Part 5

Nietzsche supports his hypothesis by derivations, some doubtful, others incorrect; but their value is immaterial.

Where Nietzsche's words are quoted, in the course of this essay, considerable use has been made of the complete English translation of his works, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.--Tr.

Nietzsche would define man as an animal that can make and keep promises.

He sees the real nobility of man in his capacity for promising something, answering for himself and undertaking a responsibility--since man, with the mastery of himself which this capacity implies, necessarily acquires in addition a mastery over external circumstances and over other creatures, whose will is not so lasting.

The consciousness of this responsibility is what the sovereign man calls his conscience.

What, then, is the past history of this responsibility, this conscience? It is a long and bloody one. Frightful means have been used in the course of history to train men to remember what they have once promised or willed, tacitly or explicitly. For milleniums man was confined in the strait-jacket of the morality of custom, and by such punishments as stoning, breaking on the wheel or burning, by burying the sinner alive, tearing him asunder with horses, throwing him into the water with a stone on his neck or in a sack, by scourging, flaying and branding--by all these means a long memory for what he had promised was burnt into that forgetful animal, man; in return for which he was permitted to enjoy the advantages of being a member of society.

According to Nietzsche's hypothesis, the consciousness of guilt originates simply as consciousness of a debt. The relation of contract between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the earliest primitive forms of human intercourse in buying, selling, bartering, etc.--this is the relation that underlies it. The debtor (in order to inspire confidence in his promise of repayment) pledges something he possesses: his liberty, his woman, his life; or he gives his creditor the right of cutting a larger or smaller piece of flesh from his body, according to the amount of the debt. (The Roman Code of the Twelve Tables; again in The Merchant of Venice.)

The logic of this, which has become somewhat strange to us, is as follows: as compensation for his loss the creditor is granted a kind of voluptuous sensation, the delight of being able to exercise his power upon the powerless.

The reader may find evidence in Rée (op. cit., p. 13 ff.) for Nietzsche's dictum, that for milleniums this was the view of mankind: The sight of suffering does one good.

The infliction of suffering on another is a feast at which the fortunate one swells with the joy of power. We may also find evidence in Rée that the instincts of pity, fairness and clemency, which were afterwards glorified as virtues, were originally regarded almost everywhere as morally worthless, nay, as indications of weakness.

Buying and selling, as well as everything psychologically connected therewith and older than any form of social organisation, contain the germs, in Nietzsche's view, of compensation, assessing, justice and duty. Man soon became proud of himself as a being who measures values. One of the earliest generalisations was this: Everything has its price. And the thought that everything can be paid for was the oldest and most naïve canon of justice.

Now the whole of society, as it gradually develops, stands in the same relation to its members as the creditor to the debtor. Society protects its members; they are assured against the state of outlawry--on condition that they do not break their pledges to the community. He who breaks his word--the criminal--is relegated to the outlawry involved in exclusion from society.

As Nietzsche, who is so exclusively taken up by the psychological aspect, discards all accessories of scholarship, it is impossible to examine directly the accuracy of his assertions. The historical data will be found collected in Rée's paragraphs on resentment and the sense of justice, and in his section on the buying-off of revenge, i. e. settlement by fines.

Other thinkers besides Nietzsche (such as E. von Hartmann and Rée) have combated the view that the idea of justice has its origin in a state of resentment, and Nietzsche has scarcely brought to light any fresh and convincing proof; but what is characteristic of him as a writer is the excess of personal passion with which he attacks this view, obviously because it is connected with the reasoning of modern democracy.

In many a modern cry for justice there rings a note of plebeian spite and envy. Involuntarily many a modern savant of middle-class or lower middle-class origin has attributed an unwarrantable importance to the atavistic emotions prevalent among those who have been long oppressed: hatred and rancour, spite and thirst for revenge.

Nietzsche does not occupy himself for an instant with the state of things in which revenge does duty as the sole punitive justice; for the death feud is not a manifestation of the thrall's hatred of his master, but of ideas of honour among equals. He dwells exclusively on the contrast between a ruling caste and a caste of slaves, and shows a constantly recurring indignation with doctrines which have caused the progressive among his contemporaries to look with indulgence on the instincts of the populace and with suspicion or hostility on master spirits. His purely personal characteristic, however, the unphilosophical and temperamental in him, is revealed in the trait that, while he has nothing but scorn and contempt for the down-trodden class or race, for the slave morality resulting from its suppressed rancour, he positively revels in the ruling caste's delight in its power, in the atmosphere of healthiness, freedom, frankness and truthfulness in which it lives. Its acts of tyranny he defends or excuses. The image it creates for itself of the slave caste is to him far less falsified than that which the latter forms of the master caste.

Nor can there be serious question of any real injustice committed by this caste. For there is no such thing as right or wrong in itself. The infliction of an injury, forcible subjection, exploitation or annihilation is not in itself a wrong, cannot be such, since life in its essence, in its primary functions, is nothing but oppression, exploitation and annihilation. Conditions of justice can never be anything but exceptional conditions, that is, as limitations of the real desire of life, the object of which is power.

Nietzsche replaces Schopenhauer's Will to Life and Darwin's Struggle for Existence by the Will to Power. In his view the fight is not for life--bare existence--but for power. And he has a great deal to say--somewhat beside the mark--of the mean and paltry conditions those Englishmen must have had in view who set up the modest conception of the struggle for life. It appears to him as if they had imagined a world in which everybody is glad if he can only keep body and soul together. But life is only an expression for the minimum. In itself life seeks, not self-preservation alone, but self-increase, and this is precisely the "will to power." It is therefore obvious that there is no difference of principle between the new catchword and the old; for the struggle for existence necessarily leads to the conflict of forces and the fight for power. Now a system of justice, seen from this standpoint, is a factor in the conflict of forces. Conceived as supreme, as a remedy for every kind of struggle, it would be a principle hostile to life and destructive of the future and progress of humanity.

Something similar was in the mind of Lassalle, when he declared that the standpoint of justice was a bad standpoint in the life of nations. What is significant of Nietzsche is his love of fighting for its own sake, in contrast to the modern humanitarian view. To Nietzsche the greatness of a movement is to be measured by the sacrifices it demands. The hygiene which keeps alive millions of weak and useless beings who ought rather to die, is to him no true progress. A dead level of mediocre happiness assured to the largest possible majority of the miserable creatures we nowadays call men, would be to him no true progress. But to him, as to Renan, the rearing of a human species higher and stronger than that which now surrounds us (the "Superman"), even if this could only be achieved by the sacrifice of masses of such men as we know, would be a great, a real progress. Nietzsche's visions, put forth in all seriousness, of the training of the Superman and his assumption of the mastery of the world, bear so strong a resemblance to Renan's dreams, thrown out half in jest, of a new Asgard, a regular manufactory of Æsir (Dialogues philosophiques, 117), that we can scarcely doubt the latter's influence. But what Renan wrote under the overwhelming impression of the Paris Commune, and, moreover, in the form of dialogue, allowing both pro and con. to be heard, has crystallised in Nietzsche into dogmatic conviction. One is therefore surprised and hurt to find that Nietzsche never mentions Renan otherwise than grudgingly. He scarcely alludes to the aristocratic quality of his intellect, but he speaks with repugnance of that respect for the gospel of the humble which Renan everywhere discloses, and which is undeniably at variance with his hope of the foundation of a breeding establishment for supermen.

Renan, and after him Taine, turned against the almost religious feelings which were long entertained in the new Europe towards the first French Revolution. Renan regretted the Revolution betimes on national grounds; Taine, who began by speaking warmly of it, changed his mind on closer inquiry. Nietzsche follows in their footsteps. It is natural for modern authors, who feel themselves to be the children of the Revolution, to sympathise with the men of the great revolt; and certainly the latter do not receive their due in the present anti-revolutionary state of feeling in Europe. But these authors, in their dread of what in political jargon is called Cæsarism, and in their superstitious belief in mass movements, have overlooked the fact that the greatest revolutionaries and liberators are not the united small, but the few great; not the small ungenerous, but the great and generous, who are willing to bestow justice and well-being and intellectual growth upon the rest.

There are two classes of revolutionary spirits: those who feel instinctively drawn to Brutus, and those who equally instinctively are attracted by Cæsar. Cæsar is the great type; neither Frederick the Great nor Napoleon could claim more than a part of his qualities. The modern poetry of the 'forties teems with songs in praise of Brutus, but no poet has sung Cæsar. Even a poet with so little love for democracy as Shakespeare totally failed to recognise his greatness; he gave us a pale caricature of his figure and followed Plutarch in glorifying Brutus at his expense. Even Shakespeare could not see that Cæsar placed a very different stake on the table of life from that of his paltry murderer. Cæsar was descended from Venus; in his form was grace. His mind had the grand simplicity which is the mark of the greatest; his nature was nobility. He, from whom even to-day all supreme power takes its name, had every attribute that belongs to a commander and ruler of the highest rank. Only a few men of the Italian Renaissance have reached such a height of genius. His life was a guarantee of all the progress that could be accomplished in those days. Brutus's nature was doctrine, his distinguishing mark the narrowness that seeks to bring back dead conditions and that sees omens of a call in the accident of a name. His style was dry and laborious, his mind unfertile. His vice was avarice, usury his delight. To him the provinces were conquests beyond the pale. He had five senators of Salamis starved to death because the town could not pay. And on account of a dagger-thrust, which accomplished nothing and hindered nothing of what it was meant to hinder, this arid brain has been made a sort of genius of liberty, merely because men have failed to understand what it meant to have the strongest, richest and noblest nature invested with supreme power.

From what has been said above it will easily be understood that Nietzsche derives justice entirely from the active emotions, since in his view revengeful feelings are always low. He does not dwell on this point, however. Older writers had seen in the instinct of retaliation the origin of punishment. Stuart Mill, in his Utilitarianism, derived justice from already established punitive provisions (justum from jussum), which were precautionary measures, not reprisals. Rée, in his book on the Origin of Conscience, defended the kindred proposition that punishment is not a consequence of the sense of justice, but vice versa. The English philosophers in general derive the bad conscience from punishment. The value of the latter is supposed to consist in awakening a sense of guilt in the delinquent.

Against this Nietzsche enters a protest. He maintains that punishment only hardens and benumbs a man; in fact, that the judicial procedure itself prevents the criminal from regarding his conduct as reprehensible; since he is made to witness precisely the same kind of acts as those he has committed--spying, entrapping, outwitting and torturing--all of which are sanctioned when exercised against him in the cause of justice. For long ages, too, no notice whatever was taken of the criminal's "sin"; he was regarded as harmful, not guilty, and looked upon as a piece of destiny; and the criminal on his side took his punishment as a piece of destiny which had overtaken him, and bore it with the same fatalism with which the Russians suffer to this day. In general we may say that punishment tames the man, but does not make him "better."

The bad conscience, then, is still unexplained. Nietzsche proposes the following brilliant hypothesis: The bad conscience is the deep-seated morbid condition that declared itself in man under the stress of the most radical change he has ever experienced--when he found himself imprisoned in perpetuity within a society which was inviolable. All the strong and savage instincts such as adventurousness, rashness, cunning, rapacity, lust of power, which till then had not only been honoured, but actually encouraged, were suddenly put down as dangerous, and by degrees branded as immoral and criminal. Creatures adapted to a roving life of war and adventure suddenly saw all their instincts classed as worthless, nay, as forbidden. An immense despondency, a dejection without parallel, then took possession of them. And all these instincts that were not allowed an outward vent, turned inwards on the man himself--feelings of enmity, cruelty, delight in change, in hazard, violence, persecution, destruction--and thus the bad conscience originated.

When the State came into existence--not by a social contract, as Rousseau and his contemporaries assumed--but by a frightful tyranny imposed by a conquering race upon a more numerous, but unorganised population, then all the latter's instinct of freedom turned inwards; its active force and will to power were directed against man himself. And this was the soil which bore such ideals of beauty as self-denial, self-sacrifice, unselfishness. The delight in self-sacrifice is in its origin a phase of cruelty; the bad conscience is a will for self-abuse.

Then by degrees guilt came to be felt as a debt, to the past, to the ancestors; a debt that had to be paid back in sacrifices--at first of nourishment in its crudest sense--in marks of honour and in obedience; for all customs, as the work of ancestors, are at the same time their commands. There is a constant dread of not giving them enough; the firstborn, human and animal, are sacrificed to them. Fear of the founder grows in proportion as the power of the race increases. Sometimes he becomes transformed into a god, in which the origin of the god from fear is clearly seen.

The feeling of owing a debt to the deity steadily grew through the centuries, until the recognition of the Christian deity as universal god brought about the greatest possible outburst of guilty feeling. Only in our day is any noticeable diminution of this sense of guilt to be traced; but where the consciousness of sin reaches its culminating point, there the bad conscience eats its way like a cancer, till the sense of the impossibility of paying the debt--atoning for the sin--is supreme and with it is combined the idea of eternal punishment. A curse is now imagined to have been laid upon the founder of the race (Adam), and all sin becomes original sin. Indeed, the evil principle is attributed to Nature herself, from whose womb man has sprung--until we arrive at the paradoxical expedient in which tormented Christendom has found a temporary consolation for two thousand years: God offers himself for the guilt of mankind, pays himself in his own flesh and blood.

What has here happened is that the instinct of cruelty, which has turned inwards, has become self-torture, and all man's animal instincts have been reinterpreted as guilt towards God. Every Nay man utters to his nature, to his real being, he flings out as a Yea, an affirmation of reality applied to God's sanctity, his capacity of judge and executioner, and in the next place to eternity, the "Beyond," pain without end, eternal punishment in hell.