Punishment and Morality
Patrick Mooney
Philosophy 184
April 10, 2000
Nietzsche writes, "If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory." (Genealogy II 3) This, along with the development of the bad conscience, is one of the two central problems of the development of the moral sentiments: After that, everything becomes a matter of progression and development of certain basic aspects of the contract between society and the individual. Although the problem of the development of the bad conscience is just as important as the development of memory, the development of the bad conscience is dependent on the prior existence of the memory. The development of memory, then, is the most basic requirement for man, an animal with a conscience, to live in a social setting.
On reading Nietzsche's sentence about memory, above, one immediately calls to mind Michel Foucault's descriptions, in Discipline and Punish, of elaborate ritual punishments for regicides, in which the act of the attempt on the monarch was mimed in public, down to the smallest detail, in front of a crowd gathered for the occasion. The development of memory in man through punishment, the practice of mnemotechnics (to use Nietzsche's term) continued in the ritual punishment of regicides and other criminals into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and through to today.
The development of memory is a basic problem because a person, to feel pride or guilt in his or her actions, must be able to remember those actions in a specific form: a vague association that may develop in the unconscious between two things that are frequently found together (in this case, an act which breaks the rules and the punishment of this act) -- as when a person housebreaks a dog by yelling at it when it urinates on the floor -- is not enough for a complex system of morality, and is not even enough to satisfy the demands of life in a simple social system. To fit into even a simple social system, one needs to be responsible for his actions so that they are not harmful to the group, and this conscience requires the development of a memory.
In the beginning, Nietzsche says, the development of morality had its roots in the contractual relationship between debtor and creditor. This is the point at which memory became indispensable, although it may have been useful before: here the memory was trained in specifics. Punishment, at this point, takes the form of an equivalence between the pain of the debtor and whatever financial obligations he may owe to his creditor. If a debtor is unable to repay his debts in the form in which they were supposed to be repaid, then his creditor is entitled to satisfy the debt by inflicting physical pain on him. As Nietzsche points out, there were systems of equivalences everywhere specifying the economic valuations of different parts of the body.
If, as Nietzsche claims, the development of mnemotechnics requires the infliction of physical pain to burn ideas into the consciousness, then it is easy to see how the development of memory here advanced a great deal for the defaulted debtors and, through the example of these debtors, a social group as a whole. Every time that a pound of flesh was excised from a debtor, not only that debtor but everyone aware of the spectacle had a motivation to become able to remember their debts in details. Conversely, the creditors always have strong motivations to remember the debts owed them -- either the creditor would expect to receive the contractual goods, originally conceived as a repayment for the loan, or he would look forward to exercising "the pleasure of being allowed to vent his power freely upon one who is powerless ... a right of the masters: at last he, too may experience for once the exalted sensation of being allowed to despise and mistreat someone as 'beneath them.'" (Genealogy II 5)
Once this development had occurred -- once memory had developed to the point where people could be expected to recall their debts -- people began to use the debtor-creditor and buyer-seller relationship (which Nietzsche calls "the oldest and most primitive personal relationship") as an economic arena in which they could compare their values as people. Even in the early development of society, according to Nietzsche, the buyer-seller and debtor-creditor relationships exist: the basic forms of interaction between early humans were economic, and the process of thinking developed out of the need to develop skills ("setting prices, determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging") that allow for economic exchange. (Genealogy II 8)
As social structures grow more complex, and the benefits derived from them increase, the community itself took on the character of a creditor in relation to its members. Punishment at this stage is still necessitated by the breaking of a contract, but the nature of the contract is no longer (necessarily) economic. A law-breaker is simply one who has enjoyed the benefits of the community while refusing to fulfill what the societal contract expects from him. At this stage, then, punishment has similar functions: the development of memory in the individuals of the community and the extraction of a compensation for the unsettled debt that the law breaker has failed to fulfill.
Now that the development of memory is long behind, and social structures have advanced to the point where people feel contractually bound to the social group, and the social group is sufficiently powerful to extract an equivalent in pain for some sort of disappointment, the development of the "bad conscience" begins in earnest. Nietzsche claims that "life simply is will to power" and that the expression of the will to power in instincts frequently entails the necessary application of cruelty. (Good and Evil 259; Genealogy II 16)
The inability of some men to be cruel to others in a social setting at this point (because the debtor-creditor relationship with society prevents it for weaker individuals, and threatens the expression of these instincts with punishment) necessitated that these men turn their instincts for cruelty inward. "All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward... thus it was that man first developed what was later called his 'soul,'" writes Nietzsche. (Genealogy II 16) The necessity to express drives toward cruelty and the inability for some to express them outwards -- which is a combination of the memory of what can happen, in a social setting, to those who are cruel to others and the inability to get away with outwardly expressed cruelty -- required that those people turn their crueler instincts inwards to express them. People without sufficient power to get away with being cruel to others became cruel to themselves instead. These people are the majority, the "masses," who feel bound by the societal contract as debtors. (Nietzsche specifically disclaims this development in the minority who are in command: "He who can command, he who is by nature 'master,' he who is violent in act and bearing -- what has he to do with contracts!" he writes.) (Genealogy II 17)
The specific way in which these people became cruel to themselves is bound up with the causes of their inability to express their cruelty outward: just as the societal contract forbids them to express their cruelty outward, they internalize the provisions of this contract and its view of man (that he should be kind and not harm the social body) and compare it unfavorably with their own still-active instincts for cruelty. The instinct for cruelty in these weak people, then, expresses itself in the fact that these people think that they should not have this same instinct: The instinct itself becomes negative and reflexive. In this way, the weak individuals still get to experience the "right of the masters" discussed above -- the right to inflict pain -- but are only able to inflict it on themselves. This conjunction of pleasure and pain is the origin of moral sentiments.
The rest of the story of the development of morality is simply the development of the degree to which this instinct for cruelty was expressed and the methods that were invented to increase this degree. In the end, Nietzsche argues, mankind even grew deities out of its ancestors to increase the degree of suffering that one could inflict on oneself; he writes, "divine spectators were needed to do justice to the spectacle" of a self-harming animal with its instincts turned inward in this manner. (Genealogy II 16, 19) The deity became another creditor to which man saw himself as in debt. (Genealogy II 20)
Nietzsche's analysis of the origins of morality here is compelling, but leaves the reader with questions -- even questions beyond the one that heads section 24, close to the very end of the essay -- that he does not answer. Questions about the historical accuracy of the essay are proper and legitimate here; unfortunately, it would be difficult to answer these questions (as central as they are to an essay which purports to trace the historical development of a concept) simply because Nietzsche's history is so non-specific: He rarely makes references to specific historical details; rather, he simply describes the development of the moral sentiments as if they happened exactly (or nearly enough) in the same way in all cultures, only occasionally making a reference to, say, a minor difference in development in Egypt. Occasionally he will also use an example from a specific culture -- Rome or Greece, for instance -- as an indication of the general nature of the development of moral sentiments. (Genealogy II 5, 23) It may or may not be true that the moral concepts developed in very similar ways in every culture, but the question needs to be addressed, and Nietzsche does not really do so. His project is just too large and sweeping, and he does not spent nearly enough time on the subject to do it justice. (Foucault again comes to mind, this time as a reconceptualizer of the scope of Nietzsche's work at a more appropriate scale: Discipline and Punish, for instance, spends 350 pages talking about the development of punishment alone over several centuries -- rather than the entire history of man -- in one particular country. These 350 pages are probably comparable in scope to several average-sized sections of Nietzsche's second essay in the Genealogy.)
Despite this problem, however, this second essay of the Genealogy is valuable for several reasons. Perhaps most importantly, it introduced a stronger and less naïve concept of moral genealogy (and polemics against naïve moral genealogists occupy a prominent part of the essay, especially at the beginning) that was not afraid to deal with the uglier parts of the history of morality without queasiness. It provides an example of Nietzsche's genealogical method and gives ideas about how it might be applied. And it provides an interesting and useful psychological picture of the master and slave types of morality.
References
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1966.1
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and RJ Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
Footnotes
[1] Nietzsche's works are referenced within this document by section number, not by page number.
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