have even the vaguest notion, for instance, that the cardinal moral
idea of "ought"[2] originates from the very material idea of "owe"? Or
that punishment developed as a retaliation absolutely independently
of any preliminary hypothesis of the freedom or determination of the
will?--And this to such an extent, that a high degree of civilisation
was always first necessary for the animal man to begin to make those
much more primitive distinctions of "intentional," "negligent,"
"accidental," "responsible," and their contraries, and apply them
in the assessing of punishment. That idea--"the wrong-doer deserves
punishment _because_ he might have acted otherwise," in spite of the
fact that it is nowadays so cheap, obvious, natural, and inevitable,
and that it has had to serve as an illustration of the way in which
the sentiment of justice appeared on earth, is in point of fact
an exceedingly late, and even refined form of human judgment and
inference; the placing of this idea back at the beginning of the world
is simply a clumsy violation of the principles of primitive psychology.
Throughout the longest period of human history punishment was _never_
based on the responsibility of the evil-doer for his action, and was
consequently not based on the hypothesis that only the guilty should
be punished;--on the contrary, punishment was inflicted in those days
for the same reason that parents punish their children even nowadays,
out of anger at an injury that they have suffered, an anger which vents
itself mechanically on the author of the injury--but this anger is kept
in bounds and modified through the idea that every injury has somewhere
or other its _equivalent_ price, and can really be paid off, even
though it be by means of pain to the author. Whence is it that this
ancient deep-rooted and now perhaps ineradicable idea has drawn its
strength, this idea of an equivalency between injury and pain? I have
already revealed its origin, in the contractual relationship between
_creditor_ and _ower_, that is as old as the existence of legal rights
at all, and in its turn points back to the primary forms of purchase,
sale, barter, and trade.
5.
The realisation of these contractual relations excites, of course (as
would be already expected from our previous observations), a great
deal of suspicion and opposition towards the primitive society which
made or sanctioned them. In this society promises will be made; in
this society the object is to provide the promiser with a memory;
in this society, so may we suspect, there will be full scope for
hardness, cruelty, and pain: the "ower," in order to induce credit
in his promise of repayment, in order to give a guarantee of the
earnestness and sanctity of his promise, in order to drill into his
own conscience the duty, the solemn duty, of repayment, will, by
virtue of a contract with his creditor to meet the contingency of
his not paying, pledge something that he still possesses, something
that he still has in his power, for instance, his life or his wife,
or his freedom or his body (or under certain religious conditions
even his salvation, his soul's welfare, even his peace in the grave;
so in Egypt, where the corpse of the ower found even in the grave no
rest from the creditor--of course, from the Egyptian standpoint, this
peace was a matter of particular importance). But especially has the
creditor the power of inflicting on the body of the ower all kinds of
pain and torture--the power, for instance, of cutting off from it an
amount that appeared proportionate to the greatness of the debt;--this
point of view resulted in the universal prevalence at an early date of
precise schemes of valuation, frequently horrible in the minuteness
and meticulosity of their application, _legally_ sanctioned schemes of
valuation for individual limbs and parts of the body. I consider it as
already a progress, as a proof of a freer, less petty, and more Roman
conception of law, when the Roman Code of the Twelve Tables decreed
that it was immaterial how much or how little the creditors in such a
contingency cut off, "si plus minusve secuerunt, ne fraude esto." Let
us make the logic of the whole of this equalisation process clear; it
is strange enough. The equivalence consists in this: instead of an
advantage directly compensatory of his injury (that is, instead of an
equalisation in money, lands, or some kind of chattel), the creditor
is granted by way of repayment and compensation a certain _sensation
of satisfaction_--the satisfaction of being able to vent, without any
trouble, his power on one who is powerless, the delight "_de faire le
mal pour le plaisir de le faire_," the joy in sheer violence: and this
joy will be relished in proportion to the lowness and humbleness of
the creditor in the social scale, and is quite apt to have the effect
of the most delicious dainty, and even seem the foretaste of a higher
social position. Thanks to the punishment of the "ower," the creditor
participates in the rights of the masters. At last he too, for once in
a way, attains the edifying consciousness of being able to despise and
ill-treat a creature--as an "inferior"--or at any rate of _seeing_ him
being despised and ill-treated, in case the actual power of punishment,
the administration of punishment, has already become transferred to the
"authorities." The compensation consequently consists in a claim on
cruelty and a right to draw thereon.
6.
It is then in _this_ sphere of the law of contract that we find the
cradle of the whole moral world of the ideas of "guilt," "conscience,"
"duty," the "sacredness of duty,"--their commencement, like the
commencement of all great things in the world, is thoroughly and
continuously saturated with blood. And should we not add that this
world has never really lost a certain savour of blood and torture (not
even in old Kant; the categorical imperative reeks of cruelty). It was
in this sphere likewise that there first became formed that sinister
and perhaps now indissoluble association of the ideas of "guilt" and
"suffering." To put the question yet again, why can suffering be a
compensation for "owing"?--Because the _infliction_ of suffering
produces the highest degree of happiness, because the injured party
will get in exchange for his loss (including his vexation at his loss)
an extraordinary counter-pleasure: the _infliction_ of suffering--a
real _feast_, something that, as I have said, was all the more
appreciated the greater the paradox created by the rank and social
status of the creditor. These observations are purely conjectural; for,
apart from the painful nature of the task, it is hard to plumb such
profound depths: the clumsy introduction of the idea of "revenge" as a
connecting-link simply hides and obscures the view instead of rendering
it clearer (revenge itself simply leads back again to the identical
problem--"How can the infliction of suffering be a satisfaction?").
In my opinion it is repugnant to the delicacy, and still more to the
hypocrisy of tame domestic animals (that is, modern men; that is,
ourselves), to realise with all their energy the extent to which
_cruelty_ constituted the great joy and delight of ancient man, was
an ingredient which seasoned nearly all his pleasures, and conversely
the extent of the naïveté and innocence with which he manifested his
need for cruelty, when he actually made as a matter of principle
"disinterested malice" (or, to use Spinoza's expression, the _sympathia
malevolens_) into a _normal_ characteristic of man--as consequently
something to which the conscience says a hearty yes. The more profound
observer has perhaps already had sufficient opportunity for noticing
this most ancient and radical joy and delight of mankind; in _Beyond
Good and Evil_, Aph. 188 (and even earlier, in _The Dawn of Day_, Aphs.
18, 77, 113), I have cautiously indicated the continually growing
spiritualisation and "deification" of cruelty, which pervades the
whole history of the higher civilisation (and in the larger sense even
constitutes it). At any rate the time is not so long past when it was
impossible to conceive of royal weddings and national festivals on a
grand scale, without executions, tortures, or perhaps an _auto-da-fé_",
or similarly to conceive of an aristocratic household, without a
creature to serve as a butt for the cruel and malicious baiting of the
inmates. (The reader will perhaps remember Don Quixote at the court of
the Duchess: we read nowadays the whole of _Don Quixote_ with a bitter
taste in the mouth, almost with a sensation of torture, a fact which
would appear very strange and very incomprehensible to the author and
his contemporaries--they read it with the best conscience in the world
as the gayest of books; they almost died with laughing at it.) The
sight of suffering does one good, the infliction of suffering does one
more good--this is a hard maxim, but none the less a fundamental maxim,
old, powerful, and "human, all-too-human"; one, moreover, to which
perhaps even the apes as well would subscribe: for it is said that in
inventing bizarre cruelties they are giving abundant proof of their
future humanity, to which, as it were, they are playing the prelude.
Without cruelty, no feast: so teaches the oldest and longest history of
man--and in punishment too is there so much of the festive.
7.
Entertaining, as I do, these thoughts, I am, let me say in parenthesis,
fundamentally opposed to helping our pessimists to new water for the
discordant and groaning mills of their disgust with life; on the
contrary, it should be shown specifically that, at the time when
mankind was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life in the world was
brighter than it is nowadays when there are pessimists. The darkening
of the heavens over man has always increased in proportion to the
growth of man's shame _before man_. The tired pessimistic outlook,
the mistrust of the riddle of life, the icy negation of disgusted
ennui, all those are not the signs of the _most evil_ age of the human
race: much rather do they come first to the light of day, as the
swamp-flowers, which they are, when the swamp to which they belong,
comes into existence--I mean the diseased refinement and moralisation,
thanks to which the "animal man" has at last learnt to be ashamed of
all his instincts. On the road to angelhood (not to use in this context
a harder word) man has developed that dyspeptic stomach and coated
tongue, which have made not only the joy and innocence of the animal
repulsive to him, but also life itself:--so that sometimes he stands
with stopped nostrils before his own self, and, like Pope Innocent the
Third, makes a black list of his own horrors ("unclean generation,
loathsome nutrition when in the maternal body, badness of the matter
out of which man develops, awful stench, secretion of saliva, urine,
and excrement"). Nowadays, when suffering is always trotted out
as the first argument _against_ existence, as its most sinister
query, it is well to remember the times when men judged on converse
principles because they could not dispense with the _infliction_ of
suffering, and saw therein a magic of the first order, a veritable
bait of seduction to life.
Perhaps in those days (this is to solace the weaklings) pain did not
hurt so much as it does nowadays: any physician who has treated negroes
(granted that these are taken as representative of the prehistoric
man) suffering from severe internal inflammations which would bring
a European, even though he had the soundest constitution, almost to
despair, would be in a position to come to this conclusion. Pain has
_not_ the same effect with negroes. (The curve of human sensibilities
to pain seems indeed to sink in an extraordinary and almost sudden
fashion, as soon as one has passed the upper ten thousand or ten
millions of over-civilised humanity, and I personally have no doubt
that, by comparison with one painful night passed by one single
hysterical chit of a cultured woman, the suffering of all the animals
taken together who have been put to the question of the knife, so as
to give scientific answers, are simply negligible.) We may perhaps
be allowed to admit the possibility of the craving for cruelty not
necessarily having become really extinct: it only requires, in view
of the fact that pain hurts more nowadays, a certain sublimation and
subtilisation, it must especially be translated to the imaginative and
psychic plane, and be adorned with such smug euphemisms, that even the
most fastidious and hypocritical conscience could never grow suspicious
of their real nature ("Tragic pity" is one of these euphemisms:
another is "_les nostalgies de la croix_"). What really raises one's
indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but
the senselessness of suffering; such a _senselessness_, however,
existed neither in Christianity, which interpreted suffering into a
whole mysterious salvation-apparatus, nor in the beliefs of the naive
ancient man, who only knew how to find a meaning in suffering from
the standpoint of the spectator, or the inflictor of the suffering.
In order to get the secret, undiscovered, and unwitnessed suffering
out of the world it was almost compulsory to invent gods and a
hierarchy of intermediate beings, in short, something which wanders
even among secret places, sees even in the dark, and makes a point
of never missing an interesting and painful spectacle. It was with
the help of such inventions that life got to learn the _tour de
force_, which has become part of its stock-in-trade, the _tour de
force_ of self-justification, of the justification of evil; nowadays
this would perhaps require other auxiliary devices (for instance,
life as a riddle, life as a problem of knowledge). "Every evil is
justified in the sight of which a god finds edification," so rang the
logic of primitive sentiment--and, indeed, was it only of primitive?
The gods conceived as friends of spectacles of cruelty--oh how far
does this primeval conception extend even nowadays into our European
civilisation! One would perhaps like in this context to consult Luther
and Calvin. It is at any rate certain that even the Greeks knew no
more piquant seasoning for the happiness of their gods than the joys
of cruelty. What, do you think, was the mood with which Homer makes
his gods look down upon the fates of men? What final meaning have at
bottom the Trojan War and similar tragic horrors? It is impossible to
entertain any doubt on the point: they were intended as festival games
for the gods, and, in so far as the poet is of a more godlike breed
than other men, as festival games also for the poets. It was in just
this spirit and no other, that at a later date the moral philosophers
of Greece conceived the eyes of God as still looking down on the moral
struggle, the heroism, and the self-torture of the virtuous; the
Heracles of duty was on a stage, and was conscious of the fact; virtue
without witnesses was something quite unthinkable for this nation of
actors. Must not that philosophic invention, so audacious and so fatal,
which was then absolutely new to Europe, the invention of "free will,"
of the absolute spontaneity of man in good and evil, simply have been
made for the specific purpose of justifying the idea, that the interest
of the gods in humanity and human virtue was _inexhaustible_?
There would never on the stage of this free-will world be a dearth of
really new, really novel and exciting situations, plots, catastrophes.
A world thought out on completely deterministic lines would be easily
guessed by the gods, and would consequently soon bore them--sufficient
reason for these _friends of the gods_, the philosophers, not to
ascribe to their gods such a deterministic world. The whole of ancient
humanity is full of delicate consideration for the spectator, being as
it is a world of thorough publicity and theatricality, which could not
conceive of happiness without spectacles and festivals.--And, as has
already been said, even in great punishment there is so much which is
festive.
8.
The feeling of "ought," of personal obligation (to take up again
the train of our inquiry), has had, as we saw, its origin in the
oldest and most original personal relationship that there is, the
relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and ower: here it
was that individual confronted individual, and that individual
_matched himself against_ individual. There has not yet been found
a grade of civilisation so low, as not to manifest some trace of
this relationship. Making prices, assessing values, thinking out
equivalents, exchanging--all this preoccupied the primal thoughts
of man to such an extent that in a certain sense it constituted
_thinking_ itself: it was here that was trained the oldest form of
sagacity, it was here in this sphere that we can perhaps trace the
first commencement of man's pride, of his feeling of superiority over
other animals. Perhaps our word "Mensch" (_manas_) still expresses
just something of _this_ self-pride: man denoted himself as the being
who measures values, who values and measures, as the "assessing"
animal _par excellence_. Sale and purchase, together with their
psychological concomitants, are older than the origins of any form of
social organisation and union: it is rather from the most rudimentary
form of individual right that the budding consciousness of exchange,
commerce, debt, right, obligation, compensation was first transferred
to the rudest and most elementary of the social complexes (in their
relation to similar complexes), the habit of comparing force with
force, together with that of measuring, of calculating. His eye was
now focussed to this perspective; and with that ponderous consistency
characteristic of ancient thought, which, though set in motion with
difficulty, yet proceeds inflexibly along the line on which it has
started, man soon arrived at the great generalisation, "everything has
its price, _all_ can be paid for," the oldest and most naive moral
canon of _justice_, the beginning of all "kindness," of all "equity,"
of all "goodwill," of all "objectivity" in the world. Justice in this
initial phase is the goodwill among people of about equal power to come
to terms with each other, to come to an understanding again by means of
a settlement, and with regard to the less powerful, to _compel_ them
to agree among themselves to a settlement.
9.
Measured always by the standard of antiquity (this antiquity, moreover,
is present or again possible at all periods), the community stands to
its members in that important and radical relationship of creditor to
his "owers." Man lives in a community, man enjoys the advantages of
a community (and what advantages! we occasionally underestimate them
nowadays), man lives protected, spared, in peace and trust, secure
from certain injuries and enmities, to which the man outside the
community, the "peaceless" man, is exposed,--a German understands the
original meaning of "Elend" (_êlend_),--secure because he has entered
into pledges and obligations to the community in respect of these very
injuries and enmities. What happens _when this is not the case_? The
community, the defrauded creditor, will get itself paid, as well as it
can, one can reckon on that. In this case the question of the direct
damage done by the offender is quite subsidiary: quite apart from
this the criminal[3] is above all a breaker, a breaker of word and
covenant _to the whole_, as regards all the advantages and amenities
of the communal life in which up to that time he had participated. The
criminal is an "ower" who not only fails to repay the advances and
advantages that have been given to him, but even sets out to attack
his creditor: consequently he is in the future not only, as is fair,
deprived of all these advantages and amenities--he is in addition
reminded of the _importance_ of those advantages. The wrath of the
injured creditor, of the community, puts him back in the wild and
outlawed status from which he was previously protected: the community
repudiates him--and now every kind of enmity can vent itself on him.
Punishment is in this stage of civilisation simply the copy, the mimic,
of the normal treatment of the hated, disdained, and conquered enemy,
who is not only deprived of every right and protection but of every
mercy; so we have the martial law and triumphant festival of the _væ
victis_! in all its mercilessness and cruelty. This shows why war
itself (counting the sacrificial cult of war) has produced all the
forms under which punishment has manifested itself in history.
10.
As it grows more powerful, the community tends to take the offences of
the individual less seriously, because they are now regarded as being
much less revolutionary and dangerous to the corporate existence: the
evil-doer is no more outlawed and put outside the pale, the common
wrath can no longer vent itself upon him with its old licence,--on
the contrary, from this very time it is against this wrath, and
particularly against the wrath of those directly injured, that the
evil-doer is carefully shielded and protected by the community. As, in
fact, the penal law develops, the following characteristics become
more and more clearly marked: compromise with the wrath of those
directly affected by the misdeed; a consequent endeavour to localise
the matter and to prevent a further, or indeed a general spread of
the disturbance; attempts to find equivalents and to settle the whole
matter (compositio); above all, the will, which manifests itself with
increasing definiteness, to treat every offence as in a certain degree
capable of _being paid off_, and consequently, at any rate up to a
certain point, to _isolate_ the offender from his act. As the power and
the self-consciousness of a community increases, so proportionately
does the penal law become mitigated; conversely every weakening and
jeopardising of the community revives the harshest forms of that law.
The creditor has always grown more humane proportionately as he has
grown more rich; finally the amount of injury he can endure without
really suffering becomes the criterion of his wealth. It is possible
to conceive of a society blessed with so great a _consciousness of its
own power_ as to indulge in the most aristocratic luxury of letting
its wrong-doers go _scot-free_.--"What do my parasites matter to me?"
might society say. "Let them live and flourish! I am strong enough for
it."--The justice which began with the maxim, "Everything can be paid
off, everything must be paid off," ends with connivance at the escape
of those who cannot pay to escape--it ends, like every good thing on
earth, by _destroying itself_.--The self-destruction of Justice! we
know the pretty name it calls itself--_Grace!_ it remains, as is
obvious, the privilege of the strongest, better still, their super-law.
11.