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Second EssayGuilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters15
At one point Spinoza became aware of this point (something which irritates his interpreters, like Kuno Fischer, who really go to great lengths to misunderstand him on this issue), when one afternoon, confronted by some memory or other (who knows what?), he pondered the question about what, as far as he was concerned, was left of the celebrated morsus conscientiae [the bite of conscience] - for he had expelled good and evil into the human imagination and had irascibly defended the honour of his "free" God against those blasphemers who claimed that in everything God worked sub ratione boni [with good reason] ("but that means that God would be subordinate to Fate, a claim which, if true, would be the greatest of all contradictions").. For Spinoza the world had gone back again into that state of innocence in which it existed before the fabrication of the idea of a bad conscience. So what, then, had happened to the morsus conscientiae?
"The opposite of gaudium [joy]," Spinoza finally told himself "is sorrow, accompanied by the image of something over and done with which happened contrary to all expectation (Ethics III, Proposition XVIII, Schol. I. II). Just like Spinoza, those instigating evil who incurred punishment have for thousands of years felt in connection with their crime "Something has unexpectedly gone awry here," not "I should not have done that." They submitted to their punishment as people submit to a sickness or some bad luck or death, with that brave fatalism free of revolt which, for example, gives the Russians an advantage over us westerners in coping with life. If back then there was some criticism of the act, such criticism came from prudence: without question we must seek the essential effect of punishment above all in an increase of prudence, in a extension of memory, in a will to go to work from now on more carefully, mistrustfully, and secretly, with the awareness that we are in many things too weak, in a kind of improved ability to judge ourselves.
In general, what can be achieved through punishment, in human beings and animals, is an increase in fear, a honing of prudence, control over desires. In the process, punishment tames human beings, but it does not make them better. People might be more justified in asserting the opposite (Popular wisdom says "Injury makes people prudent," but to the extent that it makes them prudent it also makes them bad. Fortunately, often enough it makes people stupid.)
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