|
Second EssayGuilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters9
Still measuring by the standard of pre-history (a pre-history which, by the way, is present at all times or is capable of returning), the community also stands in relation to its members in that important basic relationship of the creditor to his debtors. People live in a community. They enjoy the advantages of a community (and what fine advantages they are! Nowadays we sometimes underestimate them) - they live protected, cared for, in peace and trust, without worries concerning certain injuries and enmities from which the man outside the community, the "man without peace," is excluded - a German understands what "misery" [Elend] or êlend [other country] originally meant - and how people pledge themselves to and enter into obligations with the community bearing in mind precisely these injuries and enmities.
What will happen with an exception to this case? The community, the defrauded creditor, will see that it gets paid as well as it can - on that people can rely. The issue here is least of all the immediate damage which the offender has caused. Setting this to one side, the lawbreaker [Verbrecher] is above all a "breaker" [Brecher] - a breaker of contracts and a breaker of his word against the totality, with respect to all the good features and advantages of the communal life in which, up to that point, he has had a share. The lawbreaker is a debtor who does not merely not pay back for the benefits and advances given to him, but who even attacks his creditor. So from this point on not only does he lose, as is reasonable, all these good things and benefits, but he is also more pertinently reminded what these good things are all about.
The anger of the injured creditor, the community, gives him back the wild condition, as free as a bird, from which he was earlier protected. It pushes him away from it, and now every form of hostility can vent itself on him. At this stage of cultural behaviour "punishment" is simply the copy, the mimus, of the normal conduct towards the hated, disarmed enemy who has been thrown down, who has lost not only all rights and protection but also all mercy - hence it is a case of the rights of war and the victory celebration of vae victis [woe to the conquered] in all its ruthlessness and cruelty, which accounts for the fact that war itself (including the warlike cult of sacrifice) has given us all the ways in which punishment has appeared in history.
|
