Essay II

Second Essay:

Guilt, Bad Conscience

and Related Matters.

1 To breed an animal that has the right to promise—is this not precisely the paradoxical task nature has set itself with regard to the human being? Is it not the real problem of the human being? … That this problem has been solved to a considerable degree must seem all the more astonishing to anyone who fully appreciates the opposing force, the force of forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is no mere force of inertia, as superficial people believe; it is, rather, an active faculty of inhibition, positive in the strictest sense. It is thanks to this faculty that whatever we live through, experience, and take into ourselves enters our consciousness as little during its digestion (one might call it “assimilation into the soul”) as does the whole thousandfold process by which our bodily nourishment, our so-called “incorporation,” takes place. To close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time; to remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle with which our underworld of serving organs works for and against itself; a little stillness, a little blank slate of consciousness, to make room again for something new, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries—for governing, foreseeing, determining in advance (for our organism is organized as an oligarchy)—that is the use of this active forgetfulness, as I have called it: a doorkeeper, as it were, a guardian of the soul’s order, peace, and etiquette. We can see at once, then, how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present without forgetfulness. The person in whom this apparatus of inhibition is damaged and breaks down can be compared to a dyspeptic (and not merely compared—): he can never “finish with” anything … Yet this necessarily forgetful animal, in whom forgetting represents a force, a form of robust health, has bred in itself an opposing faculty, a memory, by means of which forgetfulness is suspended in certain cases—namely, those cases in which a promise is to be made. This is by no means merely a passive inability to shake off an impression once engraved, not merely indigestion over a word once pledged that one cannot finish with, but an active unwillingness to let go again, a continued willing of what was once willed, a true memory of the will: so that a whole world of new and unfamiliar things, circumstances, even acts of will may safely be interposed between the original “I will,” “I shall do,” and the actual discharge of the will, its act, without this long chain of willing breaking. But how much all this presupposes! To command the future in this way, how much a human being must first have learned: to distinguish necessary from accidental events, to think causally, to see distant things as present and anticipate them, to establish with certainty what is an end and what a means to it, to reckon and calculate at all—and how much the human being himself must first have become calculable, regular, necessary, even to himself in his own conception, in order finally to be able to vouch for himself as a future, as someone who promises does!

2 That is precisely the long history of the origin of responsibility. As we have already understood, the task of breeding an animal that has the right to promise includes, as its condition and preparation, the more immediate task of first making the human being to a certain degree necessary, uniform, equal among equals, regular, and consequently calculable. The immense labor of what I have called the “morality of custom” (see “Daybreak,” pp. 7, 13, 16)—humanity’s actual labor upon itself during the longest span of the human race, its entire prehistoric labor—finds its meaning, its great justification, here, however much harshness, tyranny, stupidity, and idiocy it contains: with the help of the morality of custom and the social straitjacket, the human being was actually made calculable. If, on the other hand, we place ourselves at the end of this immense process, at the point where the tree at last ripens its fruit, where society and its morality of custom finally bring to light what they were merely the means to: then we find, as the ripest fruit on its tree, the sovereign individual, resembling no one but himself, liberated again from the morality of custom, the autonomous, supramoral individual (for “autonomous” and “moral” exclude each other)—in short, the human being with his own independent, enduring will, who has the right to promise. And in him we find a proud awareness, quivering in every muscle, of what has finally been achieved and become flesh in him: a true consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of the human being’s completion as such. This liberated man, who really has the right to promise, this master of free will, this sovereign—how could he not know the superiority this gives him over everything that has no right to promise and vouch for itself, how much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he inspires—he “deserves” all three—and how this mastery over himself necessarily places in his hands mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all creatures whose wills are shorter and less reliable? The “free” man, the possessor of an enduring, unbreakable will, possesses in it his standard of value as well: looking out at others from himself, he honors or despises them. And just as necessarily as he honors his equals, the strong and dependable (those who have the right to promise)—that is, everyone who promises like a sovereign, weightily, seldom, slowly, who is sparing with his trust, who confers distinction when he trusts, who gives his word as something that can be relied on because he knows himself strong enough to uphold it even against accidents, even “against fate”—just as necessarily will he keep a kick ready for the puny curs who promise without having the right, and his rod of discipline for the liar who breaks his word even as it passes his lips. The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over himself and destiny, has sunk into his deepest depths and become instinct, the dominant instinct—what will he call it, this dominant instinct, supposing he needs a word for it? But there is no doubt: this sovereign man calls it his conscience …

3 His conscience? … We can guess already that “conscience,” the concept we encounter here in its highest, almost disconcerting development, has undergone a long history and many changes of shape. To be entitled to answer for oneself, and proudly—to be entitled, then, to affirm oneself—is, as I said, a ripe fruit, but a late fruit too. How long that fruit had to hang on the tree, tart and sour! And for a far longer time there was no trace of such a fruit—no one could have ventured to promise it, however certainly everything in the tree was preparing for it and growing toward it!—“How does one give the human animal a memory? How does one stamp something into this partly dull, partly rambling intelligence, confined to the moment, this forgetfulness in bodily form, so that it stays present?” … We may imagine that this age-old problem was not solved by particularly gentle answers or methods; perhaps nothing in humanity’s entire prehistory is more frightful and uncanny than its technique of remembering. “Something is branded in so that memory will keep it: only what goes on hurting is kept in memory”—that is a cardinal principle of the oldest psychology on earth, unfortunately also the longest-lived. We might even say that wherever life among individuals and peoples still has solemnity, gravity, mystery, dark colors, something of the terror lingers with which promises, pledges, and vows were once made everywhere on earth: the past, the longest, deepest, harshest past, breathes on us and wells up within us when we grow “serious.” Whenever human beings found it necessary to provide themselves with a memory, blood, torments, and sacrifices were indispensable; the most horrifying sacrifices and pledges—including the sacrifice of firstborn children—the most repulsive mutilations, castration for instance, the cruelest rites of every religious cult—and at their deepest foundation all religions are systems of cruelties—all this originates in the instinct that divined in pain the most powerful aid to memory. In a certain sense the whole of ascetic practice belongs here: a few ideas are to be made indelible, ever-present, unforgettable, “fixed,” in order to hypnotize the entire nervous and intellectual system through these “fixed ideas”; ascetic procedures and ways of life are means of removing these ideas from competition with every other idea, of making them “unforgettable.” The worse humanity’s “memory” was, the more terrifying its customs invariably looked; the severity of penal laws, in particular, measures the trouble it had in overcoming forgetfulness and keeping a few elementary requirements of social life present to these creatures enslaved to the immediate impulse of passion and appetite. We Germans certainly do not consider ourselves a particularly cruel or hardhearted people, and still less a particularly frivolous people who live only for the day; but one need only examine our old penal ordinances to discover how much labor it costs on earth to breed a “people of thinkers”—meaning the European people among whom, even now, the greatest measure of trustfulness, seriousness, tastelessness, and matter-of-factness is to be found, qualities that entitle them to breed every sort of mandarin for Europe. These Germans used frightful means to give themselves a memory, so as to master their coarse fundamental instincts and their brutal clumsiness. Think of the old German punishments: stoning, for example—even legend brings the millstone down on the guilty person’s head—breaking on the wheel—the German genius’s very own invention and specialty in the realm of punishment!—hurling onto a stake, having people torn apart or trampled by horses, “quartering,” boiling the criminal in oil or wine, still practiced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the popular flaying, “cutting into straps,” cutting flesh from the breast; sometimes, too, smearing the offender with honey and abandoning him to the flies under a blazing sun. With the help of such images and procedures one finally keeps five or six “I will nots” in mind, things concerning which one has given one’s promise in order to live amid society’s advantages—and indeed, with the help of memory of this kind, one finally came “to reason”!—Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over the passions, that whole somber business called reflection, all these human privileges and showpieces: what a price was paid for them! How much blood and horror lies at the bottom of all “good things”! …

4 But how did that other “somber business,” the consciousness of guilt, the whole “bad conscience,” come into the world?—With this we return to our genealogists of morality. Let me say it again—or have I not said it at all yet?—they are no good. A little personal experience, five handspans long and merely “modern”; no knowledge of the past, no will to know it; still less a historical instinct, the “second sight” so necessary here—and yet they practice the history of morality. Fair enough: it must end in results whose relationship to truth is more than merely chilly. Have these genealogists of morality up to now had even the remotest inkling, for example, that the fundamental moral concept of “guilt”—Schuld—originated in the very material concept of “debts”—Schulden—? Or that punishment as requital developed entirely apart from any presupposition about freedom or unfreedom of the will?—So much so that it actually always takes a high degree of humanization before the animal “human” begins to make those far more elementary distinctions, “intentional,” “negligent,” “accidental,” “accountable,” and their opposites, and to allow for them when determining punishment. That thought, now so cheap and seemingly so natural, so inescapable, which has even had to serve as an explanation of how the sense of justice arose on earth at all—“the criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted differently”—is in fact an exceedingly late achievement, indeed a sophisticated form of human judgment and inference. Whoever places it at the beginning lays clumsy fingers on the psychology of earlier humanity. Throughout the longest stretch of human history punishment was emphatically not imposed because the instigator of the harm was held responsible for his deed, and thus not on the assumption that only the guilty should be punished. Rather, as parents still punish their children, it arose from anger at an injury suffered, anger that vents itself on the person who caused the injury—but is restrained and modified by the idea that every injury has its equivalent somewhere and can actually be paid off, even if only through the injurer’s pain. Where did this age-old, deeply rooted, perhaps now ineradicable idea draw its power—the idea of an equivalence between injury and pain? I have already given it away: from the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, as old as the very existence of “legal persons,” and itself pointing back to the basic forms of buying, selling, exchanging, trading, and dealing.

5 Bringing these contractual relations before our minds does, as the foregoing remarks would lead us to expect, awaken all manner of suspicion and resistance toward the earlier humanity that created or permitted them. Here, precisely, people promise; here, precisely, the task is to make a memory for the one who promises; here, precisely, we may suspect a rich deposit of harshness, cruelty, and suffering. To inspire confidence in his promise to repay, to guarantee the seriousness and sanctity of his promise, to impress repayment on his own conscience as a duty, an obligation, the debtor contractually pledges to the creditor, in case he fails to pay, something else that he “possesses,” something else over which he has power: for example, his body, his wife, his freedom, or even his life—or, given certain religious assumptions, even his blessedness, his soul’s salvation, and ultimately his peace in the grave. So it was in Egypt, where even in the grave the debtor’s corpse found no rest from the creditor—though for the Egyptians in particular this rest was a matter of some importance. Above all, however, the creditor could inflict every sort of disgrace and torture on the debtor’s body, for example cutting off as much of it as seemed proportionate to the size of the debt. From this standpoint there arose early and everywhere precise valuations, sometimes worked out in horrifying minuteness down to the tiniest detail, valuations of individual limbs and parts of the body that had the force of law. I already count it as progress, as evidence of a freer, more broadly calculating, more Roman understanding of law, when Rome’s legislation of the Twelve Tables decreed that it did not matter how much or how little the creditors cut off in such a case: “If they have cut more or less, let that be no offense.” Let us make the logic of this entire form of compensation clear to ourselves: it is strange enough. The equivalence is established by allowing the creditor, as repayment and compensation, a kind of pleasurable feeling instead of an advantage that directly offsets the injury—instead, then, of compensation in money, land, or property of any kind. It is the pleasurable feeling of being entitled to discharge his power without scruple upon someone powerless, the voluptuousness of “doing harm for the pleasure of doing it,” the enjoyment of violent domination. This enjoyment is valued all the more highly the lower and humbler the creditor’s place in the social order, and may easily seem to him the most exquisite morsel, indeed a foretaste of higher rank. Through the “punishment” of the debtor, the creditor shares in a master’s right: he too at last reaches the elevating feeling of being entitled to despise and mistreat a being as someone “beneath him”—or at least, if the actual power to punish, the execution of punishment, has already passed to the “authorities,” to see that being despised and mistreated. The compensation thus consists in an allotment of cruelty and an entitlement to it.—

6 In this sphere, then, in the law of obligations, the moral world of concepts—“guilt,” “conscience,” “duty,” “the sanctity of duty”—has its birthplace. Its beginnings, like the beginnings of everything great on earth, were thoroughly and enduringly drenched in blood. And might we not add that this world has never quite lost a certain smell of blood and torture? Not even in old Kant: the categorical imperative smells of cruelty … Here too the uncanny knot of ideas, “guilt and suffering,” which has perhaps become impossible to untie, was first tied. Let us ask again: in what sense can suffering compensate for “debts”? Insofar as making someone suffer was intensely pleasurable; insofar as the injured party exchanged his loss, together with his displeasure at the loss, for an extraordinary counter-pleasure: making someone suffer—a genuine festival, something, as I said, prized all the more highly the more it contradicted the creditor’s rank and social position. This is conjecture: for it is difficult to see to the bottom of such subterranean things, quite apart from the discomfort of doing so. Anyone who crudely throws the concept of “revenge” into the middle of this has obscured and darkened his view rather than made it easier—revenge itself leads straight back to the same problem: “How can making someone suffer afford satisfaction?” It seems to me that the delicacy, and still more the hypocrisy, of tame domestic animals—meaning modern human beings, meaning us—rebels against imagining in its full force the degree to which cruelty constituted earlier humanity’s great festive pleasure, indeed was mixed as an ingredient into almost every pleasure it had; and how naïvely, how innocently, on the other hand, its need for cruelty presented itself; how, as a matter of principle, it regarded precisely “disinterested malice”—or, in Spinoza’s words, malevolent fellow-feeling—as a normal human quality: something, therefore, to which conscience gives a hearty Yes! Perhaps an eye that saw more deeply could still perceive enough of this oldest and most fundamental human festive pleasure. In “Beyond Good and Evil,” pp. 117 ff. (earlier already in “Daybreak,” pp. 17, 68, 102), I pointed a cautious finger toward the ever-increasing spiritualization and “deification” of cruelty that runs through the entire history of higher culture—and, understood in a significant sense, even constitutes that history. In any case, it is not so very long since people could not imagine princely weddings and public festivities on the grandest scale without executions, tortures, or perhaps an auto-da-fé; nor a noble household without beings on whom they could discharge their malice and cruel teasing without scruple. Think, for example, of Don Quixote at the duchess’s court: today we read the whole of Don Quixote with a bitter taste on our tongues, almost in torment, and would seem very strange, very incomprehensible in this to its author and his contemporaries—they read it with the very clearest conscience as the most cheerful of books, laughing themselves almost to death over it. Seeing suffering gives pleasure; causing suffering gives still more—this is a hard proposition, but an old, powerful, human, all-too-human cardinal principle, which the apes too might perhaps endorse: for we are told that in devising bizarre cruelties they already give ample intimation of humanity, a kind of preliminary performance. No festival without cruelty: that is the lesson of humanity’s oldest and longest history—and there is so much of the festival in punishment too!—

7 —With these thoughts, incidentally, I have no intention whatever of supplying our pessimists with fresh water for their discordant, creaking mills of weariness with life. On the contrary, let it be expressly attested that in the days when humanity was not yet ashamed of its cruelty, life on earth was more cheerful than it is now, when there are pessimists. The sky above humanity has always darkened in proportion to the growth of human shame at being human. The weary pessimistic gaze, mistrust of life’s riddle, the icy No of disgust with life—these are not the distinguishing marks of humanity’s most evil ages. Rather, being swamp plants, they only come to light once the swamp to which they belong is there—I mean the morbid overrefinement and moralization through which the beast “human” finally learns to feel ashamed of all its instincts. On the way to becoming an “angel”—to avoid a harsher word here—the human being has bred in himself that upset stomach and coated tongue that make not only the animal’s joy and innocence repulsive to him, but life itself unpalatable. At times he stands before himself holding his nose and, with Pope Innocent III, disapprovingly catalogs his repulsiveness: “unclean conception, disgusting nourishment in the womb, the badness of the matter out of which the human being develops, hideous stench, the secretion of saliva, urine, and excrement.” Now that suffering must always march at the head of the arguments against existence, as its worst question mark, we do well to remember the times when people judged the other way around, because they were unwilling to forgo making others suffer and saw in it a first-rate enchantment, a true bait enticing them into life. Perhaps in those days—let this console the tenderhearted—pain did not hurt as much as it does today. At least a physician might be entitled to conclude as much after treating Black people—taken here as representatives of prehistoric humanity—for severe internal inflammations that drive even the best-constituted European almost to despair; among Black people they do not do so. (The curve of human susceptibility to pain does in fact seem to fall extraordinarily and almost abruptly once one has left behind the upper ten thousand or ten million of overcivilization; for my part, I do not doubt that, measured against one painful night in the life of a single hysterical little woman of culture, the combined sufferings of all the animals so far interrogated with the knife for scientific answers simply do not count.) Perhaps we may even admit the possibility that this pleasure in cruelty need not actually have died out either: only, in proportion as pain hurts more today, it would require a certain sublimation and refinement; in particular, it would have to appear translated into the imaginative and psychological realm and adorned with names so thoroughly unexceptionable that even the most tender hypocritical conscience would draw no suspicion from them. “Tragic pity” is one such name; “longings for the cross” is another. What actually makes us rebel against suffering is not suffering itself but its meaninglessness. Yet neither the Christian, who has read a whole hidden machinery of salvation into suffering, nor the naïve human being of earlier times, who understood how to interpret all suffering in relation to spectators or those who caused it, knew any such meaningless suffering at all. To remove hidden, undiscovered, unwitnessed suffering from the world and honestly deny its existence, people in those days were almost compelled to invent gods and intermediate beings of every height and depth: in short, something that roams through hidden places too, that sees in the dark too, and will not readily let an interesting, painful spectacle escape it. With the help of such inventions, life then accomplished the feat it has always known how to accomplish: justifying itself, justifying its “evil.” Today it might need other auxiliary inventions for this—for example, life as a riddle, life as a problem of knowledge. “Every evil is justified if a god is edified by the sight of it”: such was the prehistoric logic of feeling—and really, was it only prehistoric? Gods conceived as lovers of cruel spectacles—oh, how far this age-old conception still reaches into our European humanization! One might consult Calvin and Luther on the subject. It is certain, at any rate, that even the Greeks knew no more pleasing addition to their gods’ happiness than the pleasures of cruelty. With what eyes, do you suppose, did Homer have his gods look down on human destinies? What, at bottom, was the ultimate meaning of Trojan wars and similar tragic horrors? There can be no doubt: they were intended as festival performances for the gods—and, insofar as poets have a more “godlike” nature than other people, probably as festival performances for poets too … Later, the moral philosophers of Greece likewise imagined God’s eyes looking down upon moral struggle, upon the virtuous person’s heroism and self-torment: the “Heracles of duty” was on a stage, and knew it; for this nation of actors, virtue without witnesses was utterly inconceivable. Might not that audacious and fateful invention of the philosophers, first made for Europe in those days—the invention of “free will,” of humanity’s absolute spontaneity in good and evil—have been made above all to establish a right to imagine that the gods’ interest in humanity, in human virtue, could never be exhausted? On this earthly stage there must never be a shortage of something genuinely new, of truly unheard-of tensions, entanglements, catastrophes. A world conceived in wholly deterministic terms would have been predictable to the gods and thus soon wearisome as well—reason enough for the philosophers, these friends of the gods, not to inflict such a deterministic world upon their gods! All of ancient humanity is full of delicate consideration for “the spectator,” being an essentially public, essentially visible world that could not imagine happiness without spectacles and festivals.—And, as I have said, there is so much of the festival in great punishment too! …

8 To resume the course of our inquiry: as we saw, the feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, originated in the oldest and most primordial relationship between persons that exists, the relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor. Here a person first confronted another person; here a person first measured himself against another. No level of civilization has been discovered, however low, in which something of this relationship is not already discernible. Setting prices, measuring values, devising equivalents, exchanging—these so thoroughly occupied humanity’s very earliest thinking that in a certain sense they are thinking. Here the oldest kind of acuteness was bred; here too, we may surmise, lay the first beginnings of human pride, of the feeling of precedence over other animals. Perhaps even our word “Mensch,” human being (manas), still expresses something of this sense of self: human beings designated themselves as the beings that measure values, that value and measure, as the “appraising animal as such.” Buying and selling, with their psychological accessories, are older even than the beginnings of any forms of social organization and association. Rather, it was from the most rudimentary form of personal law that the nascent feeling of exchange, contract, debt, right, obligation, and compensation first transferred itself to the crudest, earliest communal groupings—in their relations with similar groupings—together with the habit of comparing, measuring, and calculating one power against another. The eye was now set to this perspective; and with that clumsy consistency peculiar to earlier humanity’s thinking, slow to get moving but then relentless in pursuing the same direction, people soon arrived at the great generalization: “Everything has its price; everything can be paid off”—the oldest and most naïve moral canon of justice, the beginning of all “good nature,” all “fairness,” all “goodwill,” all “objectivity” on earth. At this first stage, justice is the goodwill among those of roughly equal power to come to terms, to reach an “understanding” again through a settlement—and, with regard to those less powerful, to compel a settlement among them.—

9 Still measured by the standard of prehistoric times—which, incidentally, are present in every age or can become possible again—the community too stands toward its members in that important fundamental relationship, that of creditor to debtors. One lives in a community, enjoys the advantages of a community—and what advantages! We sometimes underrate them today—dwells protected, spared, in peace and trust, without concern about certain injuries and hostilities to which the person outside, the “outlaw,” is exposed—a German understands what “Elend,” êlend, originally means—inasmuch as one has pledged and obligated oneself to the community precisely with regard to these injuries and hostilities. What will happen in the opposite case? The community, the cheated creditor, will exact payment as best it can: that can be counted on. The immediate injury caused by the offender is the least of the matter here. Quite apart from it, the criminal is above all a “breaker,” someone who breaks his contract and his word toward the whole, concerning all the benefits and comforts of communal life in which he has hitherto shared. The criminal is a debtor who not only fails to repay the advantages and advances granted him, but even assaults his creditor. Hence, from now on, he quite properly forfeits not only all these benefits and advantages: he is now reminded of what these benefits are worth. The anger of the injured creditor, the community, returns him to the savage, outlawed condition from which he had until then been protected: it expels him—and now every kind of hostility may vent itself upon him. At this stage of civilization, “punishment” is simply the image, the enactment, of normal conduct toward a hated enemy rendered defenseless and struck down, who has forfeited not only every right and protection but also every mercy: thus the law of war and the victory celebration of “woe to the vanquished!” in all their ruthlessness and cruelty. This explains why war itself—including the warlike cult of sacrifice—has furnished all the forms in which punishment appears in history.

10 As its power grows, a community takes the individual’s offenses less seriously, since it can no longer regard them as endangering and overturning the existence of the whole to the same extent as before. The offender is no longer “declared an outlaw” and expelled; the general anger may no longer vent itself upon him as unrestrainedly as it once did. Instead, from now on the whole carefully defends and protects the offender against this anger, especially that of those directly injured. A compromise with the anger of those immediately affected by the misdeed; an effort to localize the case and forestall wider or even general involvement and unrest; attempts to find equivalents and settle the whole affair—the compositio; above all, an increasingly definite will to treat every offense as in some sense payable, and thus, at least to a certain extent, to isolate the criminal and his deed from each other—these are the features stamped ever more clearly upon the further development of penal law. As a community’s power and self-confidence grow, penal law always grows milder too; every weakening and deeper endangerment of the former brings the latter’s harsher forms back to light. The “creditor” has always become more humane in proportion as he has become richer; ultimately, the amount of damage he can endure without suffering from it is itself the measure of his wealth. We could imagine a society’s consciousness of power reaching the point at which it could afford the noblest luxury available to it—letting the person who harms it go unpunished. “What concern are my parasites to me, really?” it might then say. “Let them live and prosper: I am still strong enough for that!” … Justice, which began with “Everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off,” ends by turning a blind eye and letting the insolvent go free. Like every good thing on earth, it ends by overcoming itself. This self-overcoming of justice—we know the beautiful name it gives itself: mercy. As goes without saying, it remains the privilege of the most powerful, or better still, his beyond-the-law.

11 —Here a word of rejection concerning recent attempts to seek the origin of justice on quite another soil—namely, that of ressentiment. Let me whisper first of all to the psychologists, should they feel inclined to study ressentiment itself at close quarters: this plant now flowers most luxuriantly among anarchists and antisemites, though, as always, it flowers in concealment, like the violet, if with a different scent. And since like must necessarily always give rise to like, it will not be surprising to see attempts emerge from these very circles, as they have often emerged before—compare page 30 above—to sanctify revenge under the name of justice, as though justice were at bottom merely a further development of the feeling of having been injured, and, along with revenge, to confer belated honor upon all the reactive affects together. I would be least inclined to object to this last undertaking in itself: with regard to the whole biological problem, in relation to which the value of these affects has hitherto been underestimated, it would even seem to me a merit. What I draw attention to is solely the circumstance that the spirit of ressentiment itself gives rise to this new shade of scholarly fairness—toward hatred, envy, ill will, suspicion, rancor, revenge. For this “scholarly fairness” immediately pauses and gives way to tones of mortal enmity and prejudice as soon as another group of affects comes into question, affects that seem to me of far higher biological value than those reactive ones and consequently deserve all the more to be assessed and esteemed scientifically: namely, the genuinely active affects, such as the lust to rule, acquisitiveness, and the like. (E. Dühring, Value of Life; Course of Philosophy; essentially everywhere.) So much against this tendency in general. But as for Dühring’s particular proposition that the home of justice must be sought on the soil of reactive feeling, truth requires that we confront it with this other proposition, its sharp reversal: the soil of reactive feeling is the last soil conquered by the spirit of justice! If it really happens that the just person remains just even toward those who injure him—and not merely cold, restrained, detached, indifferent: being just is always a positive way of acting—if even under the onslaught of personal injury, derision, suspicion, the lofty, clear objectivity of the just, the judging eye, whose gaze is as deep as it is gentle, remains unclouded, then that is a piece of perfection and the highest mastery on earth—even something that we would be wise not to expect here, and at any rate should not too readily believe in. What is certain as a rule is that, even among the most upright people, a small dose of attack, malice, or insinuation suffices to drive the blood into their eyes and fairness out of them. The active person, who attacks and overreaches, still stands a hundred steps nearer to justice than the reactive person; he has no need at all to appraise his object falsely and prejudicially, as the reactive person does and must do. Hence, in fact, the aggressive person, being stronger, braver, nobler, has in every age also had the freer eye and the better conscience on his side. Conversely, we can already guess who has the invention of “bad conscience” on his conscience—the person of ressentiment! Finally, just look around in history: in what sphere has the entire administration of law, and even the actual need for law, hitherto been at home on earth? In the sphere of reactive people, perhaps? Not at all: rather among the active, strong, spontaneous, aggressive. Historically considered, law on earth represents precisely the struggle against reactive feelings, the war waged upon them by active and aggressive powers, which used their strength in part to halt and restrain the excesses of reactive passion and enforce a settlement. Let this be said to the annoyance of the agitator named above, who once confesses of himself: “The doctrine of revenge has run as the red thread of justice through all my works and efforts.” Wherever justice is practiced and upheld, we see a stronger power seeking means to end the senseless raging of ressentiment among the weaker powers beneath it, whether groups or individuals: sometimes by taking the object of ressentiment out of the hands of revenge; sometimes by substituting, on its own part, the struggle against the enemies of peace and order for revenge; sometimes by devising settlements, proposing them, and in certain circumstances imposing them; sometimes by establishing certain equivalents for injuries as a norm to which ressentiment is henceforth referred once and for all. But the most decisive thing the supreme power does and enforces against the predominance of hostile and lingering feelings—it always does this as soon as it is at all strong enough—is to establish law: the imperative declaration of what, in its eyes, is to count as permitted, as right, and what as forbidden, as wrong. Once it has established the law, by treating encroachments and arbitrary acts of individuals or entire groups as offenses against the law, as rebellion against the supreme power itself, it diverts its subjects’ feelings from the immediate injury caused by such offenses. In the long run it thus achieves the opposite of what all revenge wants, for revenge sees and accepts only the injured party’s standpoint: from now on the eye is trained to appraise the deed ever more impersonally, even the injured party’s own eye, although, as noted above, this is the very last.—Accordingly, “right” and “wrong” exist only from the establishment of law onward, not, as Dühring would have it, from the act of injury onward. To speak of right and wrong in themselves makes no sense at all. In itself, of course, injuring, overpowering, exploiting, destroying cannot be anything “wrong,” insofar as life acts essentially—that is, in its basic functions—by injuring, overpowering, exploiting, destroying, and cannot be conceived at all without this character. We must even admit something more disquieting: from the highest biological standpoint, legal conditions can only ever be exceptional conditions, partial restrictions upon the actual will to life, which aims at power, subordinate to its overall purpose as individual means—namely, means of creating larger units of power. A legal order conceived as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between complexes of power but as a means against all struggle whatsoever, perhaps according to Dühring’s communist formula that every will must regard every will as equal, would be a principle hostile to life, a destroyer and dissolver of humanity, an assault upon humanity’s future, a sign of exhaustion, a furtive path to nothingness.—

12 One more word here about the origin and purpose of punishment—two problems that are separate, or ought to be: unfortunately people usually lump them together. How have the genealogists of morality proceeded in this case? Naïvely, as they always have: they discover some “purpose” in punishment, revenge or deterrence, for example, then innocently place this purpose at the beginning, as the cause of punishment’s coming into being—and they are done. But “purpose in law” is the very last thing to use in explaining how law originated. Rather, for every kind of history there is no more important proposition than this, so laboriously won and one that really ought to be won: the cause of a thing’s origin and its eventual usefulness, its actual employment and incorporation into a system of purposes, are worlds apart; something already present, something that has somehow come into being, is repeatedly interpreted with new intentions by a power superior to it, taken over anew, reshaped and redirected to a new use; everything that happens in the organic world is an overpowering, a gaining of mastery, and all overpowering and gaining of mastery is in turn a fresh interpretation, a reshaping in which the previous “meaning” and “purpose” must necessarily be obscured or obliterated altogether. However well one has understood the usefulness of a physiological organ—or of a legal institution, a social custom, a political practice, a form in art or religious worship—one has thereby understood nothing about its origin, however inconvenient and disagreeable this may sound to older ears. For people have always believed that in a thing’s, a form’s, an institution’s demonstrable purpose and usefulness they had also grasped the reason for its origin: the eye as made for seeing, the hand as made for grasping. They have likewise imagined punishment as invented for punishing. But all purposes, all uses are merely signs that a will to power has gained mastery over something less powerful and imposed upon it, on its own authority, the meaning of a function. In this way the entire history of a “thing,” an organ, a custom can be an ongoing chain of signs of ever-new interpretations and reshapings, whose causes need not even be connected with one another, but may in some circumstances merely follow and replace one another by chance. Accordingly, the “development” of a thing, a custom, an organ is anything but its progress toward a goal, still less a logical, shortest possible progress achieved with the least expenditure of force and cost. Rather, it is a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of overpowering that take place upon it, together with the resistance mounted against them each time, the changes of form attempted for defense and reaction, and also the results of successful counteractions. Form is fluid, but “meaning” still more so … Even within each individual organism matters are no different: every substantial growth of the whole also shifts the “meaning” of the individual organs; in some circumstances their partial destruction, their reduction in number—for example through the elimination of intermediate members—can be a sign of growing strength and perfection. What I mean is this: even partly becoming useless, withering and degenerating, losing meaning and fitness for a purpose—in short, death—belongs to the conditions of genuine progress, which always appears as a will and a path toward greater power and is always enforced at the expense of numerous smaller powers. The magnitude of a “step forward” is even measured by the mass of everything that had to be sacrificed to it; humanity as a mass sacrificed to the flourishing of a single stronger species of human being—that would be a step forward …—I stress this central standpoint of historical method all the more because at bottom it runs counter to the prevailing instinct and taste of the age, which would sooner reconcile itself to the absolute randomness, indeed the mechanistic senselessness, of all events than to the theory of a will to power at work in everything that happens. The democratic idiosyncrasy against everything that rules and wants to rule, modern misarchism—to coin a bad word for a bad thing—has gradually translated and disguised itself so thoroughly in intellectual, in the most intellectual forms that it is already making its way step by step into the most rigorous, apparently most objective sciences, and is allowed to do so. Indeed, it seems to me to have gained mastery already over the whole of physiology and the theory of life, to their detriment, needless to say, by conjuring away one of their fundamental concepts, that of genuine activity. Under the pressure of this idiosyncrasy, people put “adaptation” in the foreground instead: that is, a second-order activity, mere reactivity; indeed, life itself has been defined as an increasingly purposive inner adjustment to external circumstances (Herbert Spencer). But this misconstrues the essence of life, its will to power; it overlooks the fundamental precedence of the spontaneous, attacking, encroaching, reinterpreting, redirecting, and shaping forces whose effects are followed only afterward by “adaptation”; it denies within the organism itself the ruling role of the highest functionaries, in whom the will to life appears active and form-giving. We remember what Huxley reproached Spencer for—his “administrative nihilism”: but what is at issue here is more than “administering” …

13 —To return to the matter at hand, namely punishment, we must therefore distinguish two things in it: on the one hand, what is relatively enduring in it, the custom, the act, the “drama,” a certain strict sequence of procedures; on the other, what is fluid in it, the meaning, the purpose, the expectation attached to carrying out such procedures. Here it is simply assumed, by analogy, in accordance with the central standpoint of historical method just developed, that the procedure itself is something older, earlier than its employment as punishment; that the latter was only put into, interpreted into, a procedure long in existence but customary in a different sense; in short, that matters are not as our naïve genealogists of morality and law have so far assumed, all of whom imagined the procedure invented for the purpose of punishment, just as people once imagined the hand invented for the purpose of grasping. As for that other element in punishment, the fluid one, its “meaning”: at a very late stage of culture—for example, in Europe today—the concept “punishment” in fact no longer represents one meaning at all, but an entire synthesis of “meanings.” The whole previous history of punishment, the history of its exploitation for the most various purposes, finally crystallizes into a kind of unity that is difficult to dissolve, difficult to analyze, and, it must be emphasized, utterly indefinable. (Today it is impossible to say definitely why punishment is actually imposed: all concepts in which an entire process is condensed into signs resist definition; only what has no history can be defined.) At an earlier stage, by contrast, this synthesis of “meanings” still appears easier to dissolve and also more open to rearrangement. We can still discern how, in each individual case, the elements of the synthesis change their relative weight and reorder themselves accordingly, so that now this element, now that, comes forward and predominates at the expense of the others; indeed, under certain circumstances one element—the purpose of deterrence, for instance—seems to cancel all the rest. To give at least an idea of how uncertain, how belated, how incidental “the meaning” of punishment is, and how one and the same procedure can be used, interpreted, and refashioned for fundamentally different intentions, here is the outline that emerged for me from comparatively scant and haphazard material. Punishment as rendering harmless, as preventing further harm. Punishment as repayment to the injured party for the injury, in some form or other, including emotional compensation. Punishment as isolating a disturbance of equilibrium to prevent the disturbance from spreading. Punishment as instilling fear of those who determine and execute it. Punishment as a kind of compensation for the advantages the criminal has enjoyed up to that point—for example, when he is put to use as a slave in the mines. Punishment as eliminating a degenerating element—in some circumstances an entire branch of a family, as under Chinese law—and thus as a means of keeping the race pure or preserving a social type. Punishment as a festival, namely as the violent subjugation and derision of an enemy finally struck down. Punishment as making a memory, whether for the person who suffers it—so-called “reform”—or for the witnesses to its execution. Punishment as payment of a fee stipulated by the power that protects the offender from the excesses of revenge. Punishment as a compromise with the natural condition of revenge, insofar as that condition is still maintained by powerful lineages and claimed as their privilege. Punishment as a declaration of war and a wartime measure against an enemy of peace, law, order, authority, whom one combats as a danger to the community, as someone who has broken his contract concerning its presuppositions, as a rebel, traitor, and disturber of the peace, using whatever means war puts at one’s disposal.—

14 This list is certainly not complete; clearly, punishment is overloaded with uses of every kind. All the more readily may we subtract from it one supposed use, which nevertheless counts in popular consciousness as its most essential—belief in punishment, tottering today for several reasons, still finds its strongest support precisely here. Punishment is supposed to have the value of awakening the feeling of guilt in the guilty person; people seek in it the actual instrument of that psychological reaction called “bad conscience,” the “bite of conscience.” But this misrepresents reality and psychology even today—and how much more throughout the longest history of humanity, its prehistory! Genuine remorse is exceedingly rare precisely among criminals and convicts; prisons and penitentiaries are not the breeding grounds in which this species of gnawing worm most likes to flourish. All conscientious observers agree on this, though in many cases they pass such a judgment most unwillingly and against their own deepest wishes. Broadly speaking, punishment hardens and chills; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance. If it happens to break a person’s energy and bring about a wretched collapse and self-abasement, such a result is certainly even less heartening than punishment’s average effect, characterized by a dry, somber seriousness. But if we think back to those millennia before human history, we may judge without hesitation that punishment itself most powerfully held back the development of the feeling of guilt—at least among the victims on whom the punishing power vented itself. For we must not underestimate how much the criminal is prevented, precisely by the sight of judicial procedures and their execution, from feeling his deed, his kind of action, to be reprehensible in itself: he sees exactly the same kind of actions committed in the service of justice and then approved, committed with a good conscience—spying, outwitting, bribing, laying traps, the whole crafty and devious art of policemen and prosecutors; then the systematic robbing, overpowering, insulting, imprisoning, torturing, murdering, not even excused by passion, that finds expression in the various forms of punishment. These are therefore all actions his judges by no means reject and condemn in themselves, but only in a certain respect and application. “Bad conscience,” that uncanniest and most interesting plant of our earthly vegetation, did not grow on this soil. Indeed, for the longest time the consciousness of the judges and punishers themselves expressed nothing of the idea that they were dealing with someone “guilty.” Rather, they were dealing with an instigator of harm, an unaccountable piece of fate. And the person upon whom punishment then descended, again like a piece of fate, suffered no other “inner torment” than at the sudden arrival of something uncalculated, a terrifying natural event, a falling, crushing boulder against which no struggle is possible any longer.

15 This once dawned on Spinoza in an awkwardly revealing way—to the annoyance of his interpreters, who positively strive to misunderstand him at this point, Kuno Fischer for instance. One afternoon, chafing against who knows what memory, he pondered the question of what actually remained for him personally of the celebrated bite of conscience—he who had relegated good and evil to human imaginings and indignantly defended the honor of his “free” God against those blasphemers who claimed that God did everything with a view to the good: “But that would mean subjecting God to fate and would truly be the greatest of all absurdities.”—For Spinoza the world had reentered the innocence in which it lay before the invention of bad conscience: what, then, had become of the bite of conscience? “The opposite of joy,” he finally told himself, “a sadness accompanied by the idea of a past thing that turned out contrary to all expectation.” Eth. III propos. XVIII schol. I. II. For thousands of years the wrongdoers overtaken by punishment felt about their “offense” no differently from Spinoza: “Something has unexpectedly gone wrong here,” not: “I ought not to have done that.” They submitted to punishment as one submits to illness, misfortune, or death, with that stouthearted fatalism without rebellion that gives the Russians, for example, an advantage over us Westerners in handling life even today. If there was any criticism of the deed in those days, it was prudence that criticized it. Beyond doubt, we must seek the actual effect of punishment above all in a sharpening of prudence, a lengthening of memory, a resolve to proceed henceforth more cautiously, more suspiciously, more secretly, an insight that one is once and for all too weak for many things, a kind of improvement in self-appraisal. What punishment can achieve on the whole, in humans and animals, is an increase in fear, a sharpening of prudence, a mastery of appetites. In this way punishment tames the human being, but it does not make him “better”—one might with more justice maintain the opposite. (“Harm makes you wise,” people say: insofar as it makes you wise, it makes you bad too. Fortunately, often enough it makes you stupid.)

16 At this point I can no longer avoid giving an initial, provisional expression to my own hypothesis about the origin of “bad conscience.” It is not easily made heard; it asks to be pondered, watched over, and slept on for a long time. I take bad conscience to be the profound illness into which human beings had to fall under the pressure of the most fundamental change they ever experienced—the change that occurred when they found themselves definitively enclosed within the confines of society and peace. What happened to these half-animals, happily adapted to wilderness, war, wandering, and adventure, was no different from what must have happened to aquatic animals forced either to become land animals or perish. All at once their instincts were devalued and “disconnected.” Now they were supposed to walk on their feet and “carry themselves,” where previously the water had carried them: a dreadful heaviness weighed upon them. They felt awkward at the simplest tasks; in this new, unknown world they no longer had their old guides, the drives that regulated them and led them with unconscious certainty. These unfortunates were reduced to thinking, inferring, calculating, combining causes and effects—to their “consciousness,” their poorest and most error-prone organ! I do not believe there has ever been such a feeling of misery on earth, such a leaden malaise—and meanwhile those old instincts had not suddenly stopped making their demands! Only it was difficult and seldom possible to indulge them: for the most part they had to seek new and, as it were, subterranean satisfactions. All instincts that do not discharge themselves outward turn inward—this is what I call the internalization of the human being: only with this does there grow in the human being what is later called his “soul.” The whole inner world, originally thin, as though stretched between two skins, expanded and opened out, acquired depth, breadth, height, in proportion as human discharge outward was inhibited. Those fearful bulwarks with which the organization of the state protected itself against the old instincts of freedom—punishments belong above all among these bulwarks—brought it about that all those instincts of the wild, free, wandering human being turned back, turned against the human being himself. Hostility, cruelty, pleasure in pursuit, in ambush, in change, in destruction—all this turning against the possessors of such instincts: that is the origin of “bad conscience.” The human being who, lacking external enemies and resistance, squeezed into the oppressive narrowness and regularity of custom, impatiently tore at himself, pursued, gnawed at, disturbed, mistreated himself; this animal that wounds itself against the bars of its cage, this animal they want to “tame”; this deprived creature consumed by homesickness for the wilderness, who had to make of himself an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wild—this fool, this yearning and despairing prisoner became the inventor of “bad conscience.” With him, however, began the greatest and uncanniest illness, from which humanity has not recovered to this day: human suffering from humanity, from oneself. It followed a forcible severance from the animal past, a leap and fall, as it were, into new situations and conditions of existence, a declaration of war against the old instincts upon which human strength, pleasure, and fearsomeness had rested until then. Let us add at once that, on the other hand, the fact of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, introduced onto earth something so new, deep, unheard-of, enigmatic, contradictory, and full of future that the earth’s appearance changed fundamentally. Indeed, divine spectators were needed to appreciate the spectacle that then began, whose end is still nowhere in sight—a spectacle too fine, too wondrous, too paradoxical to be allowed to play itself out senselessly and unnoticed on some ridiculous star! Since then the human being has numbered among the most unexpected and exciting lucky throws cast by Heraclitus’s “great child,” whether named Zeus or Chance. He awakens interest, suspense, hope, almost a certainty that something is announcing itself in him, that something is preparing itself—as though the human being were no goal, but only a path, an interlude, a bridge, a great promise …

17 This hypothesis about the origin of bad conscience presupposes, first, that the change was neither gradual nor voluntary, that it was not an organic growing into new conditions but a rupture, a leap, a compulsion, an inescapable fate against which there was no struggle, not even ressentiment. Second, however, it presupposes that fitting a population hitherto unrestrained and unshaped into a fixed form began with an act of violence and was completed through acts of violence alone—that accordingly the earliest “state” appeared as a terrible tyranny, a crushing and ruthless machinery, and kept working until such raw material of people and half-animal was finally not merely kneaded through and made pliable but also formed. I used the word “state”: who is meant by it goes without saying—some pack of blond beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, organized for war and possessing the power to organize, that unscrupulously lays its fearful paws upon a population perhaps enormously superior in numbers but still shapeless, still wandering. That is how the “state” begins on earth: I think we have disposed of the fantasy that made it begin with a “contract.” What has someone who can command, who is a “master” by nature, who acts violently in deed and gesture, to do with contracts! One does not reckon with such beings; they come like fate, without cause, reason, consideration, pretext; they are there as lightning is there, too fearful, too sudden, too convincing, too “different” even to be hated. Their work is an instinctive creating of forms, an impressing of forms; they are the most involuntary, most unconscious artists there are. In a short time something new stands where they appear, a structure of dominion that lives, in which parts and functions are delimited and brought into relation, in which nothing at all finds a place without first having a “meaning” imparted to it with respect to the whole. These born organizers do not know what guilt, responsibility, consideration are; that fearful artist’s egoism rules within them, its gaze like bronze, knowing itself justified in advance for all eternity in its “work,” as the mother is in her child. It was not among them that “bad conscience” grew—that is evident from the outset—but this ugly growth would not have grown without them, would not exist, had not an immense quantity of freedom been removed from the world, at least from visibility, and made, as it were, latent, under the pressure of their hammer blows, their artists’ violence. This instinct of freedom forcibly made latent—we have already understood it—this instinct of freedom driven back, forced to retreat, imprisoned within, and finally discharging and venting itself only upon itself: that, and only that, is bad conscience at its beginning.

18 We must beware of thinking little of this whole phenomenon merely because it is ugly and painful from the outset. At bottom, the same active force that works more grandly in those artists of violence and organizers, building states, here creates bad conscience for itself and builds negative ideals—inwardly, on a smaller, pettier scale, directed backward, in the “labyrinth of the breast,” to speak with Goethe. It is that very instinct of freedom—in my language, the will to power—except that the material upon which the form-giving and overpowering nature of this force vents itself is here the human being himself, his entire old animal self, and not, as in that larger and more conspicuous phenomenon, the other human being, other human beings. This secret self-violation, this artist’s cruelty, this pleasure in giving oneself a form as though working a heavy, resistant, suffering material, in branding oneself with a will, a criticism, a contradiction, a contempt, a No; this uncanny and terribly pleasurable labor of a soul willingly divided against itself, making itself suffer out of pleasure in causing suffering—this entire active “bad conscience” has finally, as we can already guess, also brought forth an abundance of new, disconcerting beauty and affirmation as the true womb of events in the realms of ideals and imagination, and perhaps only now brought forth beauty itself … What would be “beautiful” if contradiction had not first become conscious of itself, if ugliness had not first said to itself: “I am ugly”? … At the very least, after this hint, the riddle of how an ideal, a beauty, can be suggested in contradictory concepts such as selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice will be less riddling. And henceforth one thing is known—I do not doubt it—namely, what kind of pleasure the selfless, self-denying, self-sacrificing person feels from the beginning: this pleasure belongs to cruelty.—So much for now on the origin of the “unegoistic” as a moral value, and toward marking out the soil from which this value grew: only bad conscience, only the will to mistreat oneself, supplies the precondition for the value of the unegoistic.—

19 Bad conscience is an illness, beyond any doubt—but an illness as pregnancy is an illness. Let us seek the conditions under which this illness reached its most fearful and sublime summit: we shall see what actually made its first entrance into the world through it. But that requires staying power—and first we must return once more to an earlier standpoint. The relationship in private law of debtor to creditor, which we have already discussed at length, was interpreted once again into another relationship, and in a historically most remarkable and troubling way, where it is perhaps least intelligible to us modern people: namely, the relationship of those now living to their ancestors. Within the original kinship community—we are speaking of primeval times—the living generation always acknowledges a legal obligation toward the earlier generation, and especially toward the earliest, the one that founded the lineage, by no means a merely sentimental obligation: indeed, not without reason, we might deny that the latter existed at all during the longest span of human existence. Here the conviction prevails that the lineage exists solely through the sacrifices and achievements of the ancestors, and that these must be repaid to them through sacrifices and achievements. A debt is thus acknowledged, a debt that keeps growing because these ancestors, in their continuing existence as powerful spirits, never cease to grant the lineage new advantages and advances from their power. For nothing, perhaps? But there is no “for nothing” in those crude and “poor-souled” ages. What can be given back to them? Sacrifices—originally as food, in the crudest sense—festivals, shrines, tributes of honor, above all obedience—for all customs, as the ancestors’ works, are also their ordinances and commands. Does one ever give them enough? This suspicion remains and grows: from time to time it exacts a great wholesale payment, some monstrous repayment to the “creditor”—the notorious sacrifice of the firstborn, for example; blood, human blood in any case. By this kind of logic, fear of the ancestor and his power, the consciousness of debts to him, necessarily increases in exactly the same measure as the lineage’s own power increases, as the lineage itself stands ever more victorious, independent, honored, feared. Not the other way around! Rather, every step toward the lineage’s decline, all miserable accidents, all signs of degeneration, of approaching dissolution, always diminish fear of the spirit of its founder too, giving an ever lower estimate of his prudence, foresight, and present power. If we imagine this crude logic carried to its conclusion, the ancestors of the most powerful lineages must finally, through the imagination of growing fear, have grown to monstrous proportions themselves and been pushed back into the darkness of divine uncanniness and inconceivability: the ancestor is ultimately and necessarily transfigured into a god. Perhaps here lies the very origin of the gods, an origin, then, in fear! … Anyone who might think it necessary to add, “But also in piety!” would hardly be right about that longest period of humanity, its primeval time. All the more, admittedly, about the middle period in which the noble lineages take shape: for these did indeed repay their originators, their ancestors—heroes, gods—with interest, giving them all the qualities that had meanwhile become manifest in themselves, the noble qualities. Later we shall glance at this ennobling and elevation of the gods—which is certainly not their “sanctification.” For now, let us simply follow the course of this whole development of the consciousness of debt provisionally to its end.

20 As history teaches, the consciousness of being indebted to the deity by no means came to an end with the decline of the blood-based form of organization of the “community.” Just as humanity inherited the concepts “good and bad” from the hereditary nobility—along with its fundamental psychological tendency to establish orders of rank—so, with its inheritance of the deities of lineage and tribe, it also acquired the pressure of debts still unpaid and the desire to discharge them. (The transition is effected by those vast populations of slaves and serfs that adapted themselves to their masters’ worship of the gods, whether through coercion or through submissiveness and mimicry: from them this inheritance then overflows in every direction.) For several thousand years the feeling of guilt toward the deity never stopped growing, always in the same proportion as the concept of God and the feeling for God grew on earth and were raised higher. (The entire history of ethnic struggles, victories, reconciliations, mergers—everything preceding the final ranking of all constituent peoples in every great racial synthesis—is reflected in their gods’ genealogical confusion, in the legends of their struggles, victories, and reconciliations. The advance toward universal empires is always also an advance toward universal deities; despotism, with its overpowering of the independent nobility, always paves the way for some kind of monotheism as well.) The advent of the Christian God, the maximum God attained so far, therefore also brought forth the maximum feeling of guilt on earth. Assuming that by now we have entered the reverse movement, we might infer, with no small probability, from the unstoppable decline of belief in the Christian God that there is already a considerable decline in humanity’s consciousness of guilt too. Indeed, we cannot dismiss the prospect that the complete and final victory of atheism might release humanity from this whole feeling of being indebted to its beginning, its first cause. Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together.—

21 So much for now, briefly and roughly, on the connection of the concepts “guilt” and “duty” with religious presuppositions. I have deliberately left aside until now the actual moralization of these concepts—their being thrust back into conscience, or more precisely, the entanglement of bad conscience with the concept of God—and at the end of the preceding section I even spoke as though this moralization did not exist at all; consequently, as though these concepts must now necessarily come to an end, once their presupposition has fallen, belief in our “creditor,” in God. The facts diverge from this in a terrifying way. The moralization of the concepts guilt and duty, their being thrust back into bad conscience, is, in the strictest sense, an attempt to reverse the direction of the development just described, or at least to bring its movement to a halt. Now the very prospect of a final discharge is to close pessimistically once and for all; now the gaze is to strike a bronze impossibility and recoil without consolation; now those concepts “guilt” and “duty” are to turn backward—against whom? There can be no doubt: first against the “debtor,” in whom bad conscience now takes such firm hold, eats its way in, spreads, and grows like a polyp into every breadth and depth, until at last, with the impossibility of removing guilt, the impossibility of removing penance is conceived as well, the thought that it can never be paid off—“eternal punishment.” But finally they turn even against the “creditor,” against humanity’s first cause: whether we think here of the beginning of the human race, of its ancestor, now burdened with a curse—“Adam,” “original sin,” “unfreedom of the will”—or of nature, from whose womb the human being arises and into which the principle of evil is now inserted, the “demonization of nature”; or of existence itself, which is left as worthless in itself—a nihilistic turning away from it, a longing for nothingness or for its “opposite,” for a different mode of being, Buddhism and kindred things. Until, all at once, we stand before the paradoxical and horrifying expedient in which tormented humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity: God himself sacrificing himself for humanity’s guilt, God himself exacting payment from himself, God as the only one who can discharge for humanity what has become impossible for humanity itself to discharge—the creditor sacrificing himself for his debtor, out of love—can one believe it?—out of love for his debtor! …

22 We will already have guessed what has really happened in all this, and beneath all this: that will to self-torment, that cruelty forced to retreat in the animal-human made inward, driven back into himself, imprisoned in the “state” for the purpose of taming, who invented bad conscience in order to hurt himself once the more natural outlet for this wish to hurt had been blocked—this human being of bad conscience seized upon the religious presupposition to drive his self-torture to its most horrifying hardness and intensity. A guilt toward God: this thought becomes his instrument of torture. In “God” he grasps the ultimate opposites he can find to his own inseparable animal instincts; he reinterprets these animal instincts themselves as guilt toward God—as hostility, rebellion, insurrection against the “Lord,” the “Father,” the primal ancestor and beginning of the world; he stretches himself across the contradiction “God” and “devil”; he casts out of himself every No he says to himself, to nature, to the naturalness and actuality of his being, as a Yes, as something existent, embodied, real, as God, as God’s holiness, as God’s judgeship, as God’s executionership, as a beyond, as eternity, as torment without end, as hell, as punishment and guilt beyond all measure. This is a kind of madness of the will in psychological cruelty that has absolutely no equal: the human will to find oneself guilty and reprehensible beyond the possibility of atonement; the will to think oneself punished without the punishment ever being able to equal the guilt; the will to infect and poison the deepest ground of things with the problem of punishment and guilt, so as to cut off once and for all one’s own escape from this labyrinth of “fixed ideas”; the will to erect an ideal—that of the “holy God”—in order, confronted with it, to be palpably certain of one’s absolute unworthiness. Oh, this mad, melancholy beast, the human being! What notions occur to it, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestiality in thought breaks out at once when it is prevented even a little from being a beast in action! … All this is interesting beyond measure, but also filled with such black, somber, enervating sadness that one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses. Here is illness, beyond any doubt, the most fearful illness that has yet raged in humanity—and whoever can still hear how, in this night of torment and absurdity, the cry of love rang out, the cry of the most yearning ecstasy, of redemption in love—but today people no longer have ears for it!—turns away, seized by an unconquerable horror … There is so much that is dreadful in the human being! … The earth has been a madhouse for far too long! …

23 Let this suffice once and for all on the origin of the “holy God.”—That the conception of gods in itself need not necessarily lead to this deterioration of the imagination, which for a moment we could not spare ourselves from confronting; that there are nobler ways of employing the invention of gods than for this self-crucifixion and self-defilement of humanity, in which Europe’s last millennia have displayed their mastery—fortunately, we can still gather this from every glance we cast upon the Greek gods, these reflections of noble and self-commanding human beings, in whom the animal in humanity felt itself deified and did not tear itself apart, did not rage against itself! For the longest time these Greeks used their gods precisely to keep “bad conscience” off their backs, to remain free to rejoice in their freedom of soul: thus in the opposite sense to Christianity’s use of its God. They went very far in this, these splendid, lionhearted childish souls; and no less an authority than Homer’s Zeus himself occasionally gives them to understand that they are making things too easy for themselves. “A marvel!” he says once—the case concerns Aegisthus, a very bad case—

“Marvelous, how fiercely mortals complainagainst the gods!“Evil comes only from us, they suppose; yetthey themselves“Through folly bring misery upon themselves,even beyond their fate.”

Yet at the same time we hear and see that even this Olympian spectator and judge is far from bearing them a grudge or thinking ill of them on that account. “How foolish they are!” is what he thinks at the misdeeds of mortals; and “folly,” “lack of sense,” a little “derangement in the head”—even the Greeks of the strongest, bravest age admitted this much in themselves as the cause of much that was bad and disastrous: folly, not sin! Do you understand? … But even this derangement in the head was a problem: “Yes, how is it even possible? Where can it really have come from, in heads such as we have, we people of noble descent, of good fortune, of sound constitution, of the best society, of nobility, of virtue?”—For centuries the noble Greek asked himself this in the face of every incomprehensible horror and outrage with which one of his peers had stained himself. “A god must have deluded him,” he finally told himself, shaking his head … This escape route is typical of the Greeks … In this way the gods served in those days to justify human beings to a certain degree even in wrongdoing; they served as causes of evil—in those days they took upon themselves not the punishment but, as is nobler, the guilt …

24 —I close with three question marks, as one sees well enough. “Is an ideal being set up here, or one being broken down?” I may perhaps be asked… But have you yourselves ever asked enough how dearly the setting-up of every ideal has paid for itself on earth? How much reality has each time been slandered and misjudged for it, how much lie sanctified, how much conscience disturbed, how much “God” each time had to be sacrificed? For a sanctuary to be set up, a sanctuary must be broken: that is the law—show me the case where it is not fulfilled!… We modern human beings, we are the heirs of millennia of conscience-vivisection and self-torture: in this we have our longest practice, our artistry perhaps, in any case our refinement, our spoiled taste. For far too long man has looked at his natural inclinations with an “evil eye,” so that they finally became sister to the “bad conscience” in him. A reverse attempt would be in itself possible—but who is strong enough for it?—namely, to make sister to the bad conscience the unnatural inclinations, all those aspirations to the otherworldly, to the contrary of the senses, contrary of instinct, contrary of nature, contrary of the animal—in short, the ideals so far, which are all life-hostile ideals, world-slanderer ideals. To whom today could one turn with such hopes and demands?… Precisely the good people one would have against oneself with that; besides, as is only proper, the comfortable, the reconciled, the vain, the enthusiastic, the weary… What offends more deeply, what separates so thoroughly, as letting something be noticed of the severity and the height with which one treats oneself? And again—how forthcoming, how loving all the world shows itself toward us as soon as we do as all the world does and “let ourselves go” as all the world does!… For that goal one would need another kind of spirit than is probable precisely in this age: spirits strengthened by wars and victories, to whom conquest, adventure, danger, pain even have become a need; one would need for it the habituation to sharp, high air, to wintry wanderings, to ice and mountains in every sense; one would need for it a kind of sublime malice itself, a last and most self-assured mischievousness of knowledge, which belongs to the great health; one would need, in short and badly enough, precisely this great health!… Is this even possible today?… But at some time, in a stronger time than this rotten, self-doubting present, he must come to us, the redeeming human being of the great love and the great contempt, the creative spirit whom his urgent force drives again and again away from all seclusion and all beyond, whose solitude the people misunderstand, as though it were a flight from reality—: while it is only his sinking, burying, deepening into reality, so that one day, when he comes to the light again, he may bring home from it the redemption of this reality: its redemption from the curse that the ideal so far has laid upon it. This human being of the future, who will redeem us as much from the ideal so far as from what had to grow out of it, from the great nausea, from the will to nothing, from nihilism, this stroke of the noon bell and of the great decision, which makes the will free again, which gives the earth back its goal and man back his hope, this Antichrist and Antinihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness—he must come one day…

25 —But what am I talking about here? Enough! Enough! In this place only one thing is proper to me: to be silent. Otherwise I should take liberties with what alone is permitted to a younger man, a “more future” one, a stronger one than I am—what alone is permitted to Zarathustra, to Zarathustra the godless…

Second Essay:

Guilt, Bad Conscience

and Related Matters.

1 To breed an animal that has the right to make promises—isn't this exactly the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in dealing with human beings? Isn't this the real problem of the human being? … Anyone who fully appreciates the opposing force, the force of forgetting, must find it all the more astonishing that this problem has largely been solved. Forgetting is not simply a force of inertia, as superficial people believe. It is an active ability to hold things back, positive in the strictest sense. Thanks to it, what we live through, experience, and take into ourselves enters our consciousness as little while we digest it—we might call this “taking it into the soul”—as does the whole thousandfold process of feeding our bodies, of “taking it into the body.” Temporarily closing the doors and windows of consciousness; remaining undisturbed by the noise and struggle with which our underworld of serving organs works for and against itself; a little quiet, a little blank slate in consciousness, to make room again for something new, especially for the nobler functions and officials, for governing, looking ahead, deciding in advance—for our organism is organized as an oligarchy. This is the use of active forgetting, as I have called it. It acts like a doorkeeper, keeping order, peace, and proper behavior in the soul. We can see at once how there could be no happiness, cheerfulness, hope, pride, or present moment without forgetting. A person whose mechanism for holding things back is damaged and stops working is like someone with indigestion—and not merely like one. He can never “finish with” anything … Now this animal, which needs to forget, for which forgetting is a strength, a form of robust health, has bred an opposing ability in itself: a memory. With its help, forgetting is suspended in certain cases—namely, when a promise is to be made. This is by no means just a passive inability to get rid of an impression once it has been cut into us. It is not just indigestion over a word once pledged that we cannot finish with. It is an active unwillingness to let go, a continuing to will what was once willed, a real memory of the will. A whole world of new, unfamiliar things, circumstances, even acts of will can safely come between the original “I will,” “I will do it,” and the will's actual release, its act, without breaking this long chain of will. But think of everything this requires! To have this kind of advance control over the future, a person must first have learned to distinguish necessary events from accidental ones, to think in terms of causes, to see and anticipate distant things as if they were present, to establish with certainty what the aim is and what means will achieve it. He must be able to count and calculate at all. And for this, he himself must first have become predictable, regular, necessary, even in his own picture of himself. Only then can he finally guarantee himself as a future being, as someone making a promise does!

2 This is precisely the long history of how responsibility arose. As we have already understood, the task of breeding an animal entitled to make promises includes a nearer task as its condition and preparation: first making human beings to some degree necessary, uniform, equal among equals, regular, and therefore predictable. The enormous work of what I have called the “morality of custom” (see Dawn, pp. 7. 13. 16)—the actual work human beings did on themselves through the longest period of the human race, all their prehistoric work—has its meaning and its great justification here, however much harshness, tyranny, dullness, and idiocy it contains. The morality of custom and the social straitjacket really did make human beings predictable. Now put ourselves at the end of this enormous process, where the tree finally bears fruit, where society and its morality of custom finally bring out what they were only a means to produce. We find the sovereign individual as the ripest fruit on their tree. This individual is like no one but himself. He has broken free of the morality of custom again. He is autonomous, above that morality—since “autonomous” and “moral” exclude each other. In short, he is a person with his own independent, lasting will, who has the right to make promises. In him we find a proud awareness, stirring in every muscle, of what has at last been achieved and taken bodily form in him. It is a real awareness of power and freedom, a feeling that humanity itself has reached fulfillment. This person who has become free, who really has the right to promise, this master of a free will, this sovereign—how could he fail to know the advantage this gives him over everything that cannot promise or guarantee itself? How could he fail to know how much trust, fear, and respect he inspires—he “deserves” all three—and how this mastery over himself necessarily puts mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all creatures with shorter wills and less reliability into his hands as well? This “free” person possesses a long, unbreakable will, and in this possession he also has his standard of value. Looking at others from his own standpoint, he honors or despises them. He necessarily honors his equals, the strong and reliable, those who have the right to promise. That means anyone who promises as a sovereign does: with weight, rarely, slowly; who gives his trust sparingly and distinguishes someone by trusting him; who gives his word as something dependable, because he knows he is strong enough to keep it even against accidents, even “against fate.” Just as necessarily, he keeps a kick ready for the scrawny hounds who promise without having the right, and a rod for the liar who breaks his word the moment it leaves his mouth. The proud knowledge of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the awareness of this rare freedom, this power over himself and his fate, has sunk into his deepest depths and become an instinct, the ruling instinct. What will he call this ruling instinct, assuming he needs a word for it himself? There is no doubt: this sovereign person calls it his conscience …

3 His conscience? … We can guess in advance that the concept of “conscience,” which we meet here in its highest, almost puzzling form, has already been through a long history and many changes of form. Having the right to guarantee oneself, and proudly, and so having the right to say yes to oneself—as I said, this is a ripe fruit, but also a late fruit. How long this fruit had to hang on the tree, tart and sour! And for a much longer time there was no sign of such a fruit at all. No one would have had the right to promise it, however certainly everything in the tree was prepared for it and growing toward it! “How do you give the human animal a memory? How do you stamp something onto this partly dull, partly rambling mind, caught in the moment, this living embodiment of forgetting, so that it stays present?” … This age-old problem was not, as we can imagine, solved with especially gentle answers or means. Perhaps there is nothing more frightening and sinister in the whole prehistory of humanity than its techniques for training memory. “You burn something in so that it stays in the memory: only what never stops hurting stays in the memory.” This is a main principle of the oldest—and unfortunately also the longest-lasting—psychology on earth. We might even say that wherever life among individuals and peoples on earth still has solemnity, seriousness, mystery, and dark colors, something lingers from the terror with which people everywhere once made promises, pledged things, and took vows. The past, the longest, deepest, hardest past, breathes on us and wells up inside us when we grow “serious.” Whenever people thought they needed to give themselves a memory, it never happened without blood, torture, and sacrifices. The most horrifying sacrifices and pledges—including the sacrifice of firstborn children—the most disgusting mutilations, such as castration, the cruelest ritual forms of every religious cult—and at bottom all religions are systems of cruelties—all this began in the instinct that recognized pain as the most powerful aid to memory. In a certain sense all ascetic practice belongs here. A few ideas are to be made indelible, always present, unforgettable, “fixed,” so that these “fixed ideas” hypnotize the whole nervous and intellectual system. Ascetic practices and ways of life are the means of freeing these ideas from competition with all other ideas, of making them “unforgettable.” The worse humanity's “memory” was, the more frightening its customs always looked. The harshness of penal laws in particular measures how hard it was to defeat forgetting and keep a few basic requirements of social life present to these momentary slaves of emotion and desire. We Germans certainly do not think of ourselves as an especially cruel and hardhearted people, still less as especially careless people who live only for the day. But just look at our old penal codes to discover how much trouble it takes on earth to breed a “people of thinkers.” I mean the European people among whom the greatest amount of trustfulness, seriousness, bad taste, and matter-of-factness can still be found today, and whose qualities entitle them to breed every kind of European mandarin. These Germans used terrible means to give themselves a memory, so they could master their vulgar basic instincts and their brutal clumsiness. Think of the old German punishments. For example, stoning—even the legend has a millstone fall on the guilty person's head; breaking on the wheel—the most distinctive invention and specialty of German genius in the field of punishment!; throwing a stake at someone; having people torn apart or trampled by horses—“quartering”; boiling criminals in oil or wine, still in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; the popular practice of flaying—“cutting strips of skin”; cutting flesh out of the breast; or even coating the wrongdoer in honey and leaving him to the flies under a blazing sun. With the help of such images and procedures, people finally keep five or six “I will nots” in their memory. They have given their promise about these in order to enjoy society's advantages. And sure enough, with this kind of memory they finally came “to their senses”! Ah, reason, seriousness, control over the emotions, this whole grim business called reflection, all these human privileges and showpieces: what a high price was paid for them! How much blood and horror lies at the bottom of all “good things”! …

4 But how did that other “grim business,” the awareness of guilt, the whole “bad conscience,” come into the world? This brings us back to our genealogists of morality. To say it again—or haven't I said it yet?—they are no good. Their own experience is five handbreadths long and merely “modern.” They have no knowledge of the past and no will to know it, still less a historical instinct, the “second sight” needed here in particular. Yet they go ahead and write the history of morality. Naturally, this must end in results whose relationship to truth is more than just strained. Have these previous genealogists of morality had even the faintest dream that, for example, the main moral concept of “guilt”—Schuld—originated in the very material concept of “debts”—Schulden—? Or that punishment as repayment developed completely apart from any assumption about freedom or lack of freedom of the will? Indeed, so much so that the animal “human being” always needs a high level of humanization before it even begins to make the much more basic distinctions “intentional,” “negligent,” “accidental,” “accountable,” and their opposites, and to take them into account in setting punishment. Nowadays the thought that “the criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted differently” comes so cheaply, seems so natural and unavoidable, and has even been pressed into service to explain how the sense of justice arose on earth at all. In fact, it is an extremely late achievement, a refined form of human judgment and inference. Anyone who puts it at the beginning handles the psychology of early humanity with clumsy fingers. Through the longest period of human history, people certainly did not punish because they held the wrongdoer responsible for his deed, and therefore not on the assumption that only the guilty person should be punished. Instead, they punished as parents still punish their children: from anger at harm they had suffered, which they vented on the person who caused it. But this anger was restrained and modified by the idea that every harm has its equivalent in something and can actually be paid off, even if only through the pain of the person who caused it. Where did this ancient, deep-rooted idea get its power—the idea that harm and pain are equivalent, which perhaps can no longer be rooted out today? I have already given away the answer: from the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor. This is as old as the existence of “legal persons” at all, and itself points back to the basic forms of buying, selling, exchanging, trading, and commerce.

5 Picturing these contractual relationships does, of course, arouse all kinds of suspicion and resistance toward the early humanity that created or permitted them, just as we would expect from what has already been said. This is exactly where promises are made. This is exactly where the point is to give the person who promises a memory. This is exactly where, we may suspect, we will find a store of harsh, cruel, painful things. To inspire trust in his promise to repay, to guarantee the seriousness and sacredness of his promise, to impress repayment on his own conscience as a duty and obligation, the debtor makes a contract pledging something else he “owns,” something still under his control, to the creditor if he fails to pay. For example, his body, his wife, his freedom, or even his life. Or, given certain religious assumptions, even his blessedness, his soul's salvation, finally even his peace in the grave. This happened in Egypt, where even in the grave the debtor's corpse found no rest from the creditor—and for the Egyptians in particular, that rest meant a great deal. Above all, however, the creditor could subject the debtor's body to every kind of humiliation and torture. For example, he could cut off as much of it as seemed appropriate to the size of the debt. From this point of view, precise assessments of individual limbs and body parts appeared early and everywhere, sometimes going into horrifyingly minute detail: assessments that had the force of law. I already count it as progress, as evidence of a freer, broader, more Roman view of law, when Rome's Twelve Tables decreed that it did not matter how much or how little the creditors cut off in such a case: “If they cut off more or less, let it be no offense.” Let's make the logic of this whole form of compensation clear. It is strange enough. The equivalence consists in allowing the creditor a kind of pleasure as repayment and compensation instead of an advantage that directly makes up for the harm—that is, instead of payment in money, land, or possessions of any kind. The pleasure is being allowed to vent his power without restraint on someone powerless, the delight of “doing harm for the pleasure of doing it,” the enjoyment of violent abuse. The lower the creditor's rank and position in society, the more highly he values this enjoyment. It can easily seem to him the most delicious mouthful, even a foretaste of a higher rank. Through the “punishment” of the debtor, the creditor shares in a master's right. At last he too reaches the uplifting feeling of being allowed to despise and mistreat a being as someone “beneath him.” Or at least, if the actual power to punish, the carrying out of punishment, has already passed to the “authorities,” he can see that being despised and mistreated. The compensation therefore consists in a claim and a right to cruelty.—

6 In this sphere, then, in the law of obligations, the moral world of concepts—“guilt,” “conscience,” “duty,” “sacredness of duty”—has its birthplace. Its beginnings, like those of everything great on earth, were thoroughly and for a long time drenched in blood. And couldn't we add that this world has basically never entirely lost a certain smell of blood and torture? Not even in old Kant: the categorical imperative smells of cruelty … Here too that sinister, perhaps now inseparable tangle of ideas, “guilt and suffering,” was first tied together. To ask again: how can suffering compensate for “debts”? Because making someone suffer gave the highest pleasure; because the injured person received an extraordinary enjoyment in exchange for the harm, plus the distress the harm caused him: the enjoyment of making someone suffer. It was a real celebration, something valued all the more highly, as I said, the more it contradicted the creditor's rank and social position. I put this forward as a guess. It is hard to see to the bottom of such underground things, quite apart from how distressing it is. Anyone who clumsily throws the concept of “revenge” into the middle of this has blocked and darkened his view rather than made it easier. Revenge itself leads straight back to the same problem: “How can making someone suffer be satisfying?” It seems to me that the delicacy, and still more the hypocrisy, of tame domestic animals—I mean modern people, I mean us—resists fully picturing how much cruelty made up the great festive joy of early humanity, and how it was mixed into almost every pleasure as an ingredient. It also resists picturing how naive and innocent humanity's need for cruelty was, and how fundamentally it treated “disinterested malice”—or, in Spinoza's words, malicious sympathy—as a normal human quality. That meant something to which the conscience heartily said yes! A more penetrating eye might still see enough of this oldest and most basic human festive joy even now. In Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 117 ff. (and earlier in Dawn, pp. 17. 68. 102), I cautiously pointed out cruelty's increasing spiritualization and “deification.” This runs through the whole history of higher culture, and in an important sense even constitutes it. At any rate, it was not so long ago that people could not imagine princely weddings and the grandest public festivals without executions, torture, or perhaps an auto-da-fé. Nor could they imagine a noble household without beings on whom they could freely vent their malice and cruel teasing. Think, for example, of Don Quixote at the duchess's court. Today we read all of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in our mouths, almost in torment. This would make us very strange, very hard to understand, to its author and his contemporaries. They read it with the very best conscience as the most cheerful of books; it almost made them die laughing. Seeing suffering feels good; causing suffering feels even better. This is a harsh principle, but an old, powerful, human, all-too-human basic principle. Perhaps even apes would sign it. People say that in devising bizarre cruelties, apes already give ample warning of human beings, as if “acting them out in advance.” No celebration without cruelty: this is what humanity's oldest, longest history teaches. And punishment too contains so much celebration!—

7 —With these thoughts, incidentally, I have no intention of helping our pessimists pour fresh water over their discordant, creaking mills of weariness with life. On the contrary, I want it clearly stated that life on earth was more cheerful back when humanity was not yet ashamed of its cruelty than it is now, when there are pessimists. The sky over humanity has always grown darker in proportion to the growth of human shame at being human. The tired, pessimistic look, the distrust of life's riddle, the icy no of disgust with life—these are not the signs of the most evil ages of the human race. Rather, like the swamp plants they are, they only emerge into daylight when the swamp they belong to is there. I mean the sickly softening and moralizing through which the animal “human being” finally learns to feel ashamed of all its instincts. On the way to becoming an “angel”—not to use a harsher word here—people have bred in themselves the spoiled stomach and coated tongue that make not only the animal's pleasure and innocence repulsive to them, but life itself tasteless. Sometimes they stand before themselves holding their noses and, with Pope Innocent III, disapprovingly list their disgusting features: “impure conception, disgusting nourishment in the womb, the bad quality of the matter from which human beings develop, hideous stench, secretions of saliva, urine, and feces.” Now that suffering always has to march at the head of the arguments against existence, as its worst question mark, we do well to remember the times when people judged the opposite way. They did not want to do without causing suffering. They saw in it a first-rate attraction, a real tempting bait for life. Perhaps back then—let this comfort the tenderhearted—pain did not hurt as much as it does today. At least a doctor could reach that conclusion after treating Black people—taken here as representatives of prehistoric humanity—for severe internal inflammations that bring even the most physically well-constituted European close to despair. They do not do this to Black people. (In fact, the curve of human sensitivity to pain seems to drop extraordinarily, almost suddenly, once we get past the upper ten thousand or ten million of overcivilization. Personally, I have no doubt that, compared with one painful night of a single hysterical, cultivated little woman, the combined sufferings of all animals ever questioned with a knife for scientific answers simply count for nothing.) Perhaps we may even allow the possibility that this pleasure in cruelty need not actually have died out. Only, in proportion to how much more pain hurts today, it would need a certain refinement and subtlety. Above all, it would have to appear translated into imagination and the inner life, adorned with names so entirely harmless that even the most tender hypocritical conscience would find nothing suspicious in them. “Tragic pity” is one such name; “longings for the cross” is another. What really makes people rebel against suffering is not suffering itself but its meaninglessness. Yet neither the Christian, who has read an entire hidden machinery of salvation into suffering, nor the naive person of earlier times, who understood all suffering in terms of spectators or those who caused it, knew any such meaningless suffering. To do away with hidden, undiscovered suffering without witnesses, and honestly deny its existence, people back then were almost forced to invent gods and intermediate beings of every height and depth. In short, they invented something that roams in secret too, sees in the dark too, and does not easily let an interesting, painful spectacle escape. Through such inventions, life back then knew how to perform the trick it has always known: justifying itself, justifying its “evil.” Today it might need other helpful inventions for this—for example, life as a riddle, life as a problem of knowledge. “Every evil is justified if a god enjoys watching it”: that is what the prehistoric logic of feeling sounded like. And really, was it only prehistoric? Gods imagined as lovers of cruel spectacles—oh, how far this ancient idea still reaches into our European humanization! On this point we might consult Calvin and Luther. At any rate, it is certain that even the Greeks knew no more pleasant addition to their gods' happiness than the pleasures of cruelty. How do you think Homer made his gods look down on human destinies? What ultimate meaning did the Trojan wars and similar tragic horrors really have? There can be no doubt: they were intended as festival entertainments for the gods. And since poets have a more “divine” nature than other people, presumably they were festival entertainments for poets too … Later the moral philosophers of Greece imagined God's eyes looking down in just the same way on the moral struggle, on the virtuous person's heroism and self-torture. The “Heracles of duty” stood on a stage, and knew it. Virtue without witnesses was completely unthinkable to this nation of actors. Might that bold and fateful philosophical invention, first made for Europe back then—the invention of “free will,” of absolute human spontaneity in good and evil—have been made above all to justify the idea that the gods' interest in humanity, in human virtue, could never run out? On this earthly stage there was never to be any shortage of truly new things, truly unheard-of suspense, complications, catastrophes. A world conceived as completely deterministic would have been predictable to gods, and therefore soon boring as well. Reason enough for these friends of the gods, the philosophers, not to burden their gods with such a deterministic world! All ancient humanity is full of tender consideration for “the spectator.” Its world was essentially public, essentially visible, unable to imagine happiness without spectacles and festivals. And, as I have already said, great punishment too contains so much celebration! …

8 To return to the course of our inquiry, the feeling of guilt, of personal obligation, began, as we saw, in the oldest and most basic relationship between persons that exists: the relationship between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor. Here one person first faced another; here one person first measured himself against another. No level of civilization, however low, has been found without some trace of this relationship. Setting prices, measuring values, working out equivalents, exchanging—these occupied the earliest human thinking so thoroughly that in a certain sense they are thinking. Here the oldest kind of shrewdness was bred. Here, too, we may suspect the first beginnings of human pride, of the feeling of superiority to other animals. Perhaps even our word “Mensch,” human being (manas), still expresses something of this self-esteem. Human beings named themselves as the beings that measure values, that value and measure, as the “assessing animal itself.” Buying and selling, with everything psychological that goes with them, are older than even the beginnings of any forms of social organization and association. Instead, the developing sense of exchange, contract, debt, right, obligation, and compensation was first transferred from the most basic form of personal law to the crudest, earliest group structures—in their relationships with similar groups. With it went the habit of comparing, measuring, and calculating one power against another. The eye was now set to this perspective. And with the clumsy consistency characteristic of early humanity's thinking, slow to get moving but then relentlessly continuing in the same direction, people soon arrived at the great generalization: “Everything has its price; everything can be paid off.” This is the oldest, most naive moral rule of justice, the beginning of all “good nature,” all “fairness,” all “good will,” all “objectivity” on earth. At this first stage, justice is the good will among roughly equal powers to settle with one another, to reach an “understanding” again through compensation—and, in the case of the less powerful, to force them to settle with one another.—

9 Still measuring by the standards of prehistoric times—which, incidentally, are present or possible again at every time—the community too stands toward its members in that important basic relationship of creditor to debtors. You live in a community and enjoy its advantages—oh, what advantages! Today we sometimes underestimate them. You live protected, spared, in peace and trust, without worrying about certain injuries and hostilities to which the person outside, the “outlaw,” is exposed. A German understands what “misery,” Elend, êlend, originally means. In return, you have pledged and committed yourself to the community precisely in regard to these injuries and hostilities. What will happen otherwise? The community, the cheated creditor, will get its payment as best it can. You can count on that. The immediate harm the wrongdoer has caused is the least of the issues here. Quite apart from that, the criminal is above all a “breaker,” someone who has broken a contract and his word to the whole community concerning all the benefits and comforts of communal life he has shared in until then. The criminal is a debtor who not only fails to repay the advantages and advances given him, but even attacks his creditor. From now on, therefore, he rightly loses not just all these benefits and advantages: he is now also reminded what these benefits are worth. The anger of the injured creditor, the community, returns him to the wild, outlawed condition from which he was previously protected. It pushes him away, and now every kind of hostility is free to vent itself on him. At this level of civilization, “punishment” is simply the image, the reenactment, of normal behavior toward a hated enemy who has been disarmed and defeated, and who has lost not only every right and protection but also every claim to mercy. It is therefore the law of war and the victory celebration of “woe to the conquered!” in all their ruthlessness and cruelty. This explains why war itself, including the warlike sacrificial cult, supplied all the forms in which punishment appears in history.

10 As a community's power grows, it takes the individual's offenses less seriously. They can no longer seem as dangerous and threatening to the existence of the whole as before. The wrongdoer is no longer “outlawed” and expelled. The general anger is no longer allowed to vent itself on him as wildly as before. Instead, the community as a whole now carefully defends and protects the wrongdoer against this anger, especially that of the people directly harmed. A compromise with the anger of those most immediately affected by the wrongdoing; an effort to keep the case local and prevent wider or even general involvement and unrest; attempts to find equivalents and settle the whole business—the settlement by compensation; above all, the increasingly definite will to treat every offense as payable in some sense, and so, at least to a certain degree, to separate the criminal from his deed—these are the traits that become more and more clearly stamped on the further development of penal law. As a community's power and self-confidence grow, its penal law always becomes milder too. Every weakening of that power and every deeper threat to it brings the harsher forms of penal law to light again. The “creditor” has always become more humane in proportion to his growing wealth. Finally, how much harm he can endure without suffering from it becomes the very measure of his wealth. We could imagine a society with such an awareness of its power that it could afford the noblest luxury available to it: letting the person who harms it go unpunished. “What do my parasites really matter to me?” it could then say. “Let them live and prosper. I'm still strong enough for that!” … Justice began with “Everything can be paid off; everything must be paid off.” It ends by looking the other way and letting those unable to pay go free. It ends, like every good thing on earth, by doing away with itself. This self-abolition of justice—we know the lovely name it goes by: mercy. Naturally, it remains the privilege of the most powerful, or better still, his way of going beyond the law.

11 —Here I want to reject recent attempts to look for the origin of justice on entirely different ground: the ground of ressentiment. First, a word in the psychologists' ears, if they should want to study ressentiment itself up close: this plant now flowers most beautifully among anarchists and antisemites. It also flowers as it always has, in hiding, like the violet, though with a different scent. Like must always produce like. So it will be no surprise to see just such circles again producing attempts that have often appeared before—compare p. 30 above—to sanctify revenge under the name of justice. As if justice were basically only a further development of the feeling of having been hurt! Along with revenge, these attempts seek to give belated honor to all the reactive emotions. I would be least inclined to object to that last point in itself. In fact, I would consider it a service in relation to the whole biological problem, in which the value of those emotions has previously been underestimated. All I draw attention to is that this new shade of scientific fairness—in favor of hatred, envy, ill will, suspicion, grudges, revenge—grows out of the spirit of ressentiment itself. For this “scientific fairness” immediately stops and gives way to tones of deadly hostility and prejudice whenever a different group of emotions is involved. These, it seems to me, have a far higher biological value than those reactive emotions, and therefore have an even greater claim to be scientifically assessed and highly valued. I mean the truly active emotions, such as the desire to rule, the desire to possess, and the like. (E. Dühring, The Value of Life; Course of Philosophy; essentially everywhere.) So much against this tendency in general. As for Dühring's particular claim that justice has its home on the ground of reactive feeling, truth demands that we confront him with the sharply opposite claim: the ground of reactive feeling is the last ground conquered by the spirit of justice! If it really happens that the just person remains just even toward those who harm him—and not merely cold, measured, detached, indifferent: being just is always a positive attitude—if even the assault of personal injury, mockery, and suspicion does not cloud the lofty, clear objectivity of the just, judging eye, which looks as deeply as it does gently, then this is a piece of perfection and supreme mastery on earth. It is even something we would be wise not to expect here, and at any rate should not too easily believe in. What is generally certain is that even with the most upright people, a small dose of attack, malice, or insinuation is enough to drive blood into their eyes and fairness out of them. The active, attacking, encroaching person still stands a hundred steps closer to justice than the reactive one. He has no need at all to judge his object falsely and with prejudice as the reactive person does and must do. In fact, that is why the aggressive person, as the stronger, braver, nobler one, has always had the freer eye and the better conscience on his side. Conversely, we can already guess whose conscience bears the invention of “bad conscience”: the person of ressentiment! Finally, just look at history. In what sphere has the whole practice of law, and even the actual need for law, found its home on earth until now? Among reactive people, perhaps? Not at all. Rather, among the active, strong, spontaneous, aggressive. Historically speaking, law on earth represents the struggle precisely against reactive feelings, the war waged against them by active, aggressive powers. Let this be said to annoy the agitator mentioned above, who once confessed about himself: “The doctrine of revenge has run through all my works and efforts as the connecting thread of justice.” These powers used part of their strength to set bounds and limits to the excesses of reactive passion and to force a settlement. Wherever justice is practiced and maintained, we see a stronger power looking for ways to put an end to the senseless raging of ressentiment among those weaker groups or individuals subject to it. It does so partly by taking the object of ressentiment out of the hands of revenge, partly by replacing revenge with its own struggle against the enemies of peace and order, partly by inventing, proposing, and sometimes imposing settlements, partly by making certain equivalents for injuries into a standard to which ressentiment is referred once and for all from then on. But the most decisive thing the supreme power does and enforces against the supremacy of hostile and lingering feelings—it always does this as soon as it is strong enough—is to establish law: an authoritative declaration of what, in its eyes, is to count as permitted and right, and what as forbidden and wrong. Once it has established the law, it treats encroachments and arbitrary acts by individuals or whole groups as offenses against the law, as rebellion against the supreme power itself. It thereby turns its subjects' feelings away from the immediate harm caused by such offenses. In the long run, this achieves the opposite of what all revenge wants, since revenge sees and recognizes only the injured person's viewpoint. From now on, the eye is trained to assess the deed more and more impersonally—even the injured person's own eye, though this happens last of all, as noted earlier. Accordingly, “right” and “wrong” exist only from the establishment of law onward, not, as Dühring wants, from the act of injury onward. Talking about right and wrong in themselves makes no sense at all. Naturally, injuring, violating, exploiting, destroying cannot be “wrong” in themselves, since life essentially operates by injuring, violating, exploiting, and destroying in its basic functions, and cannot be imagined without this character. We must admit something even more troubling: from the highest biological standpoint, conditions of law can only be exceptional conditions. They partly restrict the actual will to life, which aims at power, and are subordinate to its overall purpose as individual means: means of creating larger units of power. Imagine a legal order as sovereign and universal, not as a means in the struggle between power structures but as a means against all struggle as such. Suppose, for example, we followed Dühring's communist pattern, that every will must treat every will as equal. This would be a principle hostile to life, destroying and dissolving humanity, an attack on humanity's future, a sign of exhaustion, a back way into nothingness.—

12 One more word here about the origin and purpose of punishment. These are two separate problems, or should be. Unfortunately, people usually throw them together. What do the existing genealogists of morality do in this case? They act naively, as they always have. They discover some “purpose” in punishment, such as revenge or deterrence, then innocently put this purpose at the beginning, as the cause that brought punishment into existence—and they are done. But “purpose in law” is the very last thing to use for the history of law's origins. In fact, for every kind of history there is no more important principle than this one, won with so much effort, but which really ought to have been won: a thing's cause of origin and its eventual usefulness, its actual use and place in a system of purposes, are worlds apart. Something that exists, that has somehow come into being, is repeatedly interpreted from new points of view by a power superior to it, taken over anew, reshaped and redirected to a new use. Everything that happens in the organic world is an overpowering, a gaining of mastery. And all overpowering and gaining of mastery is in turn a reinterpretation, a reshaping, which must obscure or entirely erase the previous “meaning” and “purpose.” However well we understand the usefulness of a physiological organ—or of a legal institution, a social custom, a political practice, a form in art or religious worship—we have still understood nothing about its origin. This may sound awkward and unpleasant to older ears. For since ancient times people have believed that, in a thing's demonstrable purpose, in the usefulness of a thing, form, or institution, they also understood the reason it came into being: the eye as made for seeing, the hand as made for grasping. In the same way, people have imagined punishment as invented for punishing. But all purposes, all uses, are only signs that a will to power has mastered something less powerful and stamped the meaning of a function onto it. The whole history of a “thing,” an organ, a custom, can therefore be a continuous chain of signs of ever-new interpretations and adjustments. Their causes need not even be connected with one another. Sometimes they merely happen to follow and replace one another by chance. The “development” of a thing, a custom, an organ is therefore anything but its progress toward a goal, still less a logical and shortest progress achieved with the least expenditure of strength and cost. Rather, it is a succession of processes of overpowering that take place in it, more or less deep-reaching, more or less independent of one another. Add to these the resistance put up each time, the changes of form attempted for defense and reaction, and the results of successful counteractions. Form is fluid, but “meaning” is even more so … Things are no different even within each individual organism. Every substantial growth of the whole shifts the “meaning” of the individual organs too. Sometimes their partial destruction or reduction in number—for example, through destruction of intermediate parts—can be a sign of growing strength and perfection. What I meant to say is this: even partial loss of usefulness, withering and degeneration, loss of meaning and fitness for a purpose—in short, death—belongs among the conditions of real progress. Such progress always appears as a will and a path to greater power, and is always achieved at the expense of numerous smaller powers. Indeed, the greatness of a “step forward” is measured by the amount of everything that had to be sacrificed to it. Humanity as a mass sacrificed to the flourishing of a single stronger type of human being—that would be progress … I emphasize this main standpoint of historical method all the more because, at bottom, it goes against the prevailing instinct and taste of our time. These would rather accept the absolute randomness, even the mechanistic meaninglessness, of all events than the theory of a will to power at work in everything that happens. The democratic aversion to everything that rules and wants to rule, modern misarchism—to coin a bad word for a bad thing—has gradually been so thoroughly translated and disguised in intellectual, in the most intellectual forms, that today it is already advancing step by step into the strictest and apparently most objective sciences, and is allowed to do so. Indeed, it seems to me already to have mastered all physiology and the study of life—to their detriment, of course—by making a basic concept disappear: the concept of genuine activity. Under the pressure of this aversion, people instead put “adaptation” in the foreground. This is an activity of the second rank, a mere reactivity. They have even defined life itself as an increasingly suitable inner adaptation to outer circumstances (Herbert Spencer). But this misunderstands the essence of life, its will to power. It overlooks the basic priority of the spontaneous, attacking, encroaching, reinterpreting, redirecting, and shaping forces. “Adaptation” follows only after these forces have acted. It denies the ruling role within the organism itself of the highest officials, in whom the will to life appears as active and form-giving. We remember what Huxley criticized in Spencer: his “administrative nihilism.” But this involves more than just “administration” …

13 —To come back to the subject, punishment, we therefore have to distinguish two things in it. One is what stays relatively constant: the custom, the act, the “drama,” a certain strict sequence of procedures. The other is what changes: the meaning, the purpose, the expectation attached to carrying out those procedures. Following the main principle of historical method just developed, we simply assume by analogy that the procedure itself is older than its use as punishment. This use was only later put into the procedure, read into it. The procedure had long existed, but was customary in a different sense. In short, things are not as our naive genealogists of morality and law have so far assumed. They all imagined that the procedure was invented for the purpose of punishment, just as people once imagined that the hand was invented for grasping. As for the other, changing element of punishment, its “meaning,” at a very late stage of culture—for example, in Europe today—the concept of “punishment” no longer represents a single meaning at all. It represents a whole combination of “meanings.” The entire history of punishment so far, the history of its use for the most varied purposes, finally crystallizes into a kind of unity. This is hard to break down, hard to analyze, and, we must stress, completely impossible to define. (Today it is impossible to say definitely why people actually punish. Any concept in which an entire process is brought together in signs escapes definition. Only something with no history can be defined.) At an earlier stage, by contrast, this combination of “meanings” is still easier to break apart and rearrange. We can still see how, in each individual case, the elements in the combination change their relative weight and rearrange themselves accordingly. Now one element, now another comes forward and dominates at the expense of the rest. Sometimes a single element—for instance, the purpose of deterrence—seems to cancel out all the others. To give at least some idea of how uncertain, how much an afterthought, how incidental “the meaning” of punishment is, and how the very same procedure can be used, interpreted, and adjusted to serve fundamentally different intentions, here is an outline I arrived at myself from a relatively small, chance collection of material. Punishment as making someone harmless, as preventing further harm. Punishment as repayment in some form to the injured party for the harm done, including compensation in the emotions. Punishment as isolating a disturbance of balance to keep it from spreading. Punishment as instilling fear of those who decide on and carry out the punishment. Punishment as a kind of offset for the advantages the criminal has enjoyed up to that point—for example, when he is put to use as a slave in a mine. Punishment as removing a degenerating element, sometimes an entire family branch, as under Chinese law: thus as a means of keeping the race pure or preserving a social type. Punishment as a celebration, that is, as the violent abuse and mockery of an enemy finally brought down. Punishment as creating a memory, either for the person who suffers it—so-called “reform”—or for those who witness its execution. Punishment as payment of a fee demanded by the power that protects the wrongdoer from the excesses of revenge. Punishment as a compromise with revenge in its natural state, where powerful families still maintain it and claim it as their privilege. Punishment as a declaration of war and an act of war against an enemy of peace, law, order, and authority. Such a person is fought as a danger to the community, as someone who has broken the contract on which it rests, as a rebel, a traitor, and a breaker of the peace, using whatever means war provides.—

14 This list is certainly not complete. Clearly, punishment is overloaded with all kinds of uses. All the more reason to subtract one supposed use, though public opinion considers it the most essential one. Belief in punishment, shaky today for several reasons, still finds its strongest support here. Punishment is supposed to have the value of awakening the feeling of guilt in the guilty person. People look to it as the real tool for producing the inner reaction called “bad conscience” or “the bite of conscience.” But this gets both reality and psychology wrong even today—and how much more so for the longest part of human history, its prehistory! A real bite of conscience is extremely rare precisely among criminals and convicts. Prisons and penitentiaries are not the breeding grounds where this species of gnawing worm especially thrives. All careful observers agree on this, though many of them give such a judgment very reluctantly and against their own dearest wishes. Taken as a whole, punishment hardens people and makes them cold. It makes them concentrate. It sharpens their sense of alienation. It strengthens their power to resist. If it does happen to break someone's energy and bring about a miserable collapse and self-abasement, this result is certainly even less cheering than punishment's average effect, which is marked by a dry, gloomy seriousness. But if we think of those thousands of years before human history, we can safely judge that punishment itself did more than anything to hold back the development of the feeling of guilt—at least in the victims on whom the power to punish was vented. We must not underestimate how much the very sight of judicial proceedings and the carrying out of punishment prevents the criminal from feeling that his deed, his kind of action, is reprehensible in itself. He sees precisely the same kind of actions committed in the service of justice and then approved, committed with a good conscience: spying, outwitting, bribery, setting traps, all the cunning, crafty skills of policemen and prosecutors. Then there is the systematic robbing, overpowering, insulting, imprisoning, torturing, and murdering expressed in the various kinds of punishment—not even excused by passion. All these, then, are actions his judges do not reject and condemn in themselves, but only in a particular respect and application. “Bad conscience,” this most disturbing and interesting plant among the things that grow on our earth, did not grow in this soil. In fact, for the longest time, the awareness of the judges and punishers themselves expressed nothing to suggest that they were dealing with a “guilty person.” They were dealing instead with someone who had caused harm, with an unaccountable piece of fate. And when punishment then fell on that person, again like a piece of fate, he felt no other “inner torment” than he would at the sudden arrival of something he had not reckoned with: a terrible natural event, a falling boulder that crushes him, against which no further struggle is possible.

15 Spinoza once became aware of this in an awkwardly revealing way—to the annoyance of his interpreters, who actually work hard to misunderstand him at this point, Kuno Fischer, for example. One afternoon, chafing at who knows what memory, he pondered what, for him personally, was actually left of the famous bite of conscience. This was the man who had put good and evil among the things human beings imagine. He had angrily defended the honor of his “free” God against those blasphemers who claimed that God brings everything about with the good in view—“but that would mean subjecting God to fate, and would truly be the greatest of all absurdities.” For Spinoza, the world had returned to the innocence in which it lay before bad conscience was invented. What, then, had become of the bite of conscience? “The opposite of joy,” he finally told himself, “a sadness accompanied by the idea of something past that turned out contrary to all expectation.” Eth. III propos. XVIII schol. I. II. Just like Spinoza, for thousands of years the people who caused harm and were overtaken by punishment felt this way about their “offense”: “Something has unexpectedly gone wrong here,” not: “I shouldn't have done that.” They submitted to punishment as people submit to an illness, a misfortune, or death, with that brave fatalism, free of rebellion, which even today gives Russians, for example, an advantage over us Westerners in handling life. If there was any criticism of the deed back then, it was practical shrewdness that did the criticizing. Without question, we must look for punishment's actual effect above all in a sharpening of shrewdness, a lengthening of memory, a will to go about things more cautiously, suspiciously, and secretly from then on; in the realization that for many things one is simply too weak, once and for all; in a kind of improvement in judging oneself. What punishment can achieve on the whole, in humans and animals, is an increase in fear, a sharpening of shrewdness, and control over desires. Through this, punishment tames people, but it does not make them “better.” There would be more reason to claim the opposite. (“Harm makes you wise,” people say. To the extent that it makes you wise, it also makes you bad. Fortunately, it quite often makes you stupid.)

16 At this point I can no longer avoid giving a first, provisional statement of my own hypothesis about the origin of “bad conscience.” It is not easy to make it heard. It needs to be thought over, watched over, and slept on for a long time. I see bad conscience as the deep sickness human beings had to fall into under the pressure of the most thorough change they have ever experienced: the change that came when they finally found themselves confined within the rule of society and peace. These half animals, happily adapted to the wilderness, war, roaming, and adventure, fared just as water animals must have fared when forced either to become land animals or to die out. All at once, all their instincts lost their value and were “disconnected.” Now they were supposed to walk on their feet and “carry themselves,” where previously the water had carried them. A terrible weight lay on them. They felt clumsy at the simplest tasks. In this new, unknown world, they no longer had their old guides: the drives that regulated them and guided them surely without their being aware of it. These unfortunate creatures were reduced to thinking, drawing conclusions, calculating, combining causes and effects—to their “consciousness,” their poorest organ and the one most likely to go wrong! I believe there has never been such a feeling of misery on earth, such a leaden discomfort. And meanwhile those old instincts had not suddenly stopped making their demands! Only now it was difficult, and rarely possible, to give them what they wanted. For the most part, they had to look for new, underground satisfactions, so to speak. All instincts that do not discharge themselves outward turn inward. This is what I call the internalization of human beings. Only with this does what will later be called their “soul” develop in them. The whole inner world, originally thin, as though stretched between two skins, expanded and opened up. It gained depth, width, and height in proportion to how much the human discharge outward was held back. Those terrible defenses by which the organization of the state protected itself against the old instincts of freedom—punishments belong above all among these defenses—made all the instincts of the wild, free, roaming human being turn back, turn against the human being himself. Hostility, cruelty, pleasure in pursuit, in attack, in change, in destruction—all of this turning against the people who possess these instincts: that is the origin of “bad conscience.” Lacking external enemies and resistance, pressed into the oppressive narrowness and regularity of custom, the human being impatiently tore at himself, pursued, gnawed at, disturbed, and mistreated himself. This animal that people want to “tame,” which wounds itself against the bars of its cage, this deprived creature consumed by homesickness for the desert, had to make an adventure, a torture chamber, an uncertain and dangerous wilderness out of himself. This fool, this longing, desperate prisoner, became the inventor of “bad conscience.” But with him began the greatest and most disturbing sickness, from which humanity has still not recovered: human beings suffering from human beings, from themselves. It resulted from a violent separation from the animal past, a leap and fall, as it were, into new situations and conditions of existence, a declaration of war against the old instincts on which human strength, pleasure, and fearsomeness had rested until then. Let us add at once that, on the other hand, an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, brought something so new, deep, unheard-of, puzzling, contradictory, and full of a future into the world that the appearance of the earth changed fundamentally. In fact, it would take divine spectators to appreciate the spectacle that began then, whose end is still entirely out of sight. This spectacle is too subtle, too wonderful, too paradoxical to be allowed to play itself out meaninglessly and unnoticed on some ridiculous star! Since then, the human being has counted among the most unexpected and exciting lucky throws of the dice made by Heraclitus's “great child,” whether we call it Zeus or chance. The human being arouses interest, suspense, hope, almost certainty, as though something were announcing itself, preparing itself through him—as though the human being were not a goal, but only a path, an incident, a bridge, a great promise …

17 This hypothesis about the origin of bad conscience has two assumptions. First, the change was neither gradual nor voluntary. It did not take the form of organic growth into new conditions. It was a break, a leap, a compulsion, an unavoidable fate against which there was no struggle, not even ressentiment. Second, forcing a population that had previously been unrestrained and unshaped into a fixed form began with an act of violence and was completed only through one act of violence after another. Accordingly, the earliest “state” appeared as a terrible tyranny, a crushing, ruthless machine. It kept working until this raw material of people and half animals had finally been not just thoroughly kneaded and made obedient, but also shaped. I used the word “state.” It goes without saying who is meant: some pack of blond beasts of prey, a race of conquerors and masters, organized for war and able to organize, which unhesitatingly lays its terrible paws on a population perhaps vastly superior in numbers, but still without shape, still roaming. This is how the “state” begins on earth. I think we are done with the fanciful notion that it began with a “contract.” What does someone who can command, who is a “master” by nature, who acts violently in deed and gesture, have to do with contracts! Such beings cannot be reckoned with. They come like fate, without cause, reason, consideration, or pretext. They are there like a flash of lightning: too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too “different” even to be hated. Their work is an instinctive creating and imposing of forms. They are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are. Wherever they appear, something new soon stands there: a structure of rule that lives, whose parts and functions have been marked out and put into relation with one another. Nothing at all finds a place in it without first being given a “meaning” in relation to the whole. These born organizers do not know what guilt, responsibility, or consideration is. They are ruled by that terrible artist's selfishness which looks out with a gaze of bronze and knows itself justified in advance for all eternity by its “work,” as a mother does by her child. Obviously, “bad conscience” did not grow in them. But this ugly growth would not have developed without them. It would not exist if the pressure of their hammer blows, their violence as artists, had not removed an enormous amount of freedom from the world, or at least from sight, and made it latent, so to speak. This instinct of freedom made latent by violence—we have already understood this—this instinct of freedom pushed back, forced to retreat, imprisoned inside, and finally discharging and venting itself only on itself: that, and that alone, is bad conscience in its beginnings.

18 We should be careful not to think little of this whole phenomenon just because it is ugly and painful from the start. At bottom, it is the very same active force that works on a grander scale in those artists of violence and organizers, building states. Here, inwardly, on a smaller, pettier scale, working backward in the “labyrinth of the heart,” to use Goethe's words, it creates bad conscience for itself and builds negative ideals. It is that same instinct of freedom—in my language, the will to power. Only here, the material on which this force vents its shaping, violating nature is the human being himself, his whole old animal self, and not, as in that larger and more obvious phenomenon, the other person, other people. This secret violence against oneself, this artist's cruelty, this pleasure in giving oneself a form as though one were difficult, resistant, suffering material; in burning into oneself a will, a criticism, a contradiction, a contempt, a no; this disturbing and terribly pleasurable work of a soul willingly divided against itself, which makes itself suffer for the pleasure of making suffer—all this active “bad conscience” has finally, as we can already guess, also brought to light a wealth of new, strange beauty and affirmation. It has been the real womb of events in the world of ideals and imagination, and perhaps it has brought forth beauty itself for the very first time … What would be “beautiful” if contradiction had not first become aware of itself, if ugliness had not first said to itself, “I am ugly”? … At least this hint makes it less puzzling how an ideal, a beauty, can be suggested in contradictory concepts such as selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice. And from now on we know one thing—I have no doubt about it: what kind of pleasure the selfless, self-denying, self-sacrificing person feels from the very beginning. This pleasure belongs to cruelty.—So much for now about the origin of the “unselfish” as a moral value, and about marking out the soil from which this value grew. Only bad conscience, only the will to mistreat oneself, provides the condition for the value of the unselfish.—

19 Bad conscience is a sickness, beyond any doubt, but a sickness in the way that pregnancy is a sickness. Let us look for the conditions under which this sickness reached its most terrible and sublime height. We will see what really entered the world only with this. But it takes staying power to do so, and first we must return once more to an earlier point of view. The relationship in private law between debtor and creditor, which we have already discussed at length, was interpreted into yet another relationship. Historically, this happened in an extremely remarkable and troubling way, in a relationship where it may be hardest for us modern people to understand: that of people now living to their ancestors. Within the original clan community—we are speaking of primeval times—the living generation always recognizes a legal obligation to the earlier generation, and especially to the earliest one, which founded the clan. This is by no means a mere bond of feeling. Indeed, there would be some reason to deny that such a bond existed at all for the longest part of the human race's existence. The ruling conviction here is that the clan exists only through the ancestors' sacrifices and achievements, and that these must be paid back to them through sacrifices and achievements. People thus acknowledge a debt, which keeps growing because these ancestors, continuing to exist as powerful spirits, never stop using their strength to grant the clan new advantages and advances. For free, perhaps? But there is no “for free” in those crude ages so “poor in soul.” What can people give back to them? Sacrifices—originally food in the crudest sense—festivals, chapels, displays of honor, and above all obedience. For all customs, as the ancestors' works, are also their rules and commands. Do people ever give them enough? This suspicion remains and grows. From time to time it forces a great payment to clear the whole debt at once, some monstrous return payment to the “creditor”—the notorious sacrifice of firstborn children, for example; blood, human blood in any case. According to this kind of logic, fear of the founding ancestor and his power, the awareness of debts to him, necessarily grows in exact proportion to the power of the clan itself, as the clan becomes ever more victorious, independent, honored, and feared. Not the other way around! Rather, every step toward the clan's decline, every miserable accident, every sign of degeneration or approaching dissolution, always also reduces fear of the spirit of its founder. These things give an ever smaller idea of his shrewdness, his care for the future, and the presence of his power. Imagine this crude kind of logic carried through to the end. Through the imagination of growing fear, the founding ancestors of the most powerful clans must themselves finally have grown to monstrous size and been pushed back into the darkness of something divinely uncanny and unimaginable. The founding ancestor is finally, necessarily, transformed into a god. Perhaps this is even the origin of the gods—an origin, then, in fear! … Anyone who feels the need to add, “But also in reverence!” would hardly be right about that longest period of the human race, its primeval age. They would certainly be all the more right about the middle period, when noble clans took shape. These clans really did give back to their originators, the founding ancestors—heroes, gods—all the qualities that had meanwhile appeared in themselves, with interest: the noble qualities. Later we will take another look at the gods' elevation to noble rank and their refinement, which certainly does not mean making them “holy.” For now, let us simply bring this whole development of the awareness of debt and guilt to a provisional end.

20 History teaches that the awareness of having debts to the deity by no means came to an end when the form of “community” organized around blood relationships declined. Humanity inherited the concepts “good and bad” from the hereditary nobility, along with its basic psychological tendency to establish rankings. In the same way, with its inheritance of the clan and tribal deities, humanity also acquired the burden of still unpaid debts and the desire to clear them. (The transition is made by those large populations of slaves and serfs who adapted themselves to their masters' worship of the gods, whether through force or through submission and mimicry. From them, this inheritance then spreads in all directions.) For several thousand years, the feeling of guilt and debt toward the deity has never stopped growing, always in the same proportion as the concept of God and the feeling for God have grown and been raised higher on earth. (The whole history of ethnic struggles, victories, reconciliations, and mergers—everything that precedes the final ranking of all the component peoples in every great racial combination—is reflected in the tangled genealogies of their gods, in the legends of their struggles, victories, and reconciliations. Progress toward universal empires is always also progress toward universal deities. Despotism, by overpowering the independent nobility, always also clears a path for some kind of monotheism.) The rise of the Christian God, the greatest God reached so far, has therefore also brought about the greatest feeling of guilt on earth. Suppose that we have now entered the opposite movement. We could then infer, with considerable probability, from the unstoppable decline of belief in the Christian God that there is already a considerable decline in humanity's awareness of guilt as well. Indeed, we cannot dismiss the prospect that the complete and final victory of atheism might free humanity from this whole feeling of having debts to its beginning, its first cause. Atheism and a kind of second innocence belong together.—

21 So much for a brief, rough, provisional account of the connection between the concepts “guilt,” “duty,” and religious assumptions. Until now I have deliberately left aside the actual moralization of these concepts: pushing them back into the conscience, or more precisely, entangling bad conscience with the concept of God. At the end of the previous section, I even spoke as though this moralization did not exist at all, and therefore as though those concepts must now come to an end once their underlying assumption has fallen: belief in our “creditor,” in God. The actual situation differs terribly from this. Moralizing the concepts of guilt and duty, pushing them back into bad conscience, is quite specifically an attempt to reverse the direction of the development just described, or at least to bring its movement to a standstill. Now the prospect of finally clearing the debt is supposed to close off, pessimistically, once and for all. Now the gaze is supposed to strike a solid wall of impossibility and recoil without comfort. Now those concepts “guilt” and “duty” are supposed to turn backward—against whom? There can be no doubt: first against the “debtor.” Bad conscience now takes root in him, eats into him, spreads, and grows like a polyp in every direction and depth, until finally, along with the impossibility of clearing the guilt, comes the idea that the penance too cannot be cleared, can never be paid off—the idea of “eternal punishment.” But finally they turn even against the “creditor,” against the first cause of humanity. This may mean the beginning of the human race, its founding ancestor, who is now burdened with a curse—“Adam,” “original sin,” “unfreedom of the will.” Or it may mean nature, from whose womb human beings emerge, and into which the evil principle is now placed—the “demonization of nature.” Or it may mean existence as a whole, which is left standing as worthless in itself: a nihilistic turning away from it, a desire for nothingness or a desire for its “opposite,” for a different kind of being, Buddhism and related things. Then, all at once, we stand before the paradoxical and horrifying way out in which tormented humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius by Christianity: God himself sacrificing himself for humanity's guilt and debt; God himself getting payment from himself; God as the only one who can clear humanity's debt when it has become impossible for human beings themselves to clear it—the creditor sacrificing himself for his debtor, out of love (can you believe it?), out of love for his debtor! …

22 By now we will have guessed what has really happened in all this and underneath it all. That will to torment oneself, that cruelty driven back into the animal human being who has been turned inward, frightened back into himself, locked in the “state” to be tamed—this human being invented bad conscience to hurt himself after the more natural outlet for his wish to hurt had been blocked. This person of bad conscience has seized on the religious assumption in order to drive his self-torture to its most terrifying harshness and intensity. A debt to God: this thought becomes his instrument of torture. In “God” he takes hold of the most extreme opposites he can find to his own real, inseparable animal instincts. He reinterprets these animal instincts themselves as guilt before God—as hostility, defiance, rebellion against the “lord,” the “father,” the first ancestor and beginning of the world. He stretches himself between the opposing terms “God” and “devil.” He throws outside himself every no he says to himself, to nature, to the naturalness and factual reality of his being, and turns it into a yes, into something existing, embodied, real: God, God's holiness, God as judge, God as executioner, the afterlife, eternity, torment without end, hell, immeasurable punishment and guilt. This is a kind of madness of the will in psychological cruelty that has absolutely no equal. It is the human will to find oneself guilty and reprehensible beyond any possibility of atonement; the will to imagine oneself punished without the punishment ever being able to equal the guilt; the will to infect and poison the deepest foundation of things with the problem of punishment and guilt, cutting off one's escape from this labyrinth of “fixed ideas” once and for all; the will to set up an ideal—that of the “holy God”—so that, faced with it, one can be plainly certain of one's own absolute unworthiness. Oh, this mad, sad human beast! What notions it gets, what unnaturalness, what fits of nonsense, what beastliness in thought breaks out at once if it is prevented even a little from being a beast in action! … All this is interesting to excess, but also so full of black, gloomy, unnerving sadness that we must forcibly forbid ourselves to look too long into these abysses. Here is sickness, beyond any doubt, the most terrible sickness that has raged in humanity so far. And anyone who can still hear how, in this night of torture and absurdity, the cry of love, the cry of the most longing delight, of redemption in love, rang out—but people today no longer have the ears for it!—turns away, seized by an unconquerable horror … There is so much that is horrifying in human beings! … The earth has been a madhouse for far too long! …

23 Let that be enough, once and for all, about the origin of the “holy God.”—Fortunately, every look at the Greek gods still shows that the conception of gods in itself need not lead to this deterioration of the imagination, which we could not spare ourselves from picturing for a moment. There are nobler ways of using the invention of gods than for this human self-crucifixion and self-defilement, in which Europe has excelled over the last few thousand years. These Greek gods reflected noble, self-ruling human beings, in whom the animal in humanity felt itself made divine and did not tear itself apart, did not rage against itself! For the longest time, these Greeks used their gods precisely to keep “bad conscience” away from them, so that they could remain happy in their freedom of soul. They used them, then, in the opposite sense from Christianity's use of its God. These splendid, lionhearted overgrown children went very far in this. No less an authority than Homer's Zeus himself occasionally lets them know that they make things too easy for themselves. “Amazing!” he says once—the case is that of Aegisthus, a very bad case—

“Amazing, how much mortals complainagainst the gods!“Evil comes only from us, they think; butthey themselves,“Through lack of sense, even beyond their allotted fate,bring misery on themselves.”

Yet here we also hear and see that this Olympian spectator and judge is far from resenting them for it or thinking badly of them. “How foolish they are!”—that is what he thinks when mortals commit misdeeds. And “foolishness,” “lack of sense,” a little “disturbance in the head”—even the Greeks of the strongest, bravest age admitted this much in themselves as the cause of much that was bad and disastrous. Foolishness, not sin! Do you understand that? … But even this disturbance in the head was a problem. “How is it even possible? Where could it really have come from, in heads like ours, in us people of noble descent, good fortune, good breeding, the best society, nobility, and virtue?” For centuries, this is what the noble Greek asked himself when faced with any incomprehensible atrocity or outrage with which one of his equals had stained himself. “A god must have deluded him,” he finally told himself, shaking his head … This way out is typical of Greeks … In this way, the gods then served to justify human beings to a certain degree even in what was bad. They served as causes of evil. Back then they took on not the punishment, but, as is nobler, the guilt …

24 I end with three question marks, as you can see. Some of you may ask me: “Is this setting up an ideal, or tearing one down?” … But have you ever really asked yourselves how expensive it has been, on this earth, to set up any ideal? How much reality was slandered and dismissed every time, how much lying was made holy, how much conscience was thrown into confusion, how much “God” had to be sacrificed each time? To set up a holy place, a holy place must be broken: that is the law—show me the case where it is not fulfilled! … We modern people are the heirs of thousands of years of conscience-surgery and self-torture. That is what we have practiced longest, it is our art perhaps, and in any case it is our sophistication and our spoiled taste. For far too long man looked at his natural drives with an “evil eye,” until in the end they paired off inside him with the “bad conscience.” The opposite experiment would be possible in itself, but who is strong enough for it? I mean pairing the bad conscience with the unnatural drives, with all those longings for the beyond, for what opposes the senses, instinct, nature, the animal, in short, with the ideals so far, all of them hostile to life and all of them slanderers of the world. Who today could you approach with such hopes and demands? … You would instantly have the good people against you, and, as is only proper, the comfortable, the reconciled, the vain, the enthusiastic, and the tired … Nothing offends more deeply and separates people more completely than letting them notice the severity and the height with which you treat yourself. And at the same time, how forthcoming and how affectionate the whole world becomes toward us the moment we behave like everyone else and “let ourselves go” like everyone else! … To reach that goal, we would need a different kind of spirit than this age is likely to produce: spirits made strong by wars and victories, for whom conquest, adventure, danger, and even pain have become needs; we would need the habit of sharp, high air, of winter walks, of ice and mountains in every sense; we would need something like a sublime malice, a last and most self-assured mischief of knowledge, which belongs to great health; in short, and bad enough, we would need precisely this great health! … Is such a thing even possible today? … But at some point, in a stronger time than this crumbling, self-doubting present, he must come to us, the redeeming man of great love and great contempt, the creative spirit driven again and again by his own urgent strength out of every retreat and every beyond, whose solitude the crowd misunderstands, as though it were an escape from reality, when in fact it is only his sinking, burial, and deepening into reality, so that one day, when he comes back into the light, he may bring home the redemption of that reality: its redemption from the curse that the ideal so far has laid on it. This man of the future, who will redeem us from the ideal so far and from what had to grow out of it, from the great disgust, from the will to nothing, from nihilism, this stroke of the noon bell and of the great decision that sets the will free again, that gives the earth back its goal and man back his hope, this Antichrist and anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothing: he must come one day …

25 But what am I saying here? Enough! Enough! At this point only one thing is proper for me: to keep silent. Otherwise I would take liberties with what is allowed only to a younger man, a man with more future, a stronger man than I am, what is allowed only to Zarathustra, to Zarathustra the godless …