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Second EssayGuilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters1
To breed an animal that is entitled to make promises - surely that is the essence of 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 largely been resolved 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 mere 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.
We can ascribe to forgetfulness the fact what while we are digesting what we live through and experience and then absorb (we might call the process mental ingestion [Einverseeling]), we are conscious of what is going on as little as we are with the thousandfold process which our bodily nourishment goes through (so-called physical ingestion [Einverleibung]). The doors and windows of consciousness are shut from time to time, so that it stays undisturbed from the noise and struggle with which the underworld of our functional organs keeps them working for and against one another - a small quiet place, 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 (our organism is arranged as an oligarchy) - that is, as I said, the use of active forgetfulness, like some porter at the door, a maintainer of psychic order, quiet, and 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 necessarily forgetful animal 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 its 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`s been etched into the mind, nor is it merely indigestion over a word one has pledged at a particular time. No, it`s an active wish not to be free of the matter, a continuing desire for what one willed at a particular time, a real memory of one`s will, so that between the original "I will" or "I will do" and the actual discharge of the will, its real action, without thinking about it, a world of strange new things, circumstances, even acts of the will can intervene, without breaking this long chain of the will.
But consider what 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 safely, to develop a capability for figures and calculations in general - and for that to occur, a human being must necessarily have first 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 - who makes himself into a pledge for the future!
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