Chapter 21 Chapter 02 "Guilty", "Conscience Condemnation" and Others (4)

But how did that other "dark stuff," that sense of guilt, that whole set of "conscience," come into being?But back to our moral genealogists.Let me repeat (perhaps I haven't mentioned it yet), they are useless; they have only their own five-year-old, purely "modern" experience; They lack a historical instinct, a "secondary presentiment" which is precisely necessary here;—yet they try to write moral history: such an attempt must end in producing results that do not correspond to the facts.These moral genealogists in the past probably never imagined in their dreams that the main moral concept of "guilty" comes from the very material concept of "debt"; punishment is a kind of reward, and its development and Any proposition about freedom of the will is irrelevant.Of course, history always needs to develop to the advanced stage of human nature before the animal "human" begins to distinguish those very primitive crimes into "intentional", "negligent", "accidental", "criminally responsible" ", and began sentencing on opposing sides.The idea that now seems so cheap, seems so natural, so necessary, the idea that explains the origin of the sense of justice, the idea that is forced to admit that the criminal deserves to be punished because he had other options. , which appeared very late indeed, is man's refined form of discrimination and determination; whoever moves it back to the beginning of human development is grossly misinterpreting the psychology of ancient man.Throughout an extremely long period of human history there were no penalties because people were able to hold perpetrators accountable for their actions.The principle followed at that time was not just to punish the guilty, but out of anger at the loss caused by the perpetrator, just as parents punish their children today-but this anger has limits and can also be punished. Mitigation, because people would think that any loss can be compensated accordingly, even making the perpetrator feel pain can be used as a kind of compensation.How did this ancient, deep-seated, perhaps now ineradicable notion, this notion of paying for loss with pain come about?I already guessed it: it arises from the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor.This contractual relationship is as old as the concept of "subject of rights", and the latter also involves the basic formation of buying and selling, exchange, trade, and communication.