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Second EssayGuilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters7
With these ideas, by the way, I have no desire whatsoever to give our pessimists grist for their discordant mills grating with the weariness of life. On the contrary, I want to state very clearly that in that period when human beings had not yet become ashamed of their cruelty, life on earth was happier than it is now, now that we have our pessimists. The darkening of heaven over men`s heads always increased quickly in proportion to the growth of human beings` shame at human beings. The tired pessimistic look, the mistrust of the riddle of life, the icy denial stemming from disgust with life - these are not the signs of the wickedest eras in the history of human beings. It`s more the case that they first come to light as the swamp plants they are when the swamp to which they belong is there - I mean the sickly mollycoddling and moralizing, thanks to which the animal "man" finally learns to feel shame about all his instincts.
On his way to becoming an "angel" (not to use a harsher word here), man developed an upset stomach and a furry tongue which made him not only fight against the joy and innocence of the animal but even lose his taste for life, so that now and then he stands there, holds his nose, and with Pope Innocent III disapproves of himself and makes a catalogue of his nastiness ("conceived in filth, disgustingly nourished in his mother`s body, developed out of evil material stuff, stinking horribly, discharging spit, urine, and excrement"). Now, when suffering always has to march out as the first argument against existence, as its most serious question mark, it`s good for us to remember the times when people saw things the other way around, because they couldn`t do without making people suffer and saw a first-class magic in it, a really tempting enticement for living.
Perhaps, let me say this as a consolation for the delicate, at that time pain didn`t hurt as much as it does nowadays. At least that could be the conclusion of a doctor who had treated a Negro (taking the latter as a representative of pre-historical man) for a bad case of inner inflammation, which drives the European with the best constitution to despair but which doesn`t have the same effect on the Negro. (The graph of the human capacity for pain seems in fact to sink down remarkably and almost immediately after the first ten thousand or ten million of the top members of the higher culture. And I personally have no doubt that, in comparison with one painful night of a single hysterical well-educated female, the total suffering of all animals which up to now have been interrogated by the knife of science is really insignificant).
Perhaps it is even permissible to concede the possibility that that pleasure in cruelty does not really need to die out. Since today pain does more harm, the relevant pleasure needed only to be sublimated and made more subtle - in other words, it had to appear translated into the imaginative and spiritual and embellished with nothing but names so unobjectionable that they arouse no suspicion in even the most delicate hypocritical conscience ("tragic pity" is one such name; another is "les nostalgies de la croix" [nostalgia for the cross]). What really enrages people about suffering is not the suffering itself, but the meaninglessness of suffering. But neither for the Christian, who sees in suffering an entire secret machinery for salvation, nor for the naïve men of older times, who understood how to interpret all suffering in relation to the spectator or to the person inflicting the suffering, was there generally any such meaningless suffering.
In order for the hidden, undiscovered, unwitnessed suffering to be removed from the world and for people to be able to deny it honestly, they were then almost compelled to invent gods and intermediate beings at all levels, high and low - briefly put, something that also roamed in hidden places, that also looked into the darkness, and that would not readily permit an interesting painful spectacle to escape its attention. Hence, with the help of such inventions life then understood and has always understood how to justify itself by a trick, how to justify its "evil." Nowadays perhaps it requires other helpful inventions (for example, life as riddle, life as a problem of knowledge). "Every evil which is uplifting in the eyes of God is justified": that`s how the pre-historical logic of feeling rang out—and was that really confined to pre-history? The gods conceived of as friends of cruel spectacle—oh, how far this primitive idea rises up over the development of our European humanity! We might well seek advice from Calvin and Luther on this point.
At any rate it is certain that even the Greeks knew of no more acceptable snack to offer their gods for their happiness that the joys of cruelty. With what sort of expression, do you think, did Homer allow his gods to look down on the fate of men? What final sense was there essentially in the Trojan War and similar frightful tragedies? We cannot entertain the slightest doubts about this: they were intended as celebrations for the gods - and, to the extent that the poet is in these matters more "godlike" than other men, as festivals for the poets as well. Later the Greek moral philosophers in the same way imagined the eyes of god looking down on the moral struggles, on heroism and the self-mutilation of the virtuous: the "Hercules of duty" was on stage, and he knew he was there. Without someone watching, virtue for this race of actors was something entirely inconceivable.
Surely that daring and fateful philosophical invention, first made for Europe at that time, the "free will," the absolutely spontaneous nature of human beings in matters of good and evil, was created above all to justify the idea that the interest of gods in men and in human virtue could never run out? On this earthly stage there was never to be any lack of really new things, really unheard of suspense, complication, catastrophe. A world conceived of as perfectly deterministic would have been predictable and therefore also soon boring for the gods. That was reason enough for these friends of the gods, the philosophers, not to ascribe such a deterministic world to their gods! All of ancient humanity is full of sensitive consideration for "the spectator," for a truly public, truly visible world, which did not know how to imagine happiness without dramatic performances and festivals. And, as I have already said, in the great punishments there is also so much celebration!
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