From our description of eternal justice, which is not mythical but philosophical, we will now proceed to the kindred consideration of the ethical significance of conduct, and of conscience, which is merely the felt knowledge of that significance. Here, however, I wish first of all to draw attention to two characteristics of human nature which may help to make clear how the essential nature of that eternal justice and the unity and identity of the will in all its phenomena, on which that justice rests, are known to everyone, at least as an obscure feeling.
After a wicked deed has been done, it affords satisfaction not only to the injured party, who is often filled with a desire for revenge, but also to the completely indifferent spectator, to see that the person who caused pain to another suffers in turn exactly the same measure of pain; and this quite independently of the object (which we have demonstrated) of the State in punishing, which is the basis of criminal law. It seems to me that nothing is expressed here but consciousness of that eternal justice, which, however, is at once misunderstood and falsified by the unpurified mind. Such a mind, involved in the principium individuationis, commits an amphiboly of the concepts, and demands of the phenomenon what belongs only to the thing-in-itself. It does not see to what extent the offender and the offended are in themselves one, and that it is the same inner nature which, not recognizing itself in its own phenomenon, bears both the pain and the guilt. On the contrary, it longs to see again the pain in the same individual to whom the guilt belongs. A man might have a very high degree of wickedness, which yet might be found in many others, though not matched with other qualities such as are found in him, namely one who was far superior to others through unusual mental powers, and who, accordingly, inflicted unspeakable sufferings on millions of others—a world conqueror, for instance. Most people would like to demand that such a man should at some time and in some place atone for all those sufferings by an equal amount of pain; for they do not recognize how the tormentor and tormented are in themselves one, and that it is the same will by which these latter exist and live, which appears in the former, and precisely through him attains to the most distinct revelation of its inner nature. This will likewise suffers both in the oppressed and in the oppressor, and in the latter indeed all the more, in proportion as the consciousness has greater clearness and distinctness, and the will a greater vehemence. But Christian ethics testifies to the fact that the deeper knowledge, no longer involved in the principium individuationis, a knowledge from which all virtue and nobleness of mind proceed, no longer cherishes feelings demanding retaliation. Such ethics positively forbids all retaliation of evil for evil, and lets eternal justice rule in the province of the thing-in-itself which is different from that of the phenomenon (“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Rom. xii, 19).
A much more striking, but likewise much rarer, characteristic of human nature, which expresses that desire to draw eternal justice into the province of experience, i.e., of individuation, and at the same time indicates a felt consciousness that, as I put it above, the will-to-live acts out the great tragedy and comedy at its own expense, and that the same one will lives in all phenomena—such a characteristic, I say, is the following. Sometimes we see a man so profoundly indignant at a great outrage, which he has experienced or perhaps only witnessed, that he deliberately and irretrievably stakes his own life in order to take vengeance on the perpetrator of that outrage. We see him search for years for some mighty oppressor, finally murder him, and then himself die on the scaffold, as he had foreseen. Indeed, often he did not attempt in any way to avoid this, since his life was of value to him only as a means for revenge. Such instances are found especially among the Spaniards.179 Now if we carefully consider the spirit of that mania for retaliation, we find it to be very different from common revenge, which desires to mitigate suffering endured by the sight of suffering caused; indeed, we find that what it aims at deserves to be called not so much revenge as punishment. For in it there is really to be found the intention of an effect on the future through the example, and without any selfish aim either for the avenging individual, who perishes in the attempt, or for a society that secures its own safety through laws. This punishment is carried out by the individual, not by the State; nor is it in fulfilment of a law; on the contrary, it always concerns a deed which the State would not or could not punish, and whose punishment it condemns. It seems to me that the wrath which drives such a man so far beyond the limits of all self-love, springs from the deepest consciousness that he himself is the whole will-to-live that appears in all creatures through all periods of time, and that therefore the most distant future, like the present, belongs to him in the same way, and cannot be a matter of indifference to him. Affirming this will, he nevertheless desires that in the drama that presents its inner nature no such monstrous outrage shall ever appear again; and he wishes to frighten every future evildoer by the example of a revenge against which there is no wall of defence, as the fear of death does not deter the avenger. The will-to-live, though it still affirms itself here, no longer depends on the individual phenomenon, on the individual person, but embraces the Idea of man. It desires to keep the phenomenon of this Idea pure from such a monstrous and revolting outrage. It is a rare, significant, and even sublime trait of character by which the individual sacrifices himself, in that he strives to make himself the arm of eternal justice, whose true inner nature he still fails to recognize.