Chapter 30 Chapter 02 "Guilty", "Conscience Condemnation" and Others (13)

Returning to the subject of punishment, we must distinguish between two distinct properties of punishment.First, its more permanent character, expressed as custom, ritual, "drama," as a certain rigid step in procedure; secondly, the variable character of punishment, expressed as meaning, purpose, , expressed as an expectation for the formation of such a program.And so on, there is no other premise here.According to the main point of the historiographical methodology just stated, the procedure itself would become something older and earlier than its use in punishment, which was only given, imposed. For programs that already exist, but are in another sense superfluous.In short, things are not as they have always been imagined by our naive originators of morality and law, who imagined that procedures were created for punishment, just as hands were created for grasping.As for the other feature of punishment, that changeable feature, that is, the "meaning" of punishment, in the recent cultural stage (for example, in today's Europe), punishment has long been no longer just a concept with a single meaning, but a concept with multiple meanings. combination of meanings.The whole history of punishment, its use for various purposes, ends up in a single mass, difficult to dissect, difficult to dissect, and, it must be emphasized, absolutely impossible to define.Now we can't tell what the penalty is originally for. All the concepts that symbolically compress the whole process escape definition, and only those concepts that have no history can be defined.However, according to an earlier study, the combination of "various meanings" is easier to decompose and deduce.We can now see how the elements of the combination change their value according to each individual case, and how they are then recombined so that sometimes this element, sometimes that element, becomes dominant over the others. .Under certain circumstances, even a single factor (such as the purpose of deterrence) may supersede all other factors.To make the reader at least understand how uncertain, how secondary, how accidental the "meaning" of punishment really is, and how the same procedure can be used, interpreted, and disguised for quite different purposes. Services, here is an outline I've abstracted from a small handful of sources I've come across by chance:

A penalty imposed to eliminate the harmfulness of damage and prevent further damage. Punishment in order to compensate the victim in some way (even in an emotional way) for the loss. Punishment is used to isolate the party that disrupts the balance so that the imbalance does not continue to develop. Use punishment to instill fear in those who decide and enforce it. Offset the benefits the prisoner has enjoyed so far by punishing him (for example, forcing him to do hard labor in the mines). Punishment is used to exclude degenerate members (and in some cases to exclude entire clans, for example under Chinese law, which is a method of maintaining racial purity, a tool for maintaining social patterns).

To treat punishment as celebration, that is to say, to rape and mock an enemy finally defeated. Memory is established through punishment, both for the person punished (so-called "reformation") and for the witnesses. Punishment serves as a kind of gratuity demanded by those in power who protect the prisoner from deviant reprisals. Punishment is to be reconciled with the natural state of vengeance so long as the mighty race clings to it, and claims it as its prerogative. Declare war with punishment on that enemy of peace, law, order, and authority, and prescribe the norms of war.This enemy, believed to be a danger to collective life, a betrayal of its premises, will be regarded as a rebel, a traitor, a violator of the peace, to be fought with the tools that war has given to man.