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Second EssayGuilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters14
Of course, this list is not complete. Obviously punishment is overloaded with all sorts of useful purposes - all the more reason why people infer from it an alleged utility which in the popular consciousness at least is considered the most essential one. Faith in punishment, which nowadays for several reasons is getting very shaky, always finds its most powerful support in precisely this: Punishment is supposed to be valuable in waking a feeling of guilt in the guilty party. In punishment people are looking for the actual instrument for that psychic reaction called "bad conscience" and "pangs of conscience." In doing this, people still apply reality and psychology incorrectly to present issues - and how much more incorrectly to the greater part of man`s history, his prehistory!
Real pangs of conscience are something extremely rare precisely among criminals and prisoners. Prisons and penitentiaries are not breeding grounds in which this species of gnawing worm particularly thrives - 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 and 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 ordinary results of punishment - characteristically a dry and gloomy seriousness.
However, if we consider the millennia 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 sight of judicial and executive processes from sensing the nature of his action as something reprehensible in itself, for he sees exactly the same kind of actions undertaken in the service of justice, applauded and practised in good conscience, like espionage, lying, bribery, entrapment, the whole tricky and sly art of the police and prosecution, as it develops in the various kinds of punishment - the robbery, oppression, abuse, imprisonment, torture, murder (all done as a matter of principle, without any emotional involvement as an excuse). Such 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 interesting plant among our earthly vegetation, did not grow in this soil. In fact, for the longest period in the past no notion of dealing with a "guilty party" penetrated the consciousness of judges or even those doing the punishing.. They were dealing with someone who had caused harm, with an irresponsible piece of fate. And the man on whom punishment later fell, once again like a piece of fate, experienced in that no "inner pain," other than what came from the sudden arrival of something unpredictable, a terrible natural event, a falling, crushing boulder against which there is no way to fight.
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