made, to find the origin of justice on quite another basis--namely,
on that of _resentment_. Let me whisper a word in the ear of the
psychologists, if they would fain study revenge itself at close
quarters: this plant blooms its prettiest at present among Anarchists
and anti-Semites, a hidden flower, as it has ever been, like the
violet, though, forsooth, with another perfume. And as like must
necessarily emanate from like, it will not be a matter for surprise
that it is just in such circles that we see the birth of endeavours (it
is their old birthplace--compare above, First Essay, paragraph 14),
to sanctify _revenge_ under the name of _justice_ (as though Justice
were at bottom merely a _development_ of the consciousness of injury),
and thus with the rehabilitation of revenge to reinstate generally
and collectively all the _reactive_ emotions. I object to this last
point least of all. It even seems _meritorious_ when regarded from the
standpoint of the whole problem of biology (from which standpoint the
value of these emotions has up to the present been underestimated).
And that to which I alone call attention, is the circumstance that
it is the spirit of revenge itself, from which develops this new
nuance of scientific equity (for the benefit of hate, envy, mistrust,
jealousy, suspicion, rancour, revenge). This scientific "equity"
stops immediately and makes way for the accents of deadly enmity and
prejudice, so soon as another group of emotions comes on the scene,
which in my opinion are of a much higher biological value than these
reactions, and consequently have a paramount claim to the valuation
and appreciation of science: I mean the really _active_ emotions, such
as personal and material ambition, and so forth. (E. Dühring, _Value
of Life; Course of Philosophy_, and _passim_.) So much against this
tendency in general: but as for the particular maxim of Dühring's,
that the home of Justice is to be found in the sphere of the reactive
feelings, our love of truth compels us drastically to invert his own
proposition and to oppose to him this other maxim: the _last_ sphere
conquered by the spirit of justice is the sphere of the feeling of
reaction! When it really comes about that the just man remains just
even as regards his injurer (and not merely cold, moderate, reserved,
indifferent: being just is always a _positive_ state); when, in spite
of the strong provocation of personal insult, contempt, and calumny,
the lofty and clear objectivity of the just and judging eye (whose
glance is as profound as it is gentle) is untroubled, why then we have
a piece of perfection, a past master of the world--something, in fact,
which it would not be wise to expect, and which should not at any
rate be too easily _believed_. Speaking generally, there is no doubt
but that even the justest individual only requires a little dose of
hostility, malice, or innuendo to drive the blood into his brain and
the fairness _from_ it. The active man, the attacking, aggressive man
is always a hundred degrees nearer to justice than the man who merely
reacts; he certainly has no need to adopt the tactics, necessary in the
case of the reacting man, of making false and biassed valuations of his
object. It is, in point of fact, for this reason that the aggressive
man has at all times enjoyed the stronger, bolder, more aristocratic,
and also _freer_ outlook, the _better_ conscience. On the other hand,
we already surmise who it really is that has on his conscience the
invention of the "bad conscience,"--the resentful man! Finally, let man
look at himself in history. In what sphere up to the present has the
whole administration of law, the actual need of law, found its earthly
home? Perchance in the sphere of the reacting man? Not for a minute:
rather in that of the active, strong, spontaneous, aggressive man? I
deliberately defy the above-mentioned agitator (who himself makes this
self-confession, "the creed of revenge has run through all my works
and endeavours like the red thread of Justice"), and say, that judged
historically law in the world represents the very war _against_ the
reactive feelings, the very war waged on those feelings by the powers
of activity and aggression, which devote some of their strength to
damming and keeping within bounds this effervescence of hysterical
reactivity, and to forcing it to some compromise. Everywhere where
justice is practised and justice is maintained, it is to be observed
that the stronger power, when confronted with the weaker powers which
are inferior to it (whether they be groups, or individuals), searches
for weapons to put an end to the senseless fury of resentment, while
it carries on its object, partly by taking the victim of resentment
out of the clutches of revenge, partly by substituting for revenge a
campaign of its own against the enemies of peace and order, partly
by finding, suggesting, and occasionally enforcing settlements,
partly by standardising certain equivalents for injuries, to which
equivalents the element of resentment is henceforth finally referred.
The most drastic measure, however, taken and effectuated by the supreme
power, to combat the preponderance of the feelings of spite and
vindictiveness--it takes this measure as soon as it is at all strong
enough to do so--is the foundation of _law_, the imperative declaration
of what in its eyes is to be regarded as just and lawful, and what
unjust and unlawful: and while, after the foundation of law, the
supreme power treats the aggressive and arbitrary acts of individuals,
or of whole groups, as a violation of law, and a revolt against
itself, it distracts the feelings of its subjects from the immediate
injury inflicted by such a violation, and thus eventually attains the
very opposite result to that always desired by revenge, which sees
and recognises nothing but the standpoint of the injured party. From
henceforth the eye becomes trained to a more and more _impersonal_
valuation of the deed, even the eye of the injured party himself
(though this is in the final stage of all, as has been previously
remarked)--on this principle "right" and "wrong" first manifest
themselves after the foundation of law (and not, as Dühring maintains,
only after the act of violation). To talk of intrinsic right and
intrinsic wrong is absolutely non-sensical; intrinsically, an injury,
an oppression, an exploitation, an annihilation can be nothing wrong,
inasmuch as life is _essentially_ (that is, in its cardinal functions)
something which functions by injuring, oppressing, exploiting, and
annihilating, and is absolutely inconceivable without such a character.
It is necessary to make an even more serious confession:--viewed from
the most advanced biological standpoint, conditions of legality can be
only _exceptional conditions_, in that they are partial restrictions
of the real life-will, which makes for power, and in that they are
subordinated to the life-will's general end as particular means,
that is, as means to create _larger_ units of strength. A legal
organisation, conceived of as sovereign and universal, not as a weapon
in a fight of complexes of power, but as a weapon _against_ fighting,
generally something after the style of Dühring's communistic model
of treating every will as equal with every other will, would be a
principle _hostile to life_, a destroyer and dissolver of man, an
outrage on the future of man, a symptom of fatigue, a secret cut to
Nothingness.--
12.
A word more on the origin and end of punishment--two problems which
are or ought to be kept distinct, but which unfortunately are usually
lumped into one. And what tactics have our moral genealogists employed
up to the present in these cases? Their inveterate naïveté. They find
out some "end" in the punishment, for instance, revenge and deterrence,
and then in all their innocence set this end at the beginning, as the
_causa fiendi_ of the punishment, and--they have done the trick. But
the patching up of a history of the origin of law is the last use to
which the "End in Law"[4] ought to be put. Perhaps there is no more
pregnant principle for any kind of history than the following, which,
difficult though it is to master, _should_ none the less be _mastered_
in every detail.--The origin of the existence of a thing and its final
utility, its practical application and incorporation in a system of
ends, are _toto cœlo_ opposed to each other--everything, anything,
which exists and which prevails anywhere, will always be put to new
purposes by a force superior to itself, will be commandeered afresh,
will be turned and transformed to new uses; all "happening" in the
organic world consists of _overpowering_ and dominating, and again all
overpowering and domination is a new interpretation and adjustment,
which must necessarily obscure or absolutely extinguish the subsisting
"meaning" and "end." The most perfect comprehension of the utility
of any physiological organ (or also of a legal institution, social
custom, political habit, form in art or in religious worship) does not
for a minute imply any simultaneous comprehension of its origin: this
may seem uncomfortable and unpalatable to the older men,--for it has
been the immemorial belief that understanding the final cause or the
utility of a thing, a form, an institution, means also understanding
the reason for its origin: to give an example of this logic, the eye
was made to see, the hand was made to grasp. So even punishment was
conceived as invented with a view to punishing. But all ends and all
utilities are only _signs_ that a Will to Power has mastered a less
powerful force, has impressed thereon out of its own self the meaning
of a function; and the whole history of a "Thing," an organ, a custom,
can on the same principle be regarded as a continuous "sign-chain"
of perpetually new interpretations and adjustments, whose causes, so
far from needing to have even a mutual connection, sometimes follow
and alternate with each other absolutely haphazard. Similarly, the
evolution of a "thing," of a custom, is anything but its _progressus_
to an end, still less a logical and direct _progressus_ attained
with the minimum expenditure of energy and cost: it is rather the
succession of processes of subjugation, more or less profound, more
or less mutually independent, which operate on the thing itself; it
is, further, the resistance which in each case invariably displayed
this subjugation, the Protean wriggles by way of defence and reaction,
and, further, the results of successful counter-efforts. The form is
fluid, but the meaning is even more so--even inside every individual
organism the case is the same: with every genuine growth of the whole,
the "function" of the individual organs becomes shifted,--in certain
cases a partial perishing of these organs, a diminution of their
numbers (for instance, through annihilation of the connecting members),
can be a symptom of growing strength and perfection. What I mean is
this: even partial _loss of utility_, decay, and degeneration, loss of
function and purpose, in a word, death, appertain to the conditions
of the genuine _progressus_; which always appears in the shape of
a will and way to _greater_ power, and is always realised at the
expense of innumerable smaller powers. The magnitude of a "progress"
is gauged by the greatness of the sacrifice that it requires: humanity
as a mass sacrificed to the prosperity of the one _stronger_ species
of Man--that _would be_ a progress. I emphasise all the more this
cardinal characteristic of the historic method, for the reason that in
its essence it runs counter to predominant instincts and prevailing
taste, which much prefer to put up with absolute casualness, even with
the mechanical senselessness of all phenomena, than with the theory
of a power-will, in exhaustive play throughout all phenomena. The
democratic idiosyncrasy against everything which rules and wishes to
rule, the modern _misarchism_ (to coin a bad word for a bad thing),
has gradually but so thoroughly transformed itself into the guise of
intellectualism, the most abstract intellectualism, that even nowadays
it penetrates and _has the right_ to penetrate step by step into the
most exact and apparently the most objective sciences: this tendency
has, in fact, in my view already dominated the whole of physiology
and biology, and to their detriment, as is obvious, in so far as
it has spirited away a radical idea, the idea of true _activity_.
The tyranny of this idiosyncrasy, however, results in the theory
of "adaptation" being pushed forward into the van of the argument,
exploited; adaptation--that means to say, a second-class activity, a
mere capacity for "reacting"; in fact, life itself has been defined
(by Herbert Spencer) as an increasingly effective internal adaptation
to external circumstances. This definition, however, fails to realise
the real essence of life, its will to power. It fails to appreciate the
paramount superiority enjoyed by those plastic forces of spontaneity,
aggression, and encroachment with their new interpretations and
tendencies, to the operation of which adaptation is only a natural
corollary: consequently the sovereign office of the highest
functionaries in the organism itself (among which the life-will appears
as an active and formative principle) is repudiated. One remembers
Huxley's reproach to Spencer of his "administrative Nihilism": but it
is a case of something much _more_ than "administration."
13.
To return to our subject, namely _punishment_, we must make
consequently a double distinction: first, the relatively permanent
_element_, the custom, the act, the "drama," a certain rigid sequence
of methods of procedure; on the other hand, the fluid element, the
meaning, the end, the expectation which is attached to the operation of
such procedure. At this point we immediately assume, _per analogiam_
(in accordance with the theory of the historic method, which we have
elaborated above), that the procedure itself is something older and
earlier than its utilisation in punishment, that this utilisation was
_introduced_ and interpreted into the procedure (which had existed
for a long time, but whose employment had another meaning), in short,
that the case is _different_ from that hitherto supposed by our _naïf_
genealogists of morals and of law, who thought that the procedure was
_invented_ for the purpose of punishment, in the same way that the hand
had been previously thought to have been invented for the purpose of
grasping. With regard to the other element in _punishment_, its fluid
element, its meaning, the idea of punishment in a very late stage of
civilisation (for instance, contemporary Europe) is not content with
manifesting merely one meaning, but manifests a whole synthesis "of
meanings." The past general history of punishment, the history of its
employment for the most diverse ends, crystallises eventually into
a kind of unity, which is difficult to analyse into its parts, and
which, it is necessary to emphasise, absolutely defies definition.
(It is nowadays impossible to say definitely _the precise reason_
for punishment: all ideas, in which a whole process is promiscuously
comprehended, elude definition; it is only that which has no history,
which can be defined.) At an earlier stage, on the contrary, that
synthesis of meanings appears much less rigid and much more elastic; we
can realise how in each individual case the elements of the synthesis
change their value and their position, so that now one element and
now another stands out and predominates over the others, nay, in
certain cases one element (perhaps the end of deterrence) seems to
eliminate all the rest. At any rate, so as to give some idea of the
uncertain, supplementary, and accidental nature of the meaning of
punishment and of the manner in which one identical procedure can
be employed and adapted for the most diametrically opposed objects,
I will at this point give a scheme that has suggested itself to
me, a scheme itself based on comparatively small and accidental
material.--Punishment, as rendering the criminal harmless and incapable
of further injury.--Punishment, as compensation for the injury
sustained by the injured party, in any form whatsoever (including
the form of sentimental compensation).--Punishment, as an isolation
of that which disturbs the equilibrium, so as to prevent the further
spreading of the disturbance.--Punishment as a means of inspiring
fear of those who determine and execute the punishment.--Punishment
as a kind of compensation for advantages which the wrong-doer has
up to that time enjoyed (for example, when he is utilised as a
slave in the mines).--Punishment, as the elimination of an element
of decay (sometimes of a whole branch, as according to the Chinese
laws, consequently as a means to the purification of the race, or
the preservation of a social type).---Punishment as a festival, as
the violent oppression and humiliation of an enemy that has at last
been subdued.--Punishment as a mnemonic, whether for him who suffers
the punishment--the so-called "correction," or for the witnesses of
its administration. Punishment, as the payment of a fee stipulated
for by the power which protects the evil-doer from the excesses of
revenge.--Punishment, as a compromise with the natural phenomenon
of revenge, in so far as revenge is still maintained and claimed
as a privilege by the stronger races.--Punishment as a declaration
and measure of war against an enemy of peace, of law, of order,
of authority, who is fought by society with the weapons which war
provides, as a spirit dangerous to the community, as a breaker of the
contract on which the community is based, as a rebel, a traitor, and a
breaker of the peace.
14.
This list is certainly not complete; it is obvious that punishment
is overloaded with utilities of all kinds. This makes it all the
more permissible to eliminate one supposed utility, which passes, at
any rate in the popular mind, for its most essential utility, and
which is just what even now provides the strongest support for that
faith in punishment which is nowadays for many reasons tottering.
Punishment is supposed to have the value of exciting in the guilty
the consciousness of guilt; in punishment is sought the proper
instrumentum of that psychic reaction which becomes known as a "bad
conscience," "remorse." But this theory is even, from the point of
view of the present, a violation of reality and psychology: and how
much more so is the case when we have to deal with the longest period
of man's history, his primitive history! Genuine remorse is certainly
extremely rare among wrong-doers and the victims of punishment; prisons
and houses of correction are not _the_ soil on which this worm of
remorse pullulates for choice--this is the unanimous opinion of all
conscientious observers, who in many cases arrive at such a judgment
with enough reluctance and against their own personal wishes. Speaking
generally, punishment hardens and numbs, it produces concentration, it
sharpens the consciousness of alienation, it strengthens the power of
resistance. When it happens that it breaks the man's energy and brings
about a piteous prostration and abjectness, such a result is certainly
even less salutary than the average effect of punishment, which is
characterised by a harsh and sinister doggedness. The thought of those
_prehistoric_ millennia brings us to the unhesitating conclusion,
that it was simply through punishment that the evolution of the
consciousness of guilt was most forcibly retarded--at any rate in the
victims of the punishing power. In particular, let us not underestimate
the extent to which, by the very sight of the judicial and executive
procedure, the wrong-doer is himself prevented from feeling that his
deed, the character of his act, is _intrinsically_ reprehensible: for
he sees clearly the same kind of acts practised in the service of
justice, and then called good, and practised with a good conscience;
acts such as espionage, trickery, bribery, trapping, the whole
intriguing and insidious art of the policeman and the informer--the
whole system, in fact, manifested in the different kinds of punishment
(a system not excused by passion, but based on principle), of robbing,
oppressing, insulting, imprisoning, racking, murdering.--All this
he sees treated by his judges, not as acts meriting censure and
condemnation _in themselves_, but only in a particular context and
application. It was not on this soil that grew the "bad conscience,"
that most sinister and interesting plant of our earthly vegetation--
in point of fact, throughout a most lengthy period, no suggestion of
having to do with a "guilty man" manifested itself in the consciousness
of the man who judged and punished. One had merely to deal with an
author of an injury, an irresponsible piece of fate. And the man
himself, on whom the punishment subsequently fell like a piece of fate,
was occasioned no more of an "inner pain" than would be occasioned by
the sudden approach of some uncalculated event, some terrible natural
catastrophe, a rushing, crushing avalanche against which there is no
resistance.
15.
This truth came insidiously enough to the consciousness of Spinoza (to
the disgust of his commentators, who (like Kuno Fischer, for instance)
give themselves no end of _trouble_ to misunderstand him on this
point), when one afternoon (as he sat raking up who knows what memory)
he indulged in the question of what was really left for him personally
of the celebrated _morsus conscientiæ_--Spinoza, who had relegated
"good and evil" to the sphere of human imagination, and indignantly
defended the honour of his "free" God against those blasphemers who
affirmed that God did everything _sub ratione boni_ ("but this was
tantamount to subordinating God to fate, and would really be the
greatest of all absurdities"). For Spinoza the world had returned
again to that innocence in which it lay before the discovery of the
bad conscience: what, then, had happened to the _morsus conscientiæ_?
"The antithesis of _gaudium_," said he at last to himself,--"A sadness
accompanied by the recollection of a past event which has turned out
contrary to all expectation" (_Eth_. III., Propos. XVIII. Schol.
i. ii.). Evil-doers have throughout thousands of years felt when
overtaken by punishment _exactly like Spinoza_, on the subject of
their "offence": "here is something which went wrong contrary to my
anticipation," not "I ought not to have done this."--They submitted
themselves to punishment, just as one submits one's self to a disease,
to a misfortune, or to death, with that stubborn and resigned fatalism
which gives the Russians, for instance, even nowadays, the advantage
over us Westerners, in the handling of life. If at that period there
was a critique of action, the criterion was prudence: the real _effect_
of punishment is unquestionably chiefly to be found in a sharpening
of the sense of prudence, in a lengthening of the memory, in a will
to adopt more of a policy of caution, suspicion, and secrecy; in the
recognition that there are many things which are unquestionably beyond
one's capacity; in a kind of improvement in self-criticism. The broad
effects which can be obtained by punishment in man and beast, are the
increase of fear, the sharpening of the sense of cunning, the mastery
of the desires: so it is that punishment _tames_ man, but does not make
him "better"--it would be more correct even to go so far as to assert
the contrary ("Injury makes a man cunning," says a popular proverb: so
far as it makes him cunning, it makes him also bad. Fortunately, it
often enough makes him stupid).
16.
At this juncture I cannot avoid trying to give a tentative and
provisional expression to my own hypothesis concerning the origin of
the bad conscience: it is difficult to make it fully appreciated,
and it requires continuous meditation, attention, and digestion. I
regard the bad conscience as the serious illness which man was bound
to contract under the stress of the most radical change which he has
ever experienced--that change, when he found himself finally imprisoned
within the pale of society and of peace.