Daâh: The First Human

by Edmond Haraucourt

  Sometimes, a human face looms up above the circle; it has dilated nostrils, intoxicated eyes, and it pivots on the neck with viperine slowness, questing around as if in search of another life to tear apart. When two gazes meet, then, the troubled blackness of the pupils lights up with disquieting gleams; the lips draw back from teeth ready to bite; fingers clench as if for a strangulation; madness hovers.

  Whether it is a matter of their fellow or a weaker animal, they find an acute voluptuousness in causing suffering. It is strange, as if they were almost sympathetically moved by the spectacle of a pain that they are not experiencing, and which they are, on the contrary, enjoying imposing, or aggravating to the extent of torture. When the suffering of another is the result of an accident, it touches them and they feel it in themselves; when it is their work, it intoxicates them.

  The unhealthy excitement that the spectacle of dolor provokes in them is already a particularity of the species; no other animal devotes itself as they do to the intoxication of torture. A number of felines are cruel, but not in that voluptuous and passionate fashion. There is a vast difference between Human cruelty and that of the Tiger. The Tiger amuses its claws on a prey, and the prey suffers, but it does not seem to have the intention of causing suffering; it possesses a mechanical plaything from which takes pleasure in extracting twitches and contortions; if the functioning of that mechanism is accompanied by suffering, the feline does not deign to take any notice of the fact, and is probably not even aware of it.

  In brief, the Tiger plays with its prey, whereas the Human plays with the pain; the former is activating a mechanism, the latter a sensibility; what delights the Tiger in its impassivity is the movement produced, but what excites the Human is the sensitivity, the motivating cause.

  Humans understand; they know; and they prove it. In the beasts they torture it is the pain they seek; they aim to obtain a familiar vibration, about which they are curious, and which they imagine at the same time as they provoke it; it reverberates in their mind when they procure it in their victim. In that appearance is the admixture of intelligence, of which it is the sole trigger.

  They have just invented that game, hitherto unknown on earth: the Culture of Pain. It is the initial discovery of human genius. To enter into a relationship with the ambient world, they put pain to work; their already intelligent hyperesthesia makes the human being the animal expert in cruelty; it is via cruelty that their moral relationships with creatures of their own kind and others are inaugurated.

  It also seems that the commencement in question is inevitable. From the moment that Nature in progress has been able to engender a being capable of taking an interest in something other than itself, and since, finally, amid the brutality of the world, a mental attention has become capable of arresting on others, it is necessary, at the very least, that an external object should come along to provoke that still-latent faculty in its inner being; it is necessary to awaken it and induce it to labor. How? What can awaken that dormant curiosity? What is it in a foreign existence that the individual will deign to contemplate, if not that which, above all else, interests it in its own existence.

  What vibration on the part of another can resonate more clearly in one’s own depths than the one that represents the most intense emotion of one’s own flesh? Pain is incontestably the sharpest, as well as the most ancient, of animal sensations: destined to warn the living being of external or internal danger, it necessarily appears at the very beginning of sensitive life; the first notions that the zoophyte has of its existence come to it through pain.

  Generator of perceptions, educator of nerves, pain is the dawn and awakening of everything, far anterior to pleasure, since the former is and the latter is not a utility essential to the conservation of the individual.

  LX. The Culture of Pain

  The primordial importance that pain has in the history of organisms invites us, logically enough, to suppose that it will attract the first gaze of the nascent mind. In animal egotism, pain alone was capable of introducing an imagined commotion, and it is by virtue of pain that the egotism in question learned to exteriorize itself. Before a patient whose nerves are being twisted, the nerves of the spectator quiver; for the first time, a creature is able to vibrate in unison with another.

  That reversibility of egotism, which the Greeks so justly call “sympathy,” comes to link the individual that is suffering to the one watching it suffer, by revealing to the one that the other is similar to himself; by the same procedure, it will eventually inform him that the other is his kin. Without pain, humans would probably have taken far longer to perceive that similarity and that relationship; thanks to pain, they obtained a taste for watching suffering and being moved by it, and then, as a corollary, in creating it, and even in warding it off.

  Thus, the impressionability of humans to the pain of others gave rise within them to a double phenomenon: cruelty and pity. Exactly like cruelty, pity will be a human prolongation of pain and fear; both of them have the same origin, the suffering of another, and he same cradle, human being. But those two manifestations of an intellectualized neuropathy did not appear in the race with the same urgency; pity only developed second; it does not have, like cruelty, the violent attractions appropriate to primitive beings.

  In fact, their extreme mobility turns them away from contemplation and toward action. Pity is essentially a spectator and cruelty an actor.

  Pity is passive and neutral; it submits, it assists, it remains parallel to the evil, it counts for nothing in terms of action; it is, in fact, undoubtedly the displeasure of its inertia that will eventually suggest the idea of intervening ingeniously in the drama, by striving to attenuate effects and even to combat causes.

  Cruelty, by contrast, is active from the outset; it does not follow, like pity, it leads; it is creative, and knows it; it enjoys it; the nervous vibration that it has before its eyes is the product of its intention, the proof of its efficacy. By virtue of all that, it flatters the pride of force, it excites to action, and above all to the repetition of action, overexcites by virtue of functioning and accelerates to the point of provoking a vertigo, an intoxication, in the operator; it carries within itself the morbid seeds of an excess; from the outset, it presents all the elements necessary to the constitution of a vice, and will later become one.

  But hairy humankind will have a long road to travel in the depths of the woods, and a long sojourn to make in the depths of caves, before reaching a state of civilization that will permit the full blossoming of the ferocity to which it is susceptible, and which no other species will be able to equal. To reach that stage, it will be necessary for the perfectible race, moving from progress to progress, to refine itself by education, sufficiently for savage humans at least to become barbaric humans. Only then will their sensibility and imagination, enriched by experience, conclude in the ingenuity thanks to which we have been able to extract the maximum rendition from pain.

  In brief, culture is lacking; human beings are revealing themselves as a monster unique in nature, but only in terms of their exceptional curiosity for sensations: their ferocity is making its debut, and being tried out; naïve and inexpert, it is only an art in its bud. The future artist, so avid to see vibration and cause vibration, will demonstrate a capability of taking an interest in his peers; while waiting for him to think of helping them, he already knows how to animate them by means of pain; pity is in embryo, and infantile cruelty remains the unique form of nascent altruism.

  LXI. The Rights of the Weak

  The rights of the strong impose themselves so naturally that no one imagines finding them contestable. The only right the weak have is to perish, and they know it; when the strong content themselves with robbing them, instead of killing them at the same time, it is because the strong are showing them mercy.

  In those conditions, the idea of property cannot arise. Every object belongs provisionally to the individual making use of it, and only until someone stronger decides to take it; then weak in
dividuals must choose, and quickly, between their own conservation and that of the object; as their own skin is dearer to them than a bearskin, they concede; when they resist, they are beaten, and they have asked for it. If the two contenders are equal in strength, they fight.

  Now it frequently happens that something possessed by one individual attracts the gaze of another, and that the latter immediately begins to desire it ardently, simply because he has observed it in use. His need to imitate is envenomed by a jealous appetite; his desire to enjoy it is ignited, and he takes possession of it. He is not stealing, he is conquering; the one who is dispossessed may growl with anger and regret the object, but he cannot deem himself to have been wronged. As for the taker, he installs himself proudly in his victory, with a joy all the keener because the pleasure of victory his supplemented by the voluptuousness of inflicting harm. If he is dispossessed in his turn, he will see nothing abnormal in it, if he is not strong enough to prevent it.

  One day, however, something strange happened.

  At a bend in a ravine, the Chief perceived a man. He rushed at him, uttering his battle cry, but the other did not stand up either to fight or run away. He waited, almost recumbent, with a terrified expression. He was seen to make an effort to get up, painfully, and then fall to his knees again, with his head in his hands. Daâh was still moving forward; the horde, running behind him, was howling to excite him to murder; the Chief’s warrior soul was inflated by that familial clamor. Already, the club was whirling.

  But the sick man, his arms still extended, slowly raised his face: a poor face with blue-tinted orbits, tortured by winkles, with eyes that were so humble, accepting, imploring...

  The club remained in mid-air.

  The horde, forming a bewildered circle, was no longer shouting. They looked alternately at Daâh’s face and that of the dying man. No one knew why the club had not come down; all of them were astonished, and no one would have disapproved of its fall. They stood there, motionless, eyes wide, like creatures suddenly halted by darkness.

  In that sudden night, groping with all their souls, they strove to discover themselves; and those embryonic humans, stupefied to find lurking in the depths of their obscure consciousness the tiny glimmer of a sentiment that their intelligence could not comprehend. They glimpsed the rights of the weak.

  LXII. Morality

  Their morality was to live, and nothing more. Of good and evil they had not the most imperceptible idea.

  A babe in arms or a dog, ignorant as they might be of the duty that awaits them, are at least capable of understanding it, because the notion of the rule is latent within them, and they are only ready to adopt it because they have been educated to it for centuries. Humans, however, who are only just beginning to group together, and, in consequence, find themselves for the first time in a condition to establish a connection between their individual interests and those of others, are unaided in confrontation with that problem by any ancestral experience.

  The utility of reciprocal concessions, without which the community cannot prosper, is not apparent to anyone. It will first be necessary to discover it, and afterwards to invent the means of providing it; when the possibility is finally demonstrated, it will still be necessary for generations to pass and succeed one another before the recognized utility can succeed in achieving the importance of a primordial necessity. Only then will it assume the character of an absolute, which is the essence of duty; only then will the times be inaugurated when that restriction, by dint of being recorded and reiterated from one generation to the next, ends up constituting a second nature in the species, an inveterate law. The children coming into the world will find it already within them, and the sum of those efforts, intervening in the course of the ages to discipline the race, will be affirmed in the individual with the authority of a religion that no one any longer disputes.

  Philosophers have been able to imagine a primitive humankind endowed with all the virtuous candors;11 of the moral value of that virginity we are informed on a daily basis by the phenomena of regression manifest among the degenerates of the present day. The violations of the rule that we designate by the names of crimes and vices are merely reminiscences of a time when animal egotism had all the rights, and practiced them without objection, provided that it had the strength; in the same way, what we call virtue is the ennoblement of the privations that the social estate has gradually been able to impose on individual egotism.

  At this eventful moment when a human family has just been constituted, the needs of the individual do not yet show themselves in opposition to those of the group; the mode of existence is too uncomplicated for conflicts to be produced, except accidentally, between one creature and another; the common interest only exists as the sum of individual interests. The latter can incorporate one another because they are exactly similar, but they remain indifferent to one another; they are, vigorously, a matter of every man for himself; that is all there is; and it is justice, for the time being, that the law of the individual holds sway over that of the group. The wellbeing of the collective does not count as yet; a problem arises, too serious for others to be able to balance it out; what is presently at stake is the life or death of the human species. The number of humans is too tiny, and the fate of the race, in the midst of the enemies that assail it, is too precarious, its future too dubious, for any question to arise other that this one: will the species succeed, or not, in implanting itself on the planet?

  In fact, that vital question is reducible to the issue of whether the unities threatened by so many perils will escape them to perpetuate the species. In these conditions, the individual, being so rare, becomes more precious than anything else; by safeguarding one’s own body, one conserves the seed and hope; in slaking one’s appetites of hunger and amour, one is ensuring the conquest of future times; the fate of the race is incarnate in oneself, united with oneself. The success of the generations to come, or not to come, depends on whether one’s egotism is triumphant or vanquished. The individual is the depository of destiny, the reservoir of the future, the egg, and the egotism of the individual is sacred. Nothing demands the sacrifice of the individual’s life or desires; on the contrary, if one does not allow oneself to be killed, if one eats, if one reproduces, one has fulfilled all of one’s duty to the species.

  The principle of duties is not and never has been anything but the benefit of the common cause; in whatever epoch, even when the group or its members are unconscious of the ends to which they are inclined, innate obligations only ever have one single aim: general salvation. And it is for that reason that, at least for a time, the mission of that young humanity, its virtue, its duty—which is the supreme law of its mores which we call its morality—will, logically, be the inverse of what we will one day designate by the same name of morality.

  LXIII. Amour

  Endure and perpetuate oneself: that is the whole of their morality; they know nothing but life, with the imperious mission to transmit it, without even suspecting that they are giving it; of amour they know nothing but the gestures, because they have found in their cells that science bequeathed by others; and the prescribed gestures are accomplished in the ritual manner. But sexual union, which is a need in them, does not appear to them as a pleasure or a game, since the possibilities of its realization have become constant and facile.

  It was different in the epoch when Daâh lived alone; his adolescence knew bitter desire, which was the consequence of a privation that constituted normality for him in the condition of exile; then, the solitary individual, a hunter of females as well as a hunter of meat, coupled as he fought, as a dominator, a vanquisher; two appetites, hunger for the subsistence of his individuality, and lust for the subsistence of the species, threw him brutality on to flesh; in amour as in feasting, he was a beast of prey.

  The children of the horde, however, are ignorant of that misery; they no longer have the time to learn it; desire, as soon as it is born, is satisfied, and does not sharpen; familial promiscuity
has suppressed anxiety, and it anticipates the impatience of males by procuring them immediate pasture; at the opportune moment, one sex is always there, present for the satisfaction of the other.

  To the facilities procured by number, the contagion of example is added. It is rare, in fact, that the spectacle of a coupling does not provoke a similar desire in others and a similar act; the genetic sensibility has always found a powerful motor in visual suggestion, and it is logical that these primitives should be supremely impressionable to the influence of images, since nothing exists in their minds except by that route. Apart from those whom the example will excite to imitation, no one takes any notice of these copulations; the sight of a young male in coitus with a young female is less interesting than two athletes competing, because the phases and the conclusion in the former are known in advance.

  Like any other exercise, this one is practiced in broad daylight, during the halt. At night, one sleeps; the tree in the bosom of which the horde will shelter is ill-suited to vigorous actions. Amour will only become nocturnal when humans have conquered the caves, where everyone lies down pell-mell on a bed of plants and hides, and also when the morality of the clan has invented scruples that suggest the idea of concealment; before social laws that will be applied to restrict abuses and raise barriers against desire, more urgent laws are imposed, which prescribe amour instead of proscribing it. The small number of humans only demands, for the time being, their multiplication; nature is hasty and urgent; instinct alone rules, and the function is exercised without material or mental obstacles.