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Second EssayGuilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters4
But then how did that other "gloomy business," the consciousness of guilt, the whole "bad conscience" come into the world? With this we turn back to our genealogists of morality. I`ll say it once more - or perhaps I haven`t said it at all yet - they are useless. With their own purely "modern" experience extending only through five periods, with no knowledge of or any desire to know the past, and even less historical insight, a "second perspective" - something so necessary at this point - they nonetheless pursue the history of morality. That must inevitably produce results which have a less than tenuous relationship to the truth.
Have these genealogists of morality up to this point allowed themselves to dream, even remotely, that, for instance, that major moral principle "guilt" [Schuld] derives its origin from the very materialistic idea "debt" [Schulden] or that punishment developed entirely as repayment, without reference to any assumption about the freedom or lack of freedom of the will - and did so to the point where it first required a high degree of human development [Vermenschlichung] so that the animal "man" began to make those much more primitive distinctions between "intentional," "negligent," "accidental," "of sound mind" and their opposites and bring them to bear when handing out punishment? That unavoidable idea, nowadays so trite and apparently natural, which has really had to serve as the explanation how the feeling of justice in general came into existence on earth - "The criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted otherwise" - this idea, in fact, is an extremely late achievement, indeed, a sophisticated form of human judgment and decision making.
Anyone who moves this idea back to the very beginnings is sticking his coarse fingers inappropriately into the psychology of primitive humanity. For the most extensive period of human history punishment was not meted out because people held the instigator of evil responsible for his actions, nor was it assumed that only the guilty party should be punished. It was much more the case, as it still is now when parents punish their children, of anger over some harm which people have suffered, anger vented on the perpetrator. But this anger was restrained and modified through the idea that every injury had some equivalent and that compensation for it could, in fact, be paid out, even if that was through the pain of the perpetrator.
Where did this primitive, deeply rooted, and perhaps by now in eradicable idea derive its power, the idea of an equivalence between punishment and pain? I have already given away the answer: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as ancient as the idea of "someone subject to law" and in itself refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling, bartering, trading, and exchanging goods.
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