hostile feeling in us.… 'All is good'—it costs us effort to deny. We suffer, if we are ever so unintelligent as to become party against a thing"; he even suggests that in this way scholars best fulfil today the teaching of Christ.[1] If we bid farewell to a passion, he would have us do it without hate—otherwise we learn a second passion; he thinks that the souls of Christians, which have freed themselves from sin, are usually ruined by the hatred of sin—"Look at the faces of great Christians! They are the faces of great haters."[2]
Nietzsche becomes very warm against punishment—he would banish it out of the world.[3] It is really anger and revenge, to which we give a good name so as to have good conscience in inflicting it. e The truth is that the evil-doer is not even the same person that he was when he committed the evil deed; we punish a scapegoat. In any case, the punishment does not purify him, is no expiation; on the contrary, it soils more than the transgression itself.[4] The punishment here in mind is that which masks as justice (the wrong-doer receiving his deserts); viewed as a deterrent, however (whether for others or for the wrong-doer himself in the future), and wrought in that spirit, Nietzsche does not question but rather asserts its utility. The wrong-doer by suffering it benefits society, and a sense of this should determine his mood, which should not be remorse, but the feeling that having done evil, he is now doing good—he should be free to consider himself a benefactor of humanity.[5] Nietzsche is also troubled about the way society has to proceed to protect itself against crime—about the tools it has to create and make use of, the policemen, jailors, executioners, not forgetting the public prosecutors and the lawyers; indeed, "let one ask whether the judge himself and the punishment and the whole course of judicial procedure are not in their effect on non-criminals depressing rather than elevating phenomena." As often, he says, as we turn men into means to the ends of society and sacrifice them, all our higher humanity grieves.[6]
