Chapter 29 Chapter 02 "Guilty", "Conscience Condemnation" and Others (12)

There is one more thing I want to say about the origin and purpose of punishment: there are two distinct problems, or two problems that should be distinguished, which are always confused.How did previous moral originators deal with this problem?Their approach has always been very naive. They randomly find a "purpose" from punishment, such as revenge or deterrence, and then easily attribute this purpose to the origin of things and the origin of punishment.However, in the process of studying the history of law, "the purpose of law" should be the last topic to be discussed.Of course, the most important conclusions in the field of historiography are, and should be, drawn with effort, and that is: the cause of a thing and its ultimate use, its practical application, and the sequence of its ends all the permutations of things are not at all the same thing; everything that exists, whatever its origin, is constantly being transformed and distorted by those in power; Therefore, all conquests and victories mean reinterpretation and re-rectification of names. In this process of re-interpretation and rectification of names, the previous "meaning" and "purpose" will inevitably be covered up, or even completely erase.Even if one had a clear understanding of the uses of all physical organs, even of legal institutions, of social customs, of political customs, and even of forms of art or religious rites, one would not thereby know their history --however uncomfortable all this may sound to old-fashioned ears--for from time immemorial men have thought they had grasped what things, forms, institutions do have, their purpose, their use, and the reasons for their existence; Just as it is believed that the eye was created to see and the hand to hold, so one imagines that punishment was invented for punishment.But all purposes, all uses are nothing but signs of a fact: a will to power overcomes the relatively weak, and then imprints meaning on the function of this will according to its own needs.Thus the whole history of a "thing," an organ, a habit may be an unbroken chain of reinterpretations and renamings, the causes of which are not themselves necessarily connected to one another. , on the contrary, their sequential arrangement and mutual alternation are just accidental factors.Therefore, the "development" of an event, a custom, or an organ is not a gradual process towards a goal, not a logical, simple, and most economical gradual process of human and financial resources. A sequence of relatively profound, relatively independent, and spontaneously generated conquest processes. This sequence also includes the resistance that appears in each process, the transformation of forms with the goal of self-protection and rebellion, and the confrontation actions that achieve results.The form is variable, but the "meaning" is even more variable... This is no exception in any organism: when the main growth period of the whole body begins, the "meaning" of each organ of the body changes accordingly; In some cases, the aging and reduction of the number of individual organs (for example, due to the death of some components) may be a symptom of the perfection and growth of strength of the whole.What I am saying is this: even the partial invalidation, atrophy, degeneration, loss, and even death of meaning and practical value are conditions of a real gradual process, which often manifests itself as a will and a way to a greater power, and The implementation of this will and method is often at the cost of sacrificing countless weak forces, and even the standard for measuring the extent of "progress" is determined according to the amount of sacrifice paid for progress.Sacrificing large numbers of people to the prosperity of individual, stronger races - this may also be an improvement... I emphasize this main idea of ​​historiographical method mainly because it is fundamentally consistent with the currently dominant Instinct is contrary to fashion, and this view prefers to cling to the theory of an all-pervasive will to power, rather to believe in the absolute chance and purposelessness of events.Against the democratic prejudices of all rulers and would-be rulers, modern antiquity (I make up a bad word for a bad thing) has gradually eroded into the spiritual realm, the highest spiritual realm; it seems to me that it has triumphed over the whole doctrines of physiology and life, and evidently shattered them by substituting a fundamental concept, an inner concept of initiative; whereas, under the pressure of that democratic prejudice, one "Adaptation," that is, a second-rate initiative, a pure reactivity, takes precedence.This is how people, such as Herbert Spencer, defined life itself, as an inner "adaptation" of increasingly definite purposes to external circumstances.But to do so distorts the essence of life - its will to power - and ignores the spontaneous, aggressive, superior, reinterpreted, reestablished, and formed forces (you know, "adaptation" is based on this the essential superiority of those higher faculties in the organism which manifest initiative and creativity through the will to live.The reader may recall how Huxley denounced Spencer's "administrative nihilism," but the problem at hand is more pressing than "administrative."