[니체: Genealogy of Morals] Guilt, Bad Conscience, and Related Matters

• 출처 1: Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemical Tract. 1887. Trans. By Ian Johnston. Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada.
• 자료: http://johnstoniatexts.x10host.com/nietzsche/genealogy2html.html

※ 발췌 (excerpt):

Second Essay

Guilt, Bad Conscience, and Related Matters

* * *

1

To breed an animal that is entitled to promises--is that not precisely the paradoxical task nature has set itself where human beings are concerned?  Isn't that real problems of human beings? ... The fact that this problem has to a great extent been solved 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 merely 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, to which we can ascribe the fact that while we are digesting what we alone live through and experience and absorb into ourselves (we could call the process mental ingestion [Einverseelung]), we are conscious of what is going on as little as we are with the entire thousand-fold process which our bodily nourishment goes through (so-called physical ingestion [Einverleibung]).  The doors and windows of consciousness are shut temporarily; they remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle with which the underworld of our functional organs keeps working for and against another; a little stillness, 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 (for our organism is arranged as an oligarchy)--that is, as I said, the use of active forgetfulness, a porter at the door, so to speack, a custodian of psychic order, quiet, 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 particular animal, which is necessarily forgetful, 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, forgetfulness will cease to function--that is, for those cases where promises are to be made.  This is no way a merely passive inability ever to be rid of an impression once it has been etched into the mind, nor is it merely indigestion over a word one has pledged at a particular time and which one can no longer be over and done with. No, it's an active wish not to be free of the matter again, an ongoing and continuing desire for what one willed at a particular time, a real memory of one's will, so that between the original "I will," "I will do," and the actual discharge of the will, its action, a world of strange w things, circumstances, even acts of the will can be interposed without a second thought and not break this long chain of the will.  But how much all 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 with certainty, to develop a capability for figures and calculations in general--and for that to occur, a human being must necessarily have first himself 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--he can make himself into a pledge for the future!

2

Precisely that development is the long history of the origin of responsibility.  That task of breeding an animal which is permitted to make promises contains within it, as we have already grasped, as a condition and prerequisite, the more precise task of first making a human being necessarily uniform to some extent, one among others like him, regular and consequently predictable.  The immense task involved in this, what I have called the "morality of custom" (cf. Daybreak 9, 14, 16)--the essential work of a man on his own self in the longest-lasting age of the human race, his entire pre-historical work, derives its meaning, its grand justification, from the following point, no matter how much hardship, tyranny, monotony, and idiocy it also manifested: with the help of the morality of custom and the social strait jacket, the human being was made truly predictable.  Let's position ourselves, by contrast, at the end of this immense process, in the place where the tree at last yields its fruit, where society and the morality of custom finally bring to light the end for which they were simply the means: then we find, as the ripest fruit on that tree, the sovereign individual, something which resembles only itself, which has broken loose again from the morality of custom, the autonomous individual beyond morality (for "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually exclusiv terms), in short, the human being who possesses his own independent and enduring will, who is entitled to make promises--and in him a consciousness quivering in every muscle, proud of what has finally been achieved and has become a living embodiment in him, a real consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of completion for human beings generally.  This man who has become free, who really is entitled to make promises, this master of free will, this sovereign--how is he not to realize the superiority he enjoys over everything which is not permitted to make a promise and make pledges on its own behalf, knowing how much trust, how much fear, and how much respect he creates--he "is worthy" of all three--and how, with this mastery over himself, he has necessarily been given in addition mastery over his circumstances, over nature, and over all less reliable creatures with a shorter will?  The "free" man, the owner of an enduring unbreakable will, by possessing this, also acquires his own standard of value: he looks out from himself at others and confers respect or contempt.  And just as it will be necessary for him to honour those like him, the strong and dependable (who are entitled to make promises)--in other words, everyone who makes promises like a sovereign, seriously, rarely, and slowly, who is sparing with his trust, who honours another when he does trust, who gives his words as something reliable, because he knows he is strong enough to remain upright even when opposed by misfortunre, even when "opposed by fate"--in just the same way it will be neccesary for him to keep his foot ready to kick the scrawny unreliable men, who make promises without being entitled to, and to hold his cane ready for the liar, who breaks his word in the very moment it comes out of his mouth.  The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, of this power over oneself and destiny, has become internalized into the deepest parts of him and grown instinctual, has become an instinct, a dominating instinct:--what will he call it, this dominating instinct, assuming that he finds he needs a word for it? There's no doubt: the sovereign man calls this instinct his conscience.

3

His conscience? ... To begin with, we can conjecture that the idea "conscience," which we are encouraging here in its highest, almost perplexing form, has a long history and changing developmental process behind it already.  To be entitled to pledge one's word, and to do it with pride, and also to be permitted to say "Yes" to oneself--that 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 much longer time it was impossible to see any such fruit--no one could have promised it would appear, even if everything about the tree was certainly getting ready for it and growing in that very direction!--"How does one create a memory for the human animal?  How does one stamp something like that into this partly dull, partly flickering, momentary understanding, this living embodiment of forgetfulness, so that it stays current?" ... This ancient problem, as you can imagine, was not resolved right away with tender answers and methods.  Indeed, there is perhaps nothing more fearful and more terrible in the entire prehistory 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 remains in the memory”--that is a leading principle of the most ancient (unfortunately also the longest) psychology on earth.  We might even say that everywhere on earth nowadays where there is still solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and gloomy colours in the lives of men and people, something of that terror continues its work, the fear with which in earlier times everywhere on earth people made promises, pledged their word, made a vow.  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 cruelest forms of ritual in all the religious cults (and all religions are in their deepest foundations systems of cruelty)--all that originates in that instinct which discovered in pain the most powerful means of helping to develop the memory.  In a certain sense all asceticism belongs here: a couple of ideas are 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 humanity's "memory" was, the more terrible its customs have always appeared.  The harshness of the laws of punishment, in particular, provide a standard for measuring how much trouble people went to in order to triumph over forgetfulness and to maintain a present 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 an especially cruel and hard-hearted people, even less as particularly careless people who live only in the present.  But just take a look at our old penal code in order to understand how much trouble it takes on this earth to breed a "People of Thinkers" (by that I mean the European people 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 basic instincts and their brutal crudity: think of the old German punishments, for example, stoning (--the legend even lets the mill stone fall on the head of the guilty person), breaking on the wheel (the most characteristic invention and specialty of the German genius in the realm 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 14th and 15th century), the well-loved practice of flaying ("cutting flesh off in strips"), carving flesh out of the chest, and probably 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 the memory, and, so far as these precepts were concerned, they gave their word in order to live with the advantages of society--and it's true!  With the assistance of this sort of memory people finally came to “reason”!--Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over emotions, this whole gloomy business called reflection, all these privileges and showpieces of human beings: how expensive they were!  How much blood and horror is at the bottom of all “good things”! ...

4

But then how did that other “gloomy business,” the consciousness of guilt, the whole “bad conscience” come into the world?--And with this we turn back to our genealogists of morality.  I'll say it once more--or have I not said anything about it yet?--they are useless.  With their own merely "modern" experience extending through only a brief period [fünf Spannen lange], with no knowledge of and no desire to know the past, even less a historical instinct, a "second sight"--something necessary at this very point--they nonetheless pursue the history of morality.  That must justifiably produce results which have a less than tenuous relationship to the truth.  Have these genealogists of morality up to now allowed themselves to dream, even remotely, that, for instance, that major moral principle “guilt” [Schuld] derived its origin from the very materialistic idea “debt” [Schulden]?  Or that punishment developed as a repayment, completely without reference to any assumption about freedom or lack of freedom of the will?--and did so, by contrast, to the point where it always first required a high degree of human development so that the animal “man” began to make those much more primitive distinctions between “intentional”, “negligent”, “accidental”, “responsible,” and their opposites and bring them to bear when meting out punishment?  That idea, nowadays so trite, apparently so natural, so unavoidable, which has even 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 is, in fact, an extremely late achievement, indeed, a sophisticated form of human judgment and decision making.  Anyone who moves this idea back to the beginnings is sticking his coarse fingers inappropriately into the psychology of older humanity.  For the most extensive period of human history, punishment was certainly not meted out because people held the instigator of evil responsible for his actions, and thus it was not assumed that only the guilty party should be punished:--it was much more as it still is now when parents punish their children out of anger over some harm they have suffered, anger vented on the perpetrator--but anger restrained and modified through the idea that every injury has some equivalent and that compensation for it could, in fact, be paid out, even if that is through the pain of the perpetrator.  Where did this primitive, deeply rooted, and perhaps by now ineradicable idea derive its power, the idea of an equivalence between punishment and pain?  I have already give away the answer: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is, in general, as ancient as the idea of “legal subject” and which, for its part, refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling, bartering, trading, and exchanging goods.

5

It is true that recalling this contractual relationship arouses, as we might initially expect from what I have observed above, all sorts of suspicion of and opposition to older humanity, which established or allowed it.  It's at this particular moment that people make promises.  At this very point the pertinent issue is to create a memory for the person who makes a promise, so that precisely here, we can surmise, there will exist a place for harshness, cruelty, and pain.  In order to inspire trust in his promise to pay back, in order to give his promise a guarantee of its seriousness and sanctity, in order to impress on his own conscience the idea of paying back as a duty, an obligation, the debtor, by virtue of a contract, pledges to the creditor, in the event that he does not pay, something else that he still “owns,” something else over which he still exercises power, for example, his body or his woman or his freedom or even his life (or, under certain religious conditions, even his blessedness, the salvation of his soul, finally even his peace in the grave, as was the case in Egypt, where the dead body of the debtor even in the tomb found no peace from the creditor--and among the Egyptians, in particular, such peace certainly mattered).  That means that the creditor could inflict all kinds of ignominy and torture on the body of the debtor, for instance, slice off the body as much as seemed appropriate for the size of the debt:--and this point of view early on and everywhere gave rise to precise, sometimes horrific estimates going into the smallest detail, legally established estimates about individual limbs and body parts.  I consider it already a step forward, as evidence of a freer conception of the law, something which calculates more grandly, a more Roman idea of justice, when Rome's Twelve Tables of Laws decreed it was all the same, no matter how much or how litte the creditor cut off in such cases: "let it not be thought a crime if they cut off more or less." [주]1  Let us clarify for ourselves the logic of this whole method of compensation--it is weird enough.  The equivalence is given in this way: instead of an advantage making up directly for the harm (hence, instead of compensation in gold, land, possessions of some sort or another), the creditor is given a kind of pleasure as repayment and compensation--the pleasure of being allowed to discharge his power on a powerless person without having to think about it, the delight in "de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire" [doing wrong for the pleasure of doing it], the enjoyment of violation.  This enjoyment is more highly prized the lower and baser the creditor stands in the social order, and it can easily seem to him a delicious mouthful.  In fact, a foretaste of a higher rank.  By means of the "punishment" of the debtor, the creditor participates in a right belonging to the masters.  Finally he also for once comes to the lofty feeling of despising a being as someone "beneath him," as someone he is entitled to mistreat--or at least, in the event taht the real force of punishment, of executing punishment, has already been transferred to the "authorities," the feeling of seeing the debtor despised and mistreated.  The compensation thus consists of an order for and a right to cruelty.

6

In this area, that is, in the laws of obligation, the world of the moral concepts “guilt,” “conscience,” “duty,” and “sanctity of obligation” has its origin--its beginning, like the beginning of everything great on earth, was watered thoroughly and for a long time with blood.  And can we not add that this world deep down has never again been completely free of a certain smell of blood and torture--(not even with old Kant whose categorical imperative stinks of cruelty)?  In addition, here that weird knot linking the ideas of “guilt and suffering,” which perhaps has become impossible to undo, was first knit together.  Let me pose the question once more: to what extent can suffering be a compensation for “debts”?  To the extent that making someone suffer provides the highest degree of pleasure, to the extent that the person hurt by the debt, in exchange for the injury as well as for the distress caused by the injury, got an extraordinary offsetting pleasure: creating suffering--a real celebration, something that, as I've said, was valued all the more, the greater it contradicted the rank and social position of the creditor.  I have been speculating here, for it's difficult to see through to the foundations of such subterranean things, quite apart from the fact that it's embarrassing.  And anyone who crudely throws into the middle of all this the idea of “revenge” has buried and dimmed his insights rather than illuminated them (--revenge itself, in fact, simply takes us back to the same problem: “How can making someone suffer give us a feeling of satisfaction?”).  It seems to me that the delicacy and, even more the Tartufferie [hypocrisy] of tame house pets (I mean modern man, I mean us) resist imagining with all our power how much cruelty contributes to the great celebratory joy of older humanity, as, in fact, an ingredient mixed into almost all their enjoyments and, from another perspective, how naive, how innocent, their need for cruelty appears, how they fundamentally think of its particular “disinterested malice” (or to use Spinoza's words, the sympathia malevolens [malevolent sympathy] as a normal human characteristic:--and hence as something to which their conscience says a heartful Yes! [주]2  A more deeply penetrating eye might still notice, even today, enough of this most ancient and most fundamental celebratory human joy.  In Beyond Good and Evil, 229 (even earlier in Daybreak, 18, 77, 113), I pointed a cautious finger at the constantly growing spiritualization and “deification” of cruelty, which runs through the entire history of higher culture (and, in a significant sense, even constitues that culture).  In any case, it's not so long ago that people wouldn't think of an aristocratic wedding and folk festival in the grandest style without executions, tortures, or something like an auto-da-fé [burning at the stake], and similarly no noble household lacked creatures on whom people could vent their malice and cruel taunts without a second thought (--remember, for instance, Don Quixote at the court of the duchess; today we read all of Don Quixote with a bitter taste on the tongue; it's almost an ordeal.  In so doing, we could become very foreign, very obscure to the author and his contemporaries--they read it with a fully clear conscience as the most cheerful of books.  They almost dies laughing at it).  Watching suffering makes people feel good; creating suffering makes them feel even better--that's a harsh principle, but an old, powerful, and human, all-too-human major principle, which, by the way, even the apes might perhaps agree with as well.  For people say that, in thinking up bizarre cruelties, the apes already anticipate a great many human actions and are, as it were an “audition.”  Without cruelty there is no celebration: that's what the oldest and longest human history teaches us--and with punishment, too, there is so much celebration!

7

With these ideas, by the way. I have no desire whatsoever to give our pessimists grist for their discordant mills grating with 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 today, now that we have our pessimists.  The darkening of heaven over men's heads has always increased alarmingly in proportion to the growth of human beings' shame before 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 of human beings.  It is much 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 sicky 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 cultivated for himself that upset stomach and that furry tongue which not only made the joy and innocence of the animal repulsive but also made life itself distasteful:--so that now and then he stands there before himself, holds his nose, and with Pope Innocent III disapproves 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, a secretion of spit, urine, and exrement").[주]3  Now, when suffering always has to march out as the first among the arguments against existence, as its most serious question mark, it's good for us to remember the times when people judged 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, and let me say this as a consolation for the delicate, at that time pain did not yet hurt as much as it does nowadays.  That at least 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, even one with the best constitution, almost to despair, but which does not have the same effect on the Negro. (The graph of the human sensitivity to pain seems in fact to sink down remarkably and almost immediately after one has moved beyond 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 in search of scientific answers is simply not worth considering).  Perhaps it is even permissible to concede the possibility that that pleasure in cruelty does not really need to have died out.  It would only require a certain sublimation and subtlety, in proportion to the way pain hurts more nowadays; in other words, it would have 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" [nostalgias for the cross]).  What truly enrages people about suffering is not the suffering itself, but the meaninglessness of suffering.  But neither for the Christian, who has interpreted into suffering an entire secret machinery for salvation, nor for the naive 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 darkness, and that would not readily permit an interesting painful spectacle to escape its attention.  For 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 that purposes (for example, life as riddle, life as a problem of knowledge).  "Every evil a glimpse of which edifies a god is justified": that's how the pre-historical logic of feeling rang out--and was that really confined only to prehistory?  The gods conceived of as friends of cruel spectacle--O how widely this primitive idea still rises up even within our European humanity!  We might well seek advice from, say, 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 to make them happy than the joys of cruelty.  With what sort of expression, do you think, did Homer allow his gods to look down on the fates of men?  What final sense was there basically in the Trojan War and similar tragic terrors?  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 no differently, still looking down on the moral struggles, on heroism and the self-mutilation of the virtuous: the "Heracules of duty" was on a stage, and he knew he was there.  Without someone watching, virtue for this race of actors was something entirely inconceivable.  Surly such a daring and fateful philosophical invention, first made for Europe at that time, the invention of the "free will," of 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, 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, complications, and catastrophes.  A world conceived of as perfectly deterministic would have been predictable to the gods and therefore also soon boring for them--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 great punishment there is also so much celebration!

8

To resume the path of our enquiry, the feeling of guilt, of personal obligation has, as we saw, its origin in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship there is, in the relationship between seller and buyer, creditor and debtor. Here for the first time one person moved up against another person, here an individual measured himself against another individual. We have found no civilization still at such a low level that something of this relationship is not already perceptible.  To set prices, to measure values, to think up equivalencies, to exchange things--that preoccupied man's very first thinking to such a degree that in a certain sense it's what thinking itself is.  Here the oldest form of astuteness was bred; here, too, we can assume[,] are the first beginnings of man's pride, his feeling of pre-eminence in relation to other animals.  Perhaps our word “man” (manas) continues to express directly something of this feeling of the self: the human being describes himself as a being which assesses values, which values and measures, as the “inherently calculating animal.”  Selling and buying, together with their psychological attributes, are even older than the beginnings of any form of social organizations and groupings; out of the most rudimentary form of peronal legal rights the budding feeling of exchange, contract, guild, law, duty, and compensation was instead first ^transferred^ to the crudest and earliest social structures (in their relationships with similar social structures), along with the habit of comparing power with power, of measuring, of calculating.  The eye was now adjusted to this perspective, and with that awkward consistency characteristic of thinking in more ancient human beings, hard to get started but the inexorably moving forward in the same direction, people soon reached the great generalization: "Each thing has its price, ^everything^ can be paid off"--the oldest and most naive moral prinicple of ^justice^, the beginning of all "good nature," all "fairness," all "good will," all "objectivity" on earth.  Justice at this first stage is good will among those approximately equal in power to come to terms with each other, to "come to an agreement" again with each other by compensation--and in relation to those less powerful, to ^compel^ them to arrive at some settlement among themselves.--


9

( ... ... )