Chapter 32 Chapter 02 "Guilty", "Conscience Condemnation" and Others (15)

Spinoza has admitted this fact with some embarrassment (which annoys his commentators because they, like Gino Fischer, are systematically misinterpreting what he meant here).One afternoon, touched by some memory, Spinoza began to think about such a question: how much of the famous "conscience" remained in him? Spinoza attributed all good and evil to human beings. illusions, he doggedly defends the dignity of his "free" God against blasphemers who slander God for doing everything deliberate ("That would mean submitting God to his fate, and then God is really Absurdity at its most stupid"--).In Spinoza's view, the world has returned to innocence, to the situation before the invention of conscience, but what has conscience become in the process? "The opposite of being happy," he finally said to himself. "A kind of sadness, accompanied by the imagination of some unexpected event in the past." For thousands of years, those troublemakers who have been punished are no different from Spinoza. It felt like "something must have happened this time" rather than "I shouldn't have done this".They are punished as people are sick, suffering, or dying, with such a firm, unresisting fatalism that the Russians, for example, are still better at manipulating life than we are in the West.If there was a criticism of action in those days, it was an intelligence that criticized action.There can be no doubt that we should first look for the true effect of punishment in the growth of the intellect, in the growth of the memory, in a will which will henceforth be more prudent, more suspicious, more surreptitious, and Find it in the understanding that people are far behind in many things. In short, the real effect of punishment should be found in the improvement of human self-knowledge.Whether it is man or beast, all they can achieve through punishment is the increase of fear, the growth of intelligence, and the restraint of desire.Punishment, therefore, tames man, not improves him, and we have no more reason to hold to the contrary conclusion. (People say: "Eat a pit to gain wisdom". Eating a pit can make a person grow wiser, and it can also make a person worse. Fortunately, eating a pit often just makes a person stupid.)

coc1① "Ethics" Volume III Propos 18, School, 1, 2. coc2