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Second EssayGuilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters12
Here another word concerning the origin and purpose of punishment - two problems which are separate or should be separate. Unfortunately people normally throw them together. How do the previous genealogists of morality deal with this problem? Naively - the way they always work. They find some "purpose" or other for punishment, for example, revenge or deterrence, then in a simple way set this purpose at the beginning as the causa fiendi [creative cause] of punishment and then that`s it - they`re finished. The "purpose in law," however, is the very last idea we should use in the history of the emergence of law. It is much rather the case that for all forms of history there is no more important principle that the one which we reach with such difficulty but which we also really should reach, namely that what causes a particular thing to arise and the final utility of that thing, its actual use and arrangement in a system of purposes, are separate toto coelo [by all the heavens, i.e., absolutely], that something existing, which has somehow come to its present state, will again and again be interpreted by the higher powers over it from a new perspective, appropriated in a new way, reorganized for and redirected to new uses, that all events in the organic world involve overpowering, acquiring mastery and that, in turn, all overpowering and acquiring mastery involve a re-interpretation, a readjustment, in which the "sense" and "purpose" up to then must necessarily be obscured or entirely erased.
No matter how well we have understood the usefulness of some physiological organ or other (or a legal institution, a social custom, a political practice, some style in art or in religious cults), we have not, in that process, grasped anything about its origin - no matter how uncomfortable and unpleasant this may sound in elderly ears. From time immemorial people have believed that in demonstrable purposes, the usefulness of a thing, a form, an institution they could understand the reasons it came into existence - the eye as something made to see, the hand as something made to grasp. So people also imagined punishment as invented to punish. But all purposes, all uses, are only signs that a will to power has become master over something with less power and has stamped on it its own meaning of some function, and the entire history of a "thing," an organ, a practice can by this process be seen as a continuing chain of signs of constantly new interpretations and adjustments, whose causes need not be connected to each other - they rather follow and take over from each other under merely contingent circumstances.
Consequently, the "development" of a thing, a practice, or an organ has nothing to do with its progress towards a single goal, even less is it the logical and shortest progress reached with the least expenditure of power and resources but rather the sequence of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of overpowering which take place on that thing, together with the resistance which arises against that overpowering each time, the transformations of form which have been attempted for the purpose of defence and reaction, the results of successful countermeasures. Form is fluid - the "meaning," however, is even more so . . . Even within each individual organism things are no different: with every essential growth in the totality, the "meaning" of an individual organ also shifts - in certain circumstances its partial destruction, a reduction of its numbers (for example, through the destruction of intermediate structures) can be a sign of growing power and perfection.
Let me say this: the partial loss of utility, decline, and degeneration, the loss of meaning and purposelessness, in short, death, belong to the conditions of a real progress, which always appears in the form of a will and a way to greater power always establishing itself at the expense of a huge number of smaller powers. The size of a "step forward" can even be estimated by a measure of everything that had to be sacrificed to it. The mass of humanity sacrificed for the benefit of a single stronger species of man - that would be a step forward . . .
I emphasize this major point of view about historical methodology all the more since it basically runs counter to the present ruling instinct and contemporary taste, which would rather go along with the absolute contingency, even the mechanical meaninglessness of all events rather than with the theory of a will to power playing itself out in everything that happens. The democratic idiosyncrasy of being hostile to everything which rules and wants to rule, the modern ruler-hatred [Misarchismus] (to make up a bad word for a bad thing), has gradually transformed itself and dressed itself up in intellectual activity, the most intellectual activity, to such an extent that nowadays step by step it infiltrates into the strictest, apparently most objective scientific research, and is allowed to infiltrate. Indeed, it seems to me already to have attained mastery over all of physiology and the understanding of life, to their detriment, as is obvious, because it has conjured away from them their fundamental concept - that of real activity.
By contrast, under the pressure of this idiosyncrasy we push "adaptation" into the foreground, that is, a second-order activity, a mere re-activity - in fact, people have defined life itself as an always purposeful inner adaptation to external circumstances (Herbert Spencer). But that simply misjudges the essence of life, its will to power. That overlooks the first priority of the spontaneous, aggressive, over-reaching, re-interpreting, re-directing, and shaping powers, after whose effects the "adaptation" first follows. Thus, the governing role of the highest functions in an organism, ones in which the will for living appear active and creative, are denied. People should remember the criticism Huxley directed at Spencer for his "administrative nihilism." But the issue here concerns much more than "administration" . . .
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