A while ago I posted about the first section of Friedrich Nitzsche’s famous work, ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’, talking about how socialists might take the useful ideas from this rabidly anti-socialist thinker and use them for illumination, while criticising Nietzsche’s conclusions on his own terms.
So now I figured I might as well complete the series with posts on the second and third sections of that work. So here’s section 2 – which announces itself as being about guilt, justice, and punishment.
Nietzsche begins however by posing a surprising and unfamiliar question: how is it possible to breed an animal that can promise? A two-year-old child, or a cat, or a monkey, seem to be simply incapable of promising – whatever promise a two-year-old expresses now, we can put no weight on it, cannot accept it as a guarantee of the future.
And yet with adult humans, it seems, we can. How is this possible, if the latter developed out of the former – the growth of the child of course is largely governed by society, but this pushes the question back to how such a human society is possible on the basis of the monkey societies it evolved out of?
