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SECOND ESSAY
"GUILT," "BAD CONSCIENCE," AND THE LIKE
1
To rear an animal, which may promise,— is not even this that paradoxical task which nature has set herself, as regards man? Is not even this the true problem of man? . . . . That this problem has, to a considerable extent, been solved, must seem all the more astonishing to any one capable of duly appreciating the reversely operative force, — that of forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is not merely a vis inertiae, as superficial people believe; on the contrary, it is an active, and, in the strictest sense, a positive faculty of check, to which must be attributed the fact that whatever we live to see, whatever we experience and receive into ourselves, does not rise into consciousness during the state of digestion (which state we might call inanimation); no more so, than the entire, thousandfold process, by which the nourishment of our body — so-called "incorporation" — is carried on. To close, for certain times, the doors and windows of our consciousness; to remain undisturbed by the noise and feud, with which the serving organs of our nether-world operate for and against one another; a little silence, a little tabula rasa of consciousness, in order to make room for something new, especially for the nobler functions and functionaries, for governing, fore-seeing, predetermining (for our organism is constituted oligarchically) — such is the advantage of—as we called it — active forgetfulness, comparable to a door-keeper and preserver of the order of soul, of peace and etiquette; which fact makes apparent at once the reason why there can be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no presence — without forgetfulness. The man, in whom this apparatus of checking is injured and stops may be compared (and not only be compared) to one suffering from dyspepsia — he never gets beyond things . . . . Even this of necessity forgetful animal, in which the forgetting represents a force, a form of vigorous health, has reared and acquired for itself a counter-faculty, a memory by the aid of which, in certain cases, forgetfulness is unhinged — for those cases, to wit, in which a promise is to be made. Hence this is not merely a passive not-to-be-able-to-get-rid-of an impression once imprinted; not merely the indigestion caused by a word pledged at some former time with which one cannot settle accounts; but an active not-to-will-to-get- rid-of, a continuous willing of that which once has been willed, a specific memory of will; so that between the original "I will," "I shall do" and the actual discharge of will, its act, we may unhesitatingly interpose a world of new and foreign things, circumstances and even acts of will, without causing this long chain of willing to break. But what does all this presuppose? How must man, in order to be able in this wise to dispose of the future, have learned to distinguish between necessary and accidental happening; to think causally; to see, as though it were present, and anticipate what is distant; to posit with certainty what constitutes the end and what the means for the end; and, in general, to be able to reckon and calculate; — how reckonable, regular and necessary must man himself have become, also to himself, to his own consciousness, in order to be able finally, in the manner of one making a promise, to guarantee for himself as for a future.
2
Just this is the long story of the origin of responsibility. That task of rearing an animal which may promise, involves, as we have seen already, by way of condition and preparation the more immediate task of making man, in the first place, in some degree necessary, uniform, equal among equal beings, regular and consequently reckonable. The gigantic labour of that which I have called "morality of custom" (cf. Dawn of the Day, aph. 9, 14, 16) — the, specific labour of man at himself during the longest period of the existence of mankind, the entire prehistoric work of man, receives its sense and grand justification by this fact, however much of rigour, tyranny, stupidity and idiocy may attach to such work: with the aid of morality of custom and the social strait-jacket, man was made really reckonable. But if we place ourselves at the end of this gigantic process, there where the tree matures its fruits, where society and its morality of custom at last gives birth to that for which it was but the means: we shall find as the ripest fruit pendent from the tree, the sovereign individual, like to itself alone, delivered from the morality of custom, autonomous, supermoral (for "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually preclusive terms), in short, the man of private, independent and long will who may promise — and in him a proud consciousness vibrating in all his fibres, of that which finally has been attained and realised in his person, a true consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of human perfection in general. This freed one, who is really allowed to promise, this master of a free will, this sovereign — surely, he cannot be ignorant of what a superiority he is given by such a will over everything which is not allowed to promise and pledge for itself; how much confidence, how much fear, how much reverence he creates (he deserves all three); and how, with this mastery over his self, he has also been intrusted with the mastery over circumstances, nature, and all creatures possessed of a shorter will and less trustworthy than himself. The "free" man, the possessor of a long, infrangible will, has, in this possession, his standard of valuation; judging others by himself he will either honour or despise, and with the same necessity with which he honours his equals, the strong and the reliable (those that may promise), — every one, to wit, who promises as a sovereign does, reluctantly, rarely, slowly, who is niggard of his confidence, who distinguishes by confiding, whose word is given as something which can be depended upon, because he feels himself strong enough to keep it even against misfortunes, ay, even against fate. With the same necessity he will hold his kick in readiness for the slender greyhounds that promise without having the right to do so, and his scourge for the liar who breaks his word in the very moment when it 'scapes his lips. The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over self and fate, has penetrated into the inmost depth of his personality and become instinct, dominating instinct: — by what name will he call it, this dominating instinct, supposing, that he personally needs a word for it? But there can be no doubt: this sovereign man will call it his conscience . . . .
3
His conscience? . . . . It can be told in advance, that the concept "conscience," which here presents itself to us in its final, almost strange phase of development, had before reaching this stage experienced a long history and transmutation of forms. To be able to pledge for one's self and to be, consequently, also able to say yes to one's self — this, as I said, is a ripe fruit, but it is also a late fruit. How long it had to remain pendent from the tree in a state of bitter, acid taste! And for a still longer time nothing could be seen of such a fruit! No one was allowed to promise it, though certainly the entire tree was in a state of preparation for and growth towards this very fruit! "How may a memory be made for the animal man? How may this superficial, this half blunted, half giddy understanding, this walking forgetfulness, be impressed in such a manner as will leave a permanent mark?" . . . . This primeval problem was, as may be supposed, not solved exactly with delicate answers and means; indeed, perhaps nothing in the early history of man is so terrible and so awful as his mnemotechny. "In order to make a thing stay, it must be burned into memory; only that which never ceases to hurt, remains fixed in memory;" these are among the fundamental truths of the oldest (unfortunately also longest) psychology on earth. We might even say that wherever on earth solemnity, earnestness, mystery and sombre colours are still to be found in the life of men and peoples, something of the terribleness operates still with which promises, pledges and vows were made in former times. The past, the longest, deepest, sternest past breathes upon us and rises within us whenever we grow "earnest." Blood, tortures, sacrifices were indispensable whenever man found it necessary to make a memory for himself; the most frightful sacrifices and pledges (in which category are included the offerings of the first-born), the most abominable mutilations (e.g., castrations), the most barbarous ritual observances in all religious cults (all religions are at the lowest bottom systems of cruelties) — all these things owe their origin to that instinct, which found out pain mental and physical to be the most potent adjutory means of mnemonics. In a certain sense asceticism altogether falls under this head: a few ideas are to be rendered indelible, omnipresent, unforgettable, "fixed," for the purpose of hypnotising the entire nervous and intellectual system by means of these "fixed ideas" — and the ascetic procedures and forms of life furnish the means for freeing these ideas from competition with all the other ideas, for rendering them "unforgettable." The poorer the memory of mankind, the more terrible the aspect which its customs present! The rigour of the penal laws, especially, furnishes us with a standard for the trouble it had to take in mastering forgetfulness and in keeping present a few primitive requirements of social life to these fickle-mooded slaves of emotion and desire. We Germans certainly do not consider ourselves to be an extraordinarily cruel and hard-hearted people, nor a people over-much addicted to thoughtlessness and unconcernedness for the morrow; but a mere glance at our ancient penal codes will serve to convey an idea of the effort expended in the task of rearing a "nation of thinkers" (rather say: that nation in Europe, in which at this very day the maximum amount of confidence, earnest tastelessness and matter-of-factness is to be found, and which, with such endowments, is entitled to rear every variety of European mandarins). By the aid of terrible means these Germans have made for themselves a memory to conquer their fundamental mob-instincts and their brutal bluntness. We but call to mind the ancient German punishments, "stoning" for instance (already the legend makes the millstone fall on the head of the evil-doer), the rack (the most private invention and specialty of German genius in the domain of punishment!), the operation of piercing the criminal with pales, the punishment of being mangled and trampled upon by horses ("quartering"), the seething of the criminal in oil or wine (as late as the fourteenth and fifteenth century), the favourite punishment of flaying ("slice-cutting"), the cutting of flesh out of the breast, and I suppose also the painting of the evil-doer with honey and subsequent exposure to the flies in hot sunshine. By means of such pictures and performances the memory will at last take hold of some five or six "I-will-nots" in regard to which it has made its promise, in order to enjoy the boons of society — and sure enough! by means of this kind of memory people at last became "reasonable"! Alas, reason, earnestness, the mastery over the emotions, the entire, dreary affair called reflection, all these privileges and pageants of man, how dearly they have ultimately been paid for! how much blood and horror is at the bottom of all "good things"! . . . .
4
But how did that other "dreary affair," — the consciousness of guilt, the whole of "bad conscience" come to make its appearance upon earth? — And this brings us back to our genealogists of morals. Once again I say — or, is this the first time I say so? they are good for nothing. A mere "modern" subjective experience, some five spans in length! no knowledge, no will to know the past, still less any historical instinct, any gift of "second sight," which just for our problem is necessary! and, for all that, to practise "history of morals"! It is but reasonable that this should have results the relations of which to truth are rather more than prudish. Have these genealogists of morality who lived heretofore ever had even so much as an inkling of the fact, that, e.g., that fundamental notion of morality "guilt" takes its origin from the very material notion "debts"? Or that punishment as a retaliation developed quite aloof from every presupposition as to the freedom or not-freedom of the will? — and so much so, that always a very advanced stage of humanisation must first be reached before the animal "man" may begin to make those much more primitive distinctions "intentional," "negligent," "accidental," "responsible," and their antitheses, and to turn them to account in the administration of punishment. That idea now so cheap and seemingly so natural, so inevitable, which I suppose was even made to serve the purpose of an explanation of the origin of the feeling of justice upon earth, — the idea, that the malefactor deserves punishment because he might have acted otherwise, is, in fact, an extremely late, nay, a refined form of human judgment and reasoning; and he, who puts it into the beginning of history, will, very indelicately, sin against the psychology of early mankind. During the longest period of man's history punishment was not inflicted for the reason that the offender was held responsible for his deed; that is to say, not upon the supposition that the guilty party alone was to be punished; but rather, for that same reason for which parents even now-a-days punish their children: from anger over a damage done, which anger vents itself against the wrong-doer, but is, at the same time, checked and modified by the idea, that every damage finds its equivalent in some thing or other and can actually be paid off, perhaps even by the wrong-doer's pain. Whence, ye ask, the power of this ancient, deep-rooted, and now perhaps inexstirpable idea, the idea of an equivalence of wrong and pain? I have already betrayed the secret: — in the agreement between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the very existence of legal parties, and which in its turn points back to the fundamental forms of buying and selling, exchange of commerce and intercourse.
5
The representation to ourselves of these circumstances of agreement will of course, as is but natural to expect from all that has been said, give rise to much suspicion and antagonism against early mankind which created and permitted them. Just here promises are made; just here the problem is to make a memory for him who promises; just here, as we may suppose, will be a storehouse of all that is stern, cruel and painful. To awaken confidence for the promise of payment made by him, to guarantee the earnestness and sacredness of his promise, to impress his own consciousness with the fact that payment is an obligation and duty, the debtor will, by virtue of his agreement, consign by way of security in case of nonpayment to the creditor something which he still "possesses," — his body, e.g., or his wife or his freedom or his life (or even, under certain religious presuppositions, his blessedness, the salvation of his soul, and finally even his peace in the grave: such was the case in Egypt, where not even the grave afforded rest to the body of the debtor from the pursuit of his creditor, — true enough, that precisely in the case of the Egyptians this rest was something very peculiar). More especially, the creditor could subject the body of the debtor to all kinds of insult and torture, e.g., cut so much from it as seemed adequate to the magnitude of the debt; and, proceeding from this point of view, there existed everywhere, at an early date, careful estimations, often frightfully minute and circumstantial and sanctioned by law, as to the value of individual limbs and parts of the body. I regard it as a step in advance and as the proof of a freer, more liberally judging, more Roman conception of law, when the Roman code of the twelve tables decreed the large or small quantity, which the creditors cut out in such a case, to be a matter of indifference "si plus minusve secuerunt, ne fraude esto." Let us make clear to ourselves the logic of this form of compensation: it is strange enough! The equivalence is brought in in this manner that, in place of some direct advantage covering the loss (that is to say, in place of compensation by way of money, land or property of any kind) the creditor is conceded a sort of pleasurable feeling as his remuneration and compensation, — the feeling of pleasure arising from an arbitrary manifestation of power against some less powerful being, the keen delight "de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire," the joy of doing violence: which joy will be appreciated more highly according as the position of the creditor is lower and farther down in the scale of society, and which he is very apt to regard as a delicious morsel, nay, the prelibation of a higher rank. By the administration of punishment against the debtor, the creditor will become a sharer in a privilege of the masters. At last he also will for once be inspired by the elevating feeling of being allowed to despise and maltreat somebody as being "lower than himself" — or, at any rate, in case the proper power of punishment, the executive power, has already passed to the authorities, the feeling of seeing him despised and maltreated. The compensation, therefore, consists in a grant and claim upon cruelty.
6
In this sphere, i.e., the sphere of the law of obligation, the cradle of the world of moral concepts is to be found, — "guilt," "conscience," "duty," "sacredness of duty." Their origin, as the origin of everything great on earth, was for a long time sprinkled and thoroughly saturated with blood. And might we not add that this world never again could rid itself entirely of a certain smell of blood and torture? (Not even excepting the old Kant: the categorical imperative smells of cruelty . . . .) Here also that dismal — and now perhaps inseparable — combination of the ideas of "guilt and suffering" was first made. To put the question once again: in what way may suffering be a compensation for "debts"? In that the act of making another suffer produced the highest kind of pleasure; in that the loss (to which must be added the vexation caused by the loss) brought, by way of exchange, to the damaged party a most remarkable counter-pleasure: the making another suffer, — a true festival, as it were, — something which, as I said, was valued the more highly, the greater the contrast between it and the rank and social position of the creditor. This, however, I offer merely by way of conjecture: for the bottom of these subterranean things it is difficult to see, — disregarding even the fact that such a sight is painful; and he who with heavy hand throws between these things the concept of "revenge," will, instead of making the task easier for himself, rather cut off and obscure his own view (for revenge leads, in its turn, back to the same problem, "How can the act of making another suffer be a satisfaction?"). The feeling of delicacy, and still more the tartuffism of tame, domesticated animals (rather say — of modern men, rather say — of us) abhors, it seems to me, the energetic representation of the extent to which cruelty constituted the great festive joy of early mankind, and, in fact, is admixed as a necessary ingredient of nearly all their joys; and on the other hand, the representation of the naïveté the innocence with which this desire of cruelty manifests itself; of the deliberate manner in which "disinterested malignity " (or, in the words of Spinoza, sympathia malevolens) is posited as a normal attribute of man, i.e., as something to which his conscience with hearty will says Yes! A keener eye will perhaps be aware even now of much of this oldest and most thorough of man's festive joys. In Beyond Good and Evil, aph. 188 (and before that in Dawn of the Day, aph. 18, 77, 113), I have pointed out, with cautious finger, the steadily increasing spiritualisation and "divinification" of cruelty, which twines through the entire history of higher civilisation (and which, if taken in a deeper sense, even constitutes it). At any rate, the period is not yet so very distant, when princely weddings and first-class popular celebrations were inconceivable without executions, tortures or an auto-da-fé; and when, similarly, an aristocratic family was inconceivable without a being against whom all were at liberty to direct the shafts of their malice and banter. We recall, for instance, the case of Don Quixote at the court of the duchess. In reading Don Quixote we modern readers experience a bitter sensation upon our tongues, almost a torture, and hence we should, for this very reason, appear very unintelligible and unfathomable to the author of it and his contemporaries. They read it with the very best conscience, as the most cheerful of books; they would almost — split with laughter. To see another suffer is pleasant; to make another suffer is still more pleasant — a stern dictum this is, but also a fundamental proposition, old, mighty, human, all-too-human, which, perhaps, even the apes would sign. For we are told that, in the devising of bizarre cruelties, the apes abundantly announce and, as it were, "prelude" man. No festival without cruelty: thus the oldest and longest history of man teaches us — and in punishment, also, there is so much that is festival!
7
With such thoughts I am, by the bye, not at all willing to supply a fresh current of water for our pessimists upon their jarring and ill-sounding mill-wheels of life-weariness; on the contrary, we expressly attest the fact, that formerly, when mankind did not as yet feel ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more pleasant than now that there exist pessimists. The darkening of the sky above man has ever increased in the same ratio that man's shame of man kept growing. The weary, pessimistic look, the mistrust towards the riddle of life, the chilling No of the surfeit of life — these are not the symptoms of the evilest periods of humanity. On the contrary, being swamp-plants, they appear only when the swamp to which they belong has sprung into existence. By that I mean the sickly effeminacy and moralisation, by means of which the animal "man" is taught to feel ashamed at last of all his instincts. On the road to become an "angel" (not to use a harder word in this connection) man has reared for himself that spoiled stomach and "furred" tongue, which rendered obnoxious to him not only the pleasure and innocence of the animal, but made life itself of ill taste to him: — so that at times he will stand before himself with shut nose and sum up, disapproving of them, the catalogue of his disagreeableness ("impure generation, nauseous alimentation in the womb, meanness of the matter from which man develops, fearful stench, secretion of saliva, urine and filth"). Now that "suffering" always is made to march along as the first of the arguments against existence, and as the most serious interrogation mark of it, we do well to recall the times in which the reverse opinion prevailed, because the pleasure of making another suffer was held to be indispensable and constituted a most potent charm, a special bait of seduction to life. Peradventure pain in those days — so much by way of consolation to tenderlings — did not smart so much as now; thus at least would a physician be allowed to infer who has treated negroes (taking the negro as representative of prehistoric man) in cases of serious internal inflammation, such as drive almost to despair even the soundest-constitutioned European. This is not the case with negroes. (The curve of man's receptivity for pain seems, in fact, to undergo an uncommonly rapid and almost sudden lowering, as soon as the upper ten-thousand or ten-million of over-civilisation are once left behind, and I, for my part, do not doubt that, compared with one single painful night of one single, hysterical, dainty woman of culture, the sufferings of all animals so far questioned, knife in hand, with a view to scientific answers, simply fall out of consideration.) Perchance the possibility is even admissible that this delight in cruelty has, in reality, not altogether become extinct: but that, in proportion to the augmented intensity of pain now-a-days, it only requires a certain sublimation and subtilisation; it would, more especially, have to be transplanted into the territory of the imaginative and the intellectual; and be decorated with nothing but names so innocent as to banish every suspicion from even the most delicate hypocritical conscience. "Tragic pity" is such a name; another is "les nostalgies de la croix" That which makes man revolt against suffering, is not suffering as such, but the senselessness of suffering: neither for the Christian, however, who interpreted into suffering a complete system of secret machinery of salvation, nor for the naïve man of still earlier times, who contrived to interpret all suffering with a view to the spectator and the begetter of suffering, did this senseless suffering exist. In order to make it possible to banish from the world and honestly deny all hidden, undiscovered and unwitnessed suffering, man in those days was almost forced to invent gods and intermediary beings of every rank and degree, something, in short, also straying in secret abodes, seeing in the dark, and not very likely to let any interesting and painful exhibition escape its notice. By means of such inventions, to wit, life then practised the feat, which it has ever practised, — the feat of self-vindication, of vindicating its own "ills." At present other adjutory inventions would seem to be necessary for this purpose (life for instance regarded as riddle, or life as problem of perception). "All ills are justified, the sight of which edifies a god:" so ran in times of yore the logic of feeling. And rightly considered, did it so run only in times of yore? The gods conceived as the friends of cruel spectacles, — oh, how far this primeval conception reaches over and into our European humanisation! On this point Calvin, or Luther e.g., may be consulted. Certain it is at any rate that a people as late as the Greeks could think of no more delicious condiment of the happiness of its gods than the pleasures of cruelty. With what kind of eyes, do you think, Homer made his gods look down upon the fortunes of man? What was the ultimate meaning of Trojan wars and similar tragic enormities? No doubt whatever: they were intended as festive games for the gods: and very likely, in so far as in such matters the poet — more than the rest of mankind — is of "godlike" tribe, as festive games also for poets . . . . Quite in the same manner, later on the moral philosophers of Greece represented to themselves the eyes of God as looking down upon the moral struggle, the heroism and self-torment of the virtuous: the " Herakles of duty " acted upon a stage and was conscious of this fact; virtue without witnesses was something quite inconceivable to this nation of actors. Might we not suppose, that that daring and so extremely fatal invention of the philosophers then first made for Europe, the invention of "free will," of absolute spontaneity of man as regards Good and Evil, was made with the express purpose of getting the right to have the concept, that the interest of the gods in man, and human virtue, could never be exhausted? On this terrene stage truly novel things — unheard-of agitations, complications, catastrophes — must never be wanting; such was their idea. An exclusively deterministically conceived world would have been divinable for gods, and thereby, before long also fatiguing,— reason enough for these friends of the gods, the philosophers, not to impute to them such a deterministic world! All mankind of antiquity is full of delicate considerations for the "spectator,"—being, as it was, an essentially public, an essentially ostentatious world to which happiness without feasts and spectacles was inconceivable. — And, once again, in grand punishment also, there is so much that is festival.
