stronger species of
man— that would be a step forward . . . . I emphasize this major
point of view about historical methodology all the more since it basically runs
counter to the very instinct which presently rules and to contemporary taste,
which would rather still go along with the absolute contingency, even the mechanical
meaninglessness, of all events rather than with the theory of a will to
power playing itself out in everything that happens. The
democratic idiosyncrasy of being hostile to everything which rules and wants to
rule, the modern hatred of rulers [Misarchismus] (to
make up a bad word for a bad thing) has gradually transformed itself into and
dressed itself up as something spiritual, of the highest spirituality, to such
an extent that nowadays step by step it is already infiltrating the strictest,
apparently most objective scientific research, and is allowed to
infiltrate it. Indeed, it seems to me already to have attained mastery over all
of physiology and the understanding of life, to their detriment, as is obvious,
because it has conjured away from them their fundamental concept, that of real activity. By contrast, under the
pressure of this idiosyncrasy we push “adaptation” into the foreground, that
is, a second-order activity, a mere reactivity; in fact, people have defined
life itself as an always purposeful inner adaptation to external circumstances
(Herbert Spencer). But that simply misjudges the essence of life, its will
to power. That overlooks the first priority of the spontaneous, aggressive,
over-reaching, re-interpreting, re-directing, and shaping powers, after whose effects
the “adaptation” then follows. Thus, the governing role of the highest functions
in an organism itself, the ones in which the will for living appear active and
creative, are denied. People should remember the criticism Huxley directed at
Spencer for his “administrative nihilism.” But the issue here
concerns much more than “administration”.
. . 6
13
Returning to
the business at hand, that is, to punishment, we have to
differentiate between two aspects of it: first its relative duration,
the way it is carried out, the action, the “drama,” a certain strict sequence
of procedures and, on the other hand, its fluidity, the meaning,
the purpose, the expectation linked to the implementation of such procedures.
In this matter, we can here assume, without further comment, per analogium [by analogy], in accordance with the major
viewpoints about the historical method we have just established, that the
procedure itself will be somewhat older and earlier than its use as a
punishment, that the latter was only first injected and interpreted
into the procedure (which had been present for a long time but was a custom
with a different meaning), in short, that it was not what our
naive genealogists of morality and law up to now have assumed, who collectively
imagined that the procedure was invented for the purpose of punishment,
just as people earlier thought that the hand was invented for the purpose of
grasping. Now, so far as that other element in punishment is concerned, the
fluid element, its “meaning,” in a very late cultural state (for example in
contemporary Europe) the idea of “punishment” actually presents not simply one
meaning but a whole synthesis of “meanings.” The history of punishment up to
now, in general, the history of its use for different purposes, finally
crystallizes into a sort of unity, which is difficult to untangle, difficult to
analyze, and, it must be stressed, totally incapable of definition.
(Today it is impossible to say clearly why we really punish;
all ideas in which an entire process is semiotically
summarized elude definition. Only something which has no history is capable of
being defined). At an earlier stage, by contrast, that synthesis of “meanings”
still appears easier to untangle, as well as even easier to adjust. We can
still see how in every individual case the elements in the synthesis alter
their valence and rearrange themselves accordingly, so that soon this or that
element steps forward and dominates at the expense of the rest; indeed, under
certain circumstances one element (say, the purpose of deterrence) appears to
rise above all the other elements. In order to give at least an idea of how
uncertain, how belated, how accidental “the meaning” of punishment is and how
one and the same procedure can be used, interpreted, or adjusted for fundamentally
different purposes, let me offer here an example which presented itself to me
on the basis of relatively little random material: punishment as a way of
rendering someone harmless, as a prevention from further harm; punishment as
compensation for the damage to the person injured, in some form or other (also
in the form of emotional compensation); punishment as isolation of some upset
to an even balance in order to avert a wider outbreak of the disturbance; punishment
as way of inspiring fear of those who determine and carry out punishment;
punishment as a sort of compensation for the advantages which the law breaker
has enjoyed up until that time (for example, when he is made useful as a slave
working in the mines); punishment as a cutting out of a degenerate element (in
some circumstances an entire branch, as in Chinese law, and thus a means to
keep the race pure or to sustain a social type); punishment as festival, that
is, as the violation and humiliation of some enemy one has finally thrown down;
punishment as a way of making a conscience, whether for the man who suffers the
punishment— so- called “reform”—or whether for those who witness the punishment
being carried out; punishment as the payment of an honorarium, set as a
condition by those in power, which protects the wrong doer from the excesses of
revenge; punishment as a compromise with the natural condition of revenge,
insofar as the latter is still upheld and assumed as a privilege by powerful
families; punishment as a declaration of war and a war measure against an enemy
to peace, law, order, and authority, which people fight with the very measures
war makes available, as something dangerous to the community, as a breach of
contract with respect to its conditions, as a rebel, traitor, and breaker of
the peace.
14
Of course, this
list is not complete. Obviously punishment is overloaded with all sorts of
useful purposes, all the more reason why people can infer from it an alleged utility,
which, in the popular consciousness at least, is considered its most essential
one—faith in punishment, which nowadays for several reasons is getting shaky,
still finds its most powerful support in precisely
that. Punishment is supposed to be valuable in waking the feeling of
guilt in the guilty party. In punishment people are looking for the actual
instrument for that psychic reaction called “bad conscience,” “pangs of
conscience.” But in doing this, people are misappropriating reality and psychology,
even for today, and how much more for the longest history of man, his
prehistory! Real pangs of conscience are something extremely rare, especially
among criminals and prisoners. Prisons and penitentiaries are not breeding
grounds in which this species of gnawing worm particularly likes to thrive:—on
that point all conscientious observers agree, in many cases delivering such a
judgment with sufficient unwillingness, going against their own desires. In general,
punishment makes people hard and cold. It concentrates. It sharpens the feeling
of estrangement; it strengthens powers of resistance. If it comes about that
punishment shatters a man’s energy and brings on a wretched prostration and
self-abasement, such a consequence is surely even less pleasant than the
typical result of punishment, characteristically a dry, gloomy seriousness.
However, if we consider those thousands of years before the
history of humanity, without a second thought we can conclude that the very
development of a feeling of guilt was most powerfully hindered by
punishment—at least with respect to the victims onto whom this force of
punishment was vented. For let us not underestimate just how much the criminal
is prevented by the very sight of judicial and executive procedures themselves
from sensing that his act, the nature of his action, is something inherently reprehensible, for he sees
exactly the same kind of actions committed in the service of justice, then
applauded and practised in good conscience, like espionage, lying, bribery, entrapment,
the whole tricky and sly art of the police and prosecution, as it manifests
itself in the various kinds of punishment—the robbery, oppression, abuse,
imprisonment, torture, murder, all done, moreover, as a matter of principle,
without even any emotional involvement as an excuse—all these actions are in no
way rejected or condemned in themselves by his judges, but
only in particular respects when used for certain purposes. “Bad conscience,”
this most creepy and most interesting plant among our earthly vegetation, did not grow
in this soil—in fact, for the longest period in the past nothing about
dealing with a “guilty party” penetrated the consciousness of judges or even
those doing the punishing. By contrast, they were dealing with someone who had
caused harm, with an irresponsible piece of fate. And even the man on whom
punishment later fell, once again like a piece of fate, experienced in that no
“inner pain,” other than what might have come from the sudden arrival of
something unpredictable, a terrible natural event, a falling, crushing boulder
against which there is no way to fight any more.
15
At one point
Spinoza became aware of this issue in an incriminating way (something which irritates
his interpreters, like Kuno Fischer, who really go
to great lengths to misunderstand him on this matter), when one
afternoon, he came up against some memory or other (who knows what?) and
pondered the question about what, as far as he was concerned, was left of the
celebrated morsus conscientiae
[the bite of conscience]—for him, the man who had expelled good and evil
into human fantasies and had irascibly defended the honour of his “free” God
against those blasphemers who claimed that in everything God worked sub
ratione boni [with good reason] (“but
that means that God would be subordinate to Fate, a claim which, in truth,
would be the greatest of all contradictions”). For Spinoza the world had gone
back again into that state of innocence in which it had existed before the
invention of bad conscience. So with that what, then, had become of the morsus conscientiae?
“The opposite of gaudium
[joy],” Spinoza finally told himself “is sorrow, accompanied by the image
of something over and done with which happened contrary to all expectation” (Ethics III,
Proposition XVIII, Schol. I.
II). In a manner no different from Spinoza’s, those
instigating evil who incurred punishment have for thousands of years felt, so
far as their “crime” is concerned, “Something has unexpectedly gone awry here,” not “I
should not have done that”—they submitted to their punishment as people submit
to a sickness or some bad luck or death, with that brave fatalism free of
revolt which, for example, even today gives the Russians an advantage over us
westerners in coping with life. If back then there was some criticism of the act,
such criticism came from prudence: without question we must seek the essential effect
of punishment above all in an increase of prudence, in an extension of memory,
in a will to go to work from now on more carefully, more mistrustfully, more
secretly, with the awareness that we are in many things definitely too weak, in
a kind of improved ability to judge ourselves. In general, what can be achieved
through punishment, in human beings and animals, is an increase in fear, a
honing of prudence, and control over desires. In the process, punishment tames human
beings, but it does not make them “better”—people could with more justification
assert the opposite. (Popular wisdom says “Injury makes people prudent,” but to
the extent that it makes them prudent, it also makes them bad. Fortunately,
often enough it makes people stupid).
16
At this point,
I can no longer avoid setting out, in an initial, provisional statement, my own
hypothesis about the origin of “bad conscience.” It is not easy to get people
to attend to it, and it requires them to consider it at length, to guard it,
and to sleep on it. I consider bad conscience the profound illness which human
beings had to come down with under the pressure of that most fundamental of all
the changes which they ever experienced—that change when they finally found
themselves locked within the confines of society and peace. Just like the
things water animals must have gone though when they were forced either to
become land animals or to die off, so events must have played themselves out
with this half-beast so happily adapted to the wilderness, war, wandering
around, adventure—suddenly all its instincts were devalued and “disengaged.”
From this point on, these animals were to go on foot and “carry themselves”;
whereas previously they had been supported by the water. A terrible heaviness
weighed them down. In performing the simplest things they felt ungainly. In
dealing with this new unknown world, they no longer had their old leaders, the
ruling unconscious drives which guided them safely—these unfortunate creatures
were reduced to thinking, inferring, calculating, bringing together cause and
effect, reduced to their “consciousness,” their most impoverished and
error-prone organ! I believe that never on earth has there been such a feeling
of misery, such a leaden discomfort—while at the same time those old instincts
had not all of a sudden stopped imposing their demands! Only it was difficult
and seldom possible to do their bidding. For the most part, they had to find
new and, as it were, underground satisfactions for themselves. All instincts
which are not discharged to the outside are turned back inside—this
is what I call the internalization [Verinnerlichung] of
man. From this first grows in man what people later call his “soul.” The entire
inner world, originally as thin as if stretched between two layers of skin,
expanded and extended itself, acquired depth, width, and height, to the extent
that what a person discharged out into the world was obstructed.
Those frightening fortifications with which the organization of the state protected
itself against the old instincts for freedom—punishments belong above all to
these fortifications—brought it about that all those instincts of the wild,
free, roaming man turned themselves backwards, against man himself.
Enmity, cruelty, joy in pursuit, in attack, in change, in destruction—all those
turned themselves against the possessors of such instincts. That is
the origin of “bad conscience.” The man who, because of a lack of external
enemies and opposition, was forced into an oppressive narrowness and regularity
of custom impatiently tore himself apart, persecuted himself, gnawed away at
himself, grew upset, and did himself damage—this animal which scraped itself
raw against the bars of its cage, which people want to “tame,” this
impoverished creature, consumed with longing for the wild, which had to create
out of its own self an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous
wilderness—this fool, this yearning and puzzled prisoner, became the inventor
of “bad conscience.” But with him was introduced the greatest and weirdest
illness, from which humanity up to the present time has not recovered, the
suffering of man from man, from himself, a consequence
of the forcible separation from his animal past, a leap and, so to speak, a
fall into new situations and living conditions, a declaration of war against
the old instincts, on which, up to that point, his power, joy, and ability to
inspire fear had been based. Let us at once add that, on the other hand, the
fact that there was on earth an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides
against itself, meant there was something so new, profound, unheard of,
enigmatic, contradictory, and full of the future, that with it the
picture of the earth was fundamentally changed. In fact, it required divine
spectators to appreciate the dramatic performance which then began and whose
conclusion is by no means yet in sight—a spectacle too fine, too wonderful, too
paradoxical, to be allowed to play itself out senselessly and unobserved on
some ridiculous star or other! Since then man has been included among the
most unexpected and most thrillingly lucky rolls of the dice in
the game played by Heraclitus’ “great child,” whether he’s called Zeus or
chance.7 For himself he arouses a certain interest, a
tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if something is announcing itself with
him, something is preparing itself, as if the human being were not the goal but
only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise . . .
17
Inherent in
this hypothesis about the origin of bad conscience is, firstly, the assumption
that the change was not gradual or voluntary and did not manifest itself as an
organic growth into new conditions, but as a break, a leap, something forced,
an irrefutable disaster, against which there was no struggle, nor even any
ressentiment. Secondly, however, it assumes that the adaptation of a populace
hitherto unchecked and shapeless into a fixed form, just as it was initiated by
an act of violence, was carried to its conclusion by nothing but acts of
violence—that consequently the oldest “State” emerged as a terrible tyranny, as
an oppressive and inconsiderate machinery, and continued working until such raw
materials of people and half-animals finally were not only thoroughly kneaded
and submissive but also given a shape. I used the word “State”: it
is self-evident who is meant by that term—some pack of blond predatory animals,
a race of conquerors and masters, which, organized for war and with the power
to organize, without thinking about it, sets its terrifying paws on a
subordinate population which may perhaps be vast in numbers but is still
without any form, is still wandering about. That is, in fact, the way the
“State” begins on earth. I believe that fantasy has been done away with which
sees the beginning of the state in a “contract.” The man who can command, who
is by nature a “master,” who comes forward with violence in his actions and
gestures—what has he to do with making contracts! We do not negotiate with such
beings. They come like fate, without cause, reason, consideration, or pretext.
They are present as lightning is present, too fearsome, too sudden, too
convincing, too “different” even to become merely
hated. Their work is the instinctive creation of forms, the imposition of
forms. They are the most involuntary and most unconscious artists in
existence:—where they appear something new is soon present, a power structure
which lives, something in which the parts and functions are demarcated
and coordinated, in which there is, in general, no place for anything which
does not first derive its “meaning” from its relationship to the totality.
These men, these born organizers, have no idea what guilt, responsibility, and
consideration are. In them that fearsome egotism of the artist is in charge,
which stares out like bronze and knows how to justify itself for all time in
the “work,” just as a mother does in her child. They are not
the ones in whom “bad conscience” grew—that point is obvious from the outset.
But this hateful plant would not have grown without them. It would
have failed if an immense amount of freedom had not been driven from the world
under the pressure of their hammer blows, their artistic violence, or at least
had not been driven from sight and, as it were made latent. This powerful instinct for freedom, once made
latent—we already understand how—this instinct for freedom driven back,
repressed, imprisoned inside, and finally still able to discharge and direct
itself only against itself—that and that alone is what bad conscience is
in its beginning.
18
We need to be
careful not to entertain a low opinion of this entire phenomenon simply because
it is from the start nasty and painful. In fact, it is basically the same
active force which is at work on a grander scale in those artists of power and
organizers and which builds states. Here it is inner, smaller, more mean
spirited, directing itself backwards, into “the labyrinth of the breast,” to
use Goethe’s words, and it creates bad conscience for itself and builds
negative ideals, just that instinct for freedom (to use my own
language, the will to power). Only the material on which the shaping and
violating nature of this force directs itself here is simply man himself, his
entire old animal self— and not, as in that greater and more
striking phenomenon, on another man or on other men.
This furtive violation of the self, this artistic cruelty, this pleasure in
giving a shape to oneself as a tough, resisting, suffering material, to burn
into it a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a denial, this weird
and horribly pleasurable work of a soul willingly divided against itself, which
makes itself suffer for the pleasure of creating suffering, all this active “bad
conscience,” as the essential womb of ideal and imaginative events, finally
brought to light —we have already guessed—also an abundance of strange new
beauty and affirmation and perhaps for the first time the idea of the beautiful
in general. . . . For what would be “beautiful,” if its opposite had not yet
come to an awareness of itself, if ugliness had not already said to itself, “I
am ugly”? At least, after this hint the paradox will be less puzzling, the
extent to which in contradictory ideas, like selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice,
an ideal can be indicated, something beautiful. And beyond
that, one thing we do know—I have no doubt about it—namely, the nature of the pleasure which
the selfless, self-denying, self-sacrificing person experiences from the beginning:
this pleasure belongs to cruelty. So much for the moment on the origin of the “unegoistic” as something of moral worth
and on the demarcation of the soil out of which this value has grown: only bad
conscience, only the will to abuse the self, provides the condition for the value of
the un-egoistic.
19
Bad conscience
is a sickness—there’s no doubt about that—but a sickness the way pregnancy is a
sickness. Let’s look for the conditions in which this illness has arrived at
its most terrible and most sublime peak:—in this way we’ll see what really
brought about its entry into the world at the start. But that requires a lot of
endurance—and we must first go back once more to an earlier point of view. The
relationship in civil law between the debtor and his creditor, which I have reviewed
extensively already, has been interpreted once again in an extremely remarkable
and dubious historical manner into a relationship which we modern men are
perhaps least capable of understanding, namely, into the relationship between those
people presently alive and their ancestors. Within the
original tribal cooperatives—we’re talking about primeval times—the living
generation always acknowledged a legal obligation to the previous generations,
and especially to the earliest one which had founded the tribe (and this was in
no way merely a sentimental obligation: the latter is something we could even
reasonably claim was, in general, absent for the longest period of the human race).
Here the reigning conviction is that the tribe exists at all
only because of the sacrifices and achievements of its ancestors—and that
people have to pay them back with sacrifices and
achievements. In this people recognize a debt which
keeps steadily growing because these ancestors in their continuing existence as
powerful spirits do not stop giving the tribe new advantages and lending them
their power. Do they do this gratuitously? But there is no “gratuitously” for
those raw and “spiritually destitute” ages. What can people give back to them?
Sacrifices (at first as nourishment understood very crudely), festivals,
chapels, signs of honour, above all, obedience—for all customs, as work of
one’s ancestors, are also their statutes and commands. Do people ever give them
enough? This suspicion remains and grows. From time to time it forcefully requires
a huge wholesale redemption, something immense as a repayment to
the “creditor” (the notorious sacrifice of the first born, for example, blood,
human blood in any case). The fear of ancestors and their
power, the awareness of one’s debt to them, according to this kind of logic, necessarily
increases directly in proportion to the increase in the power of the tribe
itself, as the tribe finds itself constantly more victorious, more independent,
more honoured, and more feared. It’s not the other way around! Every step
towards the decline of the tribe, all conditions of misery, all indications of
degeneration, of approaching dissolution, rather lead to a constant lessening of
the fear of the spirit of its founder and give a constantly smaller image of
his wisdom, providence, and powerful presence. If we think this crude form of
logic through to its conclusion, then the ancestors of the most powerful tribes
must, because of the fantasy of increasing fear, finally have grown into
something immense and have been pushed back into the darkness of a divine
mystery, something beyond the powers of imagination, so that finally the
ancestor is necessarily transfigured into a god. Here perhaps lies
even the origin of the gods, thus an origin out of fear! . . . And
the man to whom it seems obligatory to add “But also out of piety” could hardly
claim to be right for the longest period of the human race, for his primaeval age. Of course, he would be all the more correct
for the middle period, in which the noble tribes
developed—those who in fact paid back to their founders, their ancestors
(heroes, gods), with interest, all the characteristics which in the meantime
had become manifest in themselves, the noble qualities. Later we
will have another look at the process by which the gods were ennobled and
exalted (which is naturally not at all the same thing as their becoming
“holy”). But now, for the moment, let’s follow the path of this whole development
of the consciousness of guilt to its conclusion.
20
As history
teaches us, the consciousness of being in debt to the gods did not in any way
come to an end after the downfall of the organization of the “community” based
on blood relationships. Just as humanity inherited the ideas of “good and bad”
from the nobility of the tribe (together with its fundamental psychological
tendency to set up orders of rank), in the same way people also inherited, as
well as the divinities of the tribe and of the extended family, the pressure of
as yet unpaid debts and the desire to be relieved of them. (The transition is
made with those numerous slave and indentured populations which adapted
themselves to the divine cults of their masters, whether through compulsion or
through obsequiousness and mimicry; from them this inheritance then overflowed
in all directions). The feeling of being indebted to the gods did not stop
growing for several thousands of years, always, in fact, in direct proportion
to the extent to which the idea of god and the feeling for god grew on earth
and were carried to the heights. (The entire history of ethnic fighting,
victory, reconciliation, mergers, everything which comes before the final rank
ordering of all the elements of a people in every great racial synthesis, is
mirrored in the tangled genealogies of its gods, in the sagas of their fights,
victories, and reconciliations. The progress towards universal empires is
always also the progress toward universal divinities. In addition, despotism,
with its overthrow of the independent nobility always builds the way to some
variety of monotheism). The arrival of the Christian god, as the greatest [Maximal] god
which has yet been reached, thus brought about the maximum feeling of
indebtedness on earth. Assuming that we have gradually set out in the reverse direction,
we can infer with no small probability that, given the inexorable decline of
faith in the Christian god, even now there may already be a considerable decline
in the human consciousness of guilt. Indeed, we cannot dismiss the idea that
the complete and final victory of atheism could release humanity from this
entire feeling of being indebted to its origin, its causa
prima [prime cause]. Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong
together.—
21
So much for a brief and rough preface concerning the connection between
the ideas “guilt” and “obligation” with religious assumptions. Up to this point I have
deliberately set aside the actual moralizing of these ideas (the repression of
them into the conscience, or more precisely, the complex interaction of the bad conscience
with the idea of god). At the end of the previous section I even talked as if
there were no such thing as this moralizing and thus as if those ideas were now
necessarily coming to an end after the collapse of their presuppositions, the
faith in our “creditor,” in God. But to a terrifying extent the facts indicate
something different. The moralizing of the ideas of debt and duty, with their
repression into the bad conscience, actually gave rise to the
attempt to reverse the direction of the development I have
just described, or at least to bring its motion to a halt. Now, in a fit of
pessimism, the prospect of a final installment must once
and for all be denied; now, our gaze must bounce and ricochet
back despairingly off an iron impossibility, now those
ideas of “debt” and “duty” must turn back. But
against whom? There can be no doubt: first of all against
the “debtor,” in whom from this point on bad conscience sets itself firmly,
gnaws away, spreads out, and, like a polyp, grows wide and deep to such an
extent that finally, with the impossibility of discharging the debt, people
also come up with the notion that it is impossible to remove the penance, the
idea that it cannot be paid off (“eternal punishment”):—finally
however, those ideas of “debt” and “duty” turn back even against the
“creditor.” People should, in this matter, now think about the causa prima [first cause] of humanity, about
the beginning of the human race, about their ancestor who from now on is loaded
down with a curse (“Adam,” “original sin,” “no freedom of the will”) or about
nature from whose womb human beings arose and into which the principle of evil
is now inserted (“the demonizing of nature”) or about existence in general,
which remains something inherently without value (nihilistic
turning away from existence, longing for nothingness, or a desire for its
“opposite,” in an alternate state of being, Buddhism and things like
that)—until all of a sudden we confront the paradoxical and horrifying
expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of
genius of Christianity: God sacrificing himself for the guilt of human
beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can
redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem—the
creditor sacrificing himself for the debtor, out of love (can
people believe that?), out of love for his debtor! . . .
22
You will already
have guessed what really went on with all this and under all
this: that will to self-torment, that repressed cruelty of animal man pushed
inward and forced back into himself, imprisoned in the “state” to make him
tame, who invented bad conscience in order to lacerate himself, after the more
natural discharge of this will to inflict pain had been blocked—this
man of bad conscience seized upon religious assumptions to drive his
self-torment to its most horrifying hardship and ferocity. Guilt towards God:
this idea becomes his instrument of torture. In “God” he seizes on the ultimate
contrast he is capable of discovering to his real and indissoluble animal instincts.
He interprets these animal instincts themselves as a crime against God (as
enmity, rebellion, revolt against the “master,” the “father,”
the original ancestor and beginning of the world). He grows tense with the
contradiction of “God” and “devil.” He hurls from himself every “No” which he
says to himself, to nature, naturalness, the factual reality [Tatsächlichkeit] of his being as a “Yes,” as
something existing, as living, as real, as God, as the blessedness of God, as
God the Judge, as God the Hangman, as something beyond him, as eternity, as perpetual
torment, as hell, as punishment and guilt beyond measure. In this spiritual
cruelty there is a kind of insanity of the will which simply has no equal: a
man’s will finding him so guilty and
reprehensible that there is no atonement, his will to imagine
himself punished, but in such a way that the punishment could never be adequate
for his crime, his will to infect and poison the most fundamental
basis of things with the problem of punishment and guilt in order to cut
himself off once and for all from any exit out of this labyrinth of “fixed
ideas,” his will to erect an ideal—that of the “holy God”—in
order to be tangibly certain of his own absolute worthlessness when confronted
with it. O this insane, sad beast man! What ideas it has, what unnaturalness,
what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestiality of thought breaks from it as soon as it is prevented,
if only a little, from being a beast in deed!
. . . All this is excessively interesting, but there’s also a black, gloomy, unnerving
sadness about it, so that man must forcefully hold himself back from gazing too
long into these abysses. Here we have illness—no doubt about
that—the most terrifying illness that has raged in human beings up to now:—and
anyone who can still hear (but nowadays people no longer have the ear for
that!—) how in this night of torment and insanity the cry of love has
resounded, the cry of the most yearning delight, of redemption through love,
turns away, seized by an invincible horror. . . In human beings there is so
much that is terrible! . . . The world has already been a lunatic asylum for
too long!
23
These remarks
should be sufficient, once and for all, concerning the origin of the “holy
God.”—The fact that conceiving gods does not necessarily, in itself,
have to lead to this degraded imagination, that’s something we could not excuse
ourselves from recalling for a moment, the point that there are more
uplifting ways to use the invention of the gods than for this human
self-crucifixion and self-laceration, in which Europe in the last millennia has
become an expert—fortunately that’s something we can still infer with every
glance we cast at the Greek gods, these reflections of nobler men,
more rulers of themselves, in whom the animal in man felt
himself deified and did not tear himself apart, did not rage
against himself! These Greeks for the longest time used their gods for the very
purpose of keeping that “bad conscience” at a distance, in order to be permitted
to continue enjoying their psychic freedom. Hence, their understanding was the
opposite of how Christianity used its God. In this matter the Greeks went a
very long way, these splendid and lion-hearted Greeks, with their
child-like minds. And no lesser authority than that of Homer’s Zeus himself now
and then lets them understand that they are making things too easy for themselves.
“It’s strange,” he says at one point in relation to the case of Aegisthus, a very bad
case—
It’s
strange how these mortal creatures complain about the gods!
Evil comes only from us, they claim, but they
themselves
Stupidly make themselves miserable,
even contrary to fate.8
But at the same
time we hear and see that even this Olympian spectator and judge is far from being
irritated and from thinking them evil because of this: “How foolish they
are,” he thinks in relation to the bad deeds of mortal men—and even the Greeks
of the strongest and bravest times conceded that much about
themselves—the “foolishness,” “stupidity,” a little “disturbance in the head”
were the basis for many bad and fateful things—foolishness, not sin!
Do you understand that? . . . But even this disturbance in the head was a
problem, “Indeed, how is this even possible? Where could this have really come
from in heads like the ones we have, we
men of noble descent, happy, successful, from the best society, noble, and
virtuous?”—for hundreds of years the aristocratic Greek posed this question to
himself in relation to every horror or outrage incomprehensible to him which
had defiled one of his peers. “Some god must have deluded
him,” he finally said, shaking his head . . . This solution is typical of
the Greeks . . . In this way, the gods then served to justify men to a certain
extent, even in bad things. They served as the origins of evil—at that time the
gods took upon themselves, not punishment, but, what is nobler, the
guilt. . .
24
—I’ll conclude
with three question marks—that’s clear enough. You may perhaps ask me, “Is an
ideal actually being built up here or shattered?” . . . But have you ever
really asked yourself enough how high a price has been paid on earth for the construction
of every ideal? How much reality had to be constantly vilified
and misunderstood for that to happen, how many lies had to be consecrated, how
many consciences corrupted, how much “god” had to be sacrificed every time? In
order to enable a shrine to be built, a shrine must be destroyed: that
is the law—show me the case where it has not been fulfilled! We modern men, we
are the inheritors of thousands of years of vivisection of the conscience and
self-inflicted animal torture. That’s what we have had the longest practice
doing, that is perhaps our artistry; in any case, it’s something we have
refined, the corruption of our taste. For too long man has looked at his
natural inclinations with an “evil eye,” so that finally in him they have
become twinned with “bad conscience.” An attempt to reverse this might, in
itself, be possible—but who is strong enough for it, that is, to link as siblings
bad conscience and the unnatural inclinations, all those
aspirations for what lies beyond, those things which go against our senses,
against our instincts, against nature, against animals—in short, the earlier
ideals, all the ideals which are hostile to life, ideals of those who vilify the
world? To whom can we turn to today with such hopes and
demands? . . . In this we would have precisely the good people
against us, as well, of course, as the comfortable, the complacent, the vain,
the enthusiastic, the tired. . . . But what is more deeply
offensive, what cuts us off so fundamentally, as letting them take some note of
the severity and loftiness with which we
deal with ourselves? And, by contrast, how obliging, how friendly all the world is in relation to us, as soon as we act as all
the world does and “let ourselves go” just like all the world! To attain the
goal I’m talking about requires a different
sort of spirit from those which are likely to exist at this particular time:
spirits empowered by war and victory, for whom
conquest, adventure, danger, and even pain have become a need. That would require
getting acclimatized to keen, high air, winter wanderings, to ice and mountains
in every sense. That would require even a kind of sublime maliciousness, an ultimate
self-conscious wilfulness of knowledge, which comes with great health. Simply
and seriously put, that would require just this great health! . . . Is
this even possible today? . . . But at some time or other, in a more powerful
time than this mouldy, self-doubting present, he must nonetheless come to us,
the redeeming man of great love and contempt, the creative
spirit, constantly pushed again and again away from every sideline or from the
beyond by his own driving power, whose isolation is misunderstood by people as
if it were a flight from reality—whereas it is only his immersion,
burial, and absorption in reality, so
that, once he comes out of it into the light again, he brings home the redemption of this reality, its
redemption from the curse which the previous ideal has laid upon it. This man
of the future, who will release us from that earlier ideal just as much as from
what had to grow from it, from the great loathing, from the will to
nothingness, from nihilism—that stroke of noon and of the great decision which
makes the will free once again, who gives back to the earth its purpose and to
the human being his hope, this anti-Christ and anti-nihilist, this conqueror of
God and of nothingness—at some point he must come . . .
25
But what am I
talking about here? Enough, enough! At this stage there’s only one thing
appropriate for me to do: keep quiet. Otherwise, I’ll make the mistake of arrogating
to myself something which only someone younger is free to do, someone “more of
the future,” someone more powerful than I am—something that only
Zarathustra is free to do, Zarathustra
the Godless . . . .9
ENDNOTES
1Nietzsche quotes the Latin: “si
plus minusve secuerunt, ne fraude esto.” [Back to Text]
2Spinoza: Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677), important Dutch rationalist
philosopher. [Back to Text]
3Pope Innocent III: (1161-1216), an important and powerful medieval
Pope. [Back to Text]
4. .
. ressentiment: As mentioned above (in the First
Essay), Nietzsche uses this French word, which since his writing, and largely
because of it, has entered the English language as an important term in
psychology: a short definition is as follows: “deep-seated resentment, frustration,
and hostility, accompanied by a sense of being powerless to express these
feelings directly” (Merriam-Webster). Ressentiment
is thus significantly different in meaning from resentment. [Back to Text]
5E. Dühring: (1833-1921), German
philosopher and economist.
[Back to Text]
6Herbert Spencer: (1820-1903), English philosopher who advanced the
idea of evolution as a progressive process in society. Huxley:
Thomas Huxley (1825-1895): a major English champion of Darwin’s evolutionary
ideas. [Back to Text]
7Heraclitus: (c. 535-475 BC) an important pre-Socratic Greek
philosopher. [Back to Text]
8Zeus makes these remarks to the other Olympian gods
at the start of Homer’s Odyssey. Aegisthus seduced
Clytaemnestra, and the two of them murdered Agamemnon, her husband, as soon as
he returned home from the Trojan War. The gods, according to Homer, had warned
him against these actions. [Back to Text]
9Zarathustra: a name for the Persian prophet Zoroaster, which
Nietzsche appropriates to designate a spokesman for his own ideas. [Back to Text]
[Table of
Contents for Genealogy of Morals]
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