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Second EssayGuilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters3
His conscience? For a start we can conjecture that the idea of "conscience," which we are encountering here in its highest, almost perplexing form, already had a long history and developmental process behind it. To be entitled to pledge one`s word, to do it with pride, and also to say "yes" to oneself - that right 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 longer time it was impossible to see any such fruit. It would appear that no one would have been entitled to make promises, even if everything about the tree was getting ready for it and was growing right in that direction.
"How does one create a memory for the human animal? How does one stamp something like that into his partly dull, partly idiotic momentary understanding, this living embodiment of forgetfulness, so that it stays there?" This ancient problem, as you can imagine, was not resolved right away with tender answers and methods. Perhaps there is nothing more fearful and more terrible in the entire pre-history 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 stays in the memory" - that is a leading principle of the most ancient (and unfortunately the most recent) psychology on earth.
We might even say that everywhere on earth nowadays where there is still solemnity, seriousness, mystery, gloomy colours in the lives of men and people, something of that terror is still at work, the fear with which in earlier times on earth people made promises, pledged their word, or praised something. 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 at bottom systems of cruelty) - all that originates in that instinct which discovered that pain was the most powerful means of helping to develop the memory.
In certain sense all asceticism belongs here: a couple of ideas need 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 the human`s "memory" was, the more terrible his customs have always appeared. The harshness of the laws of punishment provide a special standard for measuring how much trouble people went to in order to triumph over forgetfulness and to maintain the 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 a particularly cruel and hard-hearted people, even less as particularly careless people who live only in the present. But have a look at our old penal code in order to understand how much trouble it took on this earth to breed a "People of Thinkers" (by that I mean the peoples of Europe, 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 and brutally crude basic instincts. Think of the old German punishments, for example, stoning (even the legend lets the mill stone fall on the head of the guilty person), breaking on the wheel (the unique invention and specialty of the German genius in the area 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, along with, of course, 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 their memory, and so far as these precepts were concerned they gave their word in order to live with the advantages of society - and that was that! With the assistance of this sort of memory people finally came to "reason"! Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over emotions, the whole gloomy business called reflection, all these privileges and ceremonies of human beings - how expensive they were! How much blood and horror is the basis for all "good things."
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