On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 3.14)

Of course, this list is not complete. Obviously punishment is overloaded with all sorts of useful purposes, all the more reason why people can infer from it an alleged utility, which, in the popular consciousness at least, is considered its most essential one—faith in punishment, which nowadays for several reasons is getting shaky, still finds its most powerful support in precisely that. Punishment is supposed to be valuable in waking the feeling of guilt in the guilty party. In punishment people are looking for the actual instrument for that psychic reaction called “bad conscience,” “pangs of conscience.” But in doing this, people are misappropriating reality and psychology, even for today, and how much more for the longest history of man, his prehistory! Real pangs of conscience are something extremely rare, especially among criminals and prisoners. Prisons and penitentiaries are not breeding grounds in which this species of gnawing worm particularly likes to thrive:—on that point all conscientious observers agree, in many cases delivering such a judgment with sufficient unwillingness, going against their own desires. In general, punishment makes people hard and cold. It concentrates. It sharpens the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens powers of resistance. If it comes about that punishment shatters a man’s energy and brings on a wretched prostration and self-abasement, such a consequence is surely even less pleasant than the typical result of punishment, characteristically a dry, gloomy seriousness. However, if we consider those thousands of years before the history of humanity, without a second thought we can conclude that the very development of a feeling of guilt was most powerfully hindered by punishment—at least with respect to the victims onto whom this force of punishment was vented. For let us not underestimate just how much the criminal is prevented by the very sight of judicial and executive procedures themselves from sensing that his act, the nature of his action, is something inherently reprehensible, for he sees exactly the same kind of actions committed in the service of justice, then applauded and practised in good conscience, like espionage, lying, bribery, entrapment, the whole tricky and sly art of the police and prosecution, as it manifests itself in the various kinds of punishment—the robbery, oppression, abuse, imprisonment, torture, murder, all done, moreover, as a matter of principle, without even any emotional involvement as an excuse— all these actions are in no way rejected or condemned in themselves by his judges, but only in particular respects when used for certain purposes. “Bad conscience,” this most creepy and most interesting plant among our earthly vegetation, did not grow in this soil—in fact, for the longest period in the past nothing about dealing with a “guilty party” penetrated the consciousness of judges or even those doing the punishing. By contrast, they were dealing with someone who had caused harm, with an irresponsible piece of fate. And even the man on whom punishment later fell, once again like a piece of fate, experienced in that no “inner pain,” other than what might have come from the sudden arrival of something unpredictable, a terrible natural event, a falling, crushing boulder against which there is no way to fight any more.