Page:Nietzsche the thinker.djvu/282

266 involving pain or shame to the debtor. In no other way is it possible to account for the fact that instead of being satisfied with a natural equivalent for his loss, such as land, money, property of any kind, the creditor so often demanded the right to mistreat a debtor's body, to take away his wife, or to make him a slave. It was really a right to cruelty: only to one with cruel instincts does suffering yield a pleasure equal or superior to that of a material compensation—to such an one, indeed, suffering is the equivalent par excellence. The right to cruelty was graded very fine at times and was very exacting—one could, for example, cut from the debtor's body just so and so much (according to the amount of the debt), particular parts and members having their special valuation; and Nietzsche deems it progress and a proof of the freer, greater, more Roman spirit, when the Twelve Tables made it a matter of indifference whether more or whether less was cut off in a special case—"si plus minusve secuerunt, ne fraude esto." Whether the creditor inflicted the suffering in person or a functionary of the group did so for him, made no essential difference—at least he could witness the suffering and be satisfied. This idea that wrong may be compensated for by suffering has an important subsequent history, as we shall see in the next chapter.

Rights and duties were originally, as Nietzsche thinks, of this very matter-of-fact kind, and the grave, almost somber meaning which the words still have in our minds, take us back to the times when it was a serious thing to promise, when pain was an educator to responsibility, and suffering the common equivalent for wrong. And when rights and duties acquire a wider range and have a more spiritual character, their ground-meaning and perspective does not change.undefined In time the group comes to be viewed as a creditor, and its members as debtors to it. The community gives advantages ("and what advantages! we underestimate them today," says Nietzsche), and the individual enjoys them—he lives protected, cared for, in peace and confidence, with no concern about injuries and hostilities to which one outside is exposed; and in return he obligates himself to the community not to commit injuries and hostilities against his fellow-members. If, however, he does commit them,