But let us now return to the
promised Nietzschean passages, starting with Genealogie-2-14, where the
idea of bad conscience is first brought to the fore.
Nietzsche approaches the
formulation of this concept through his discussion of the practice of punishment,
whose primary function is supposed to be the development of “bad
conscience” in the actual and potential perpetrators, to serve as a
deterrent against future recurrences of criminal behavior. However, he
ridicules the notion that punishment evokes the feeling of guilt, which is the
essence of bad conscience:
Punishment
is supposed to possess the value of awakening the feeling of guilt in
the guilty; one seeks in it the actual instrumentum of that psychical
reaction called “bad conscience, sting of conscience.” Thus one
misunderstands psychology. It is precisely among criminals and convicts that bad
conscience, the sting of conscience is extremely rare. Generally
speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold, it concentrates, it sharpens the
feeling of alienation, and it strengthens the power of resistance. We must not
underrate the extent to which the sight of the judicial and executive
procedures prevents the criminal from considering his deed reprehensible; for
he sees exactly the same kind of actions practiced in the service of justice
and approved of with good conscience: spying, deception, bribery,
setting traps, etc… practiced as a matter of principle and without even emotion
to excuse them.
The bad
conscience, this most uncanny and most interesting plant of our earthly
vegetation, did not grow on this soil…
It is fascinating, that the above
passage may be easily misconstrued to be in total contradiction with what I was
saying about Raskolnikov’s freedom circle, catalyzed by bad
conscience, as if in Nietzsche’s mind the two are incompatible. The real
question here is that of precedence and consequence, of cause and effect. I
completely agree with Nietzsche’s psychological assertion that punishment, as long as it is a result of the
failure, on the part of the perpetrator of the crime, to escape the law, makes men hard and cold. There is a strong
element of sports competition in the cat and mouse game between the robbers and
the cops, and this element imposes its own parameters on the crime and
punishment situation, causing deep resentment and creating an
insurmountable obstacle to repentance in the heart and the mind of the
criminal, as long as he can perceive himself as the loser in this game. The
secret of Raskolnikov’s triumph of bad conscience was that he had won
the game in the first place and then threw it all to the loser, accentuating
the fact that his act of repentance was not from a position of weakness of the
loser, but clearly from the position of strength. Only under such conditions is
the true bad conscience, and the ensuing liberation through
repentance, at all possible.
Let us now continue with
Nietzsche’s Genealogie-2-15, as promised, because what this passage
says, is of great interest and importance, both in general terms and to our
discussion.
This
fact once came insidiously into the mind of Spinoza when one afternoon he mused
on the question of what really remained to him of the famous morsus
conscientiae, he, who had banished good and evil to the realm of human
imagination and had defended the honor of his “free” God against those
blasphemers who asserted that God effected all things ‘sub ratione boni.’ (“But
that would mean making God subject to fate, and it would surely be the greatest
of all absurdities!”) The world, for Spinoza, had returned to that state of
innocence, in which it had lain before the invention of the “bad conscience”:
what, then, had become of the morsus conscientiae?
‘The
opposite of gaudium,’ he finally said to himself, ‘a sadness,
accompanied by the recollection of a past event that flouted all of our
expectations.’ Mischief-makers overtaken by punishments have for thousands of
years felt, in respect of their transgressions, just as Spinoza did: ‘here
something has unexpectedly gone wrong,’ and not ‘I ought not to have done
that.’ They submitted to punishment as one submits to an illness or to a
misfortune or to death, with that stout-hearted fatalism without rebellion
through which the Russians for example still have an advantage over us
Westerners in dealing with life.
If there
existed any criticism of the deed in those days, it was prudence that
criticized the deed. Punishment tames men, but it does not make them “better.”
One might with more justice assert the opposite.
Here is the thrust of Nietzsche’s
brilliant challenge that morality is incompatible with freedom. Assigning
Spinoza to buttress his cause, he claims that the concepts of good (thou
shalt) and evil (thou shalt not) are restrictive to freedom, which
compels him to go Jenseits von Gut und Böse, where he apparently joins
God Himself. He is right, of course, in correctly characterizing Russian fatalism
as a philosophical recognition of the inevitable, but he has failed to find
a key to the essence of the Russian attitude to crime and punishment, which
I hopefully elucidated with some adequacy in my previous comment.
To be continued…
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