On the Genealogy of Morality (Chap. 3.15)

At one point Spinoza became aware of this issue in an incriminating way (something which irritates his interpreters, like Kuno Fischer, who really go to great lengths to misunderstand him on this matter), when one afternoon, he came up against some memory or other (who knows what?) and pondered the question about what, as far as he was concerned, was left of the celebrated morsus conscientiae [the bite of conscience]—for him, the man who had expelled good and evil into human fantasies and had irascibly defended the honour of his “free” God against those blasphemers who claimed that in everything God worked sub ratione boni [with good reason] (“but that means that God would be subordinate to Fate, a claim which, in truth, would be the greatest of all contradictions”). For Spinoza the world had gone back again into that state of innocence in which it had existed before the invention of bad conscience. So with that what, then, had become of the morsus conscientiae? “The opposite of gaudium [joy],” Spinoza finally told himself “is sorrow, accompanied by the image of something over and done with which happened contrary to all expectation” (Ethics III, Proposition XVIII, Schol. I. II). In a manner no different from Spinoza’s, those instigating evil who incurred punishment have for thousands of years felt, so far as their “crime” is concerned, “Something has unexpectedly gone awry here,” not “I should not have done that”—they submitted to their punishment as people submit to a sickness or some bad luck or death, with that brave fatalism free of revolt which, for example, even today gives the Russians an advantage over us westerners in coping with life. If back then there was some criticism of the act, such criticism came from prudence: without question we must seek the essential effect of punishment above all in an increase of prudence, in an extension of memory, in a will to go to work from now on more carefully, more mistrustfully, more secretly, with the awareness that we are in many things definitely too weak, in a kind of improved ability to judge ourselves. In general, what can be achieved through punishment, in human beings and animals, is an increase in fear, a honing of prudence, control over desires. In the process, punishment tames human beings, but it does not make them “better”—people could with more justification assert the opposite. (Popular wisdom says “Injury makes people prudent,” but to the extent that it makes them prudent, it also makes them bad. Fortunately, often enough it makes people stupid).