Eternal Justice

What is the nature of that eternal justice?

Human nature has 2 peculiarities that make us obscurely feel:

• eternal justice
• the unity and identity of the will

When a bad deed has been done, the sufferer and the perfectly indifferent spectator feel the desire of revenge.

This is independent of the actual punishment, which is the basis of penal law.

This is the It seems to me that what expresses itself here is nothing but

This shows the consciousness of that eternal justice.

, which is, nevertheless, at once and falsified by

The unenlightened mind, involved in the principium individuationis:

• misunderstands it
• does not see how the offender and the offended are one

Therefore, most persons would demand that a wicked man who had a very high degree of wickedness matched with not only a man with his own wickedness, but with more wickedness such as a conqueror.

Most persons would demand that he get all the sufferings that he has inflicted.

They do not recognise:

• how the inflicter of suffering and the sufferers are one
• that the same will in the sufferer also exists in the inflicter

The deeper knowledge no longer:

• is involved in the principium individuationis.

from which all virtue and nobleness proceed, no longer retains the disposition which demands requital, is shown by the

Christian ethics:

• absolutely forbids all requital of evil with evil
• allows eternal justice to proceed in the sphere of the thing-in-itself, which is different from that of the phenomenon.

A much more striking but rarer characteristic of

Human nature has the will that wants to realize eternal justice.

A man is so deeply moved by a great injury he has experienced, that he stakes his own life to take revenge.

After many years, he murders his oppressor at last.

• Then he himself dies on the scaffold, as he had foreseen

It means that his life had value for him only as a means of vengeance.

This was done especially by the Spaniards.

The desire for retribution is very different from common revenge, which seeks to mitigate the suffering.

• It endures through the sight of the suffering inflicted.

It aims at a resolution, not so much revenge as punishment [by inflicting the same pain].

Revenge:

• intends an effect in the future.
• has no selfish aim, either for:
  • the avenging person, for it costs him his life, o
  • society which secures its own safety by laws.

That punishment is carried out by individuals, not by the state.

Nor is it in fulfilment of a law, but, on the contrary,

always concerns a deed which the state either would not or could not punish, and the punishment of which it condemns.

The indignation which carries 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, which appears in all beings through all time, and that therefore the most distant future belongs to him just as the present, and cannot be indifferent to him.

Asserting this will, he yet desires that in the drama which represents its nature no such fearful wrong shall ever appear again, and wishes to frighten ever future wrong-doer by the example of a vengeance against which there is no means of defence, since the avenger is not deterred by the fear of death.

The will to live does not here depend any longer upon the particular phenomenon, the individual.

Instead, it:

• comprehends the Idea of man
• wishes to keep its manifestation pure from such a fearful and shocking wrong.

It is a rare, very significant, and even sublime trait of character through which the individual sacrifices himself by striving to make himself the arm of eternal justice, of the true nature of which he is yet ignorant.