Chapter 25 Chapter 02 "Guilty", "Conscience Condemnation" and Others (8)

To repeat, we have seen that the sense of guilt and personal responsibility arose in the oldest and most primitive human relations, in that of buyer and seller, creditor and debtor; For the first time, the phenomenon of man against man appeared, and for the first time there was a phenomenon of man competing with man.We find that these relations exist to some degree, no matter how low the level of development of civilization.The setting of prices, the measurement of value, the invention and exchange of equivalents—these activities occupied the minds of the ancients to a considerable extent, and they were even in a sense the minds of the ancients: from here grew the oldest Similarly, the earliest pride of human beings, the superiority of human beings over other animals, also arises from this.Perhaps what we call "man" (man-us) is also an expression of this sense of self.Man regards himself as a measurer of value, as a creature that has value and can be measured, as an "animal that can be valued by itself".Buying and selling, with their psychological properties, are even older than any of the first forms of social organization and association: among men's most primitive ways of expressing rights are precisely those of exchange, of contract, of guilt, of right, of The rudimentary consciousness of obligation, coordination, etc., first translates into the most extensive and primitive public groups (compared with other similar groups), and at the same time the habit of comparing, measuring and valuing power is formed.From this clumsy continuity, from this ancient thought which faltered and then stubbornly moved in the same direction, one can at once draw the general conclusion that "everything has its price", "all things are liquidable": this is the oldest and most innocent moral precept of justice, the beginning of all "good deeds", "fairness", "good intentions", and "objectivity" on earth .This initial justice is the goodwill common among those who are roughly equal in strength, it is mutual tolerance among them, and it is an "understanding" reached through a kind of coordination. If it concerns the weak, it must be achieved through coercion. A kind of harmony.