The Origins of Responsibility

Three. Nietzsche’s Deconstruction of Accountability

80 three Nietzsche’s Deconstruction of Accountability One has thereby attained to the knowledge that the history of moral sensations is the history of an error, the error of accountability, which rests on the error of freedom of will. Human, All Too Human The Fiction of Responsibility Responsibility as History One of the most decisive features of Nietzsche’s critique of the Western tradition is his claim that its inherited concepts are essentially constructs (“fictions” or “lies”), as opposed to accurate grasps of an objective essence. There will thus not be a “natural” or “objective” concept of responsibility. Wealreadynoted,inparticularwithrespecttoAristotle,theperformative character of the traditional account of responsibility, and how the predominantsenseofresponsibilitywasconstitutedasasphereofcontrolover events. Aristotle secured such a sphere through his careful and strict distinguishingofthevoluntaryfromtheinvoluntaryandbyemphasizingthe voluntaryinone’sactions.WithrespecttoKant,wesawhowaproblematic notion of transcendental freedom—a freedom that is not of this world— was made the foundation of responsibility understood as the imputability of a subject, and further characterized as autonomous self-responsibility, Nietzsche’s Deconstruction of Accountability · 81 thatis,withintheegologicalhorizonthatisreductiveofalterity(underthe rubric of “heteronomy”). Nietzsche exposes such features further by stressing how the traditional concept of responsibility rests on the constructs—indeed the fictions —of agency, causality, free will, intentionality, and subjectivity. Hence Nietzsche’s destructive genealogy of those concepts, of those idols, which for him means as much the exposure of their fictive nature as an attack on the values they subtend and carry. This is indeed the goal of Nietzsche’s genealogy of responsibility, namely, to return to the origins of its (pathological) formations in order to determine how its concept has been constructed, for what purpose and with what motives. In such a genealogical—literally de-constructive—return to the history of responsibility , another path is opened, another fate and another future of our being-responsible. The Nietzschean genealogical destruction of the concept of responsibility, far from leading to a nihilism of values, in fact opens new possibilities, which come to be explored in various ways in contemporary continental thought. It is important to stress at the outset that Nietzsche’s genealogy of the tradition is not, as is at times claimed, a nihilistic attack on morality. This claim is based on the flawed notion that is similar to what Merleau-Ponty remarked, “From the simple fact that I make of morality a problem, you conclude that I deny it.”1 Interestingly, Nietzsche had already objected to suchareading,2 andclarifiedthatitwasamatterforhimofreengagingour tradition and its concepts, an attempt at reevaluating its values, that is, reevaluate the value of its values: It is a matter of questioning the value of moral values. It is thus crucial to distinguish here between a positive examinationofthevalueandoriginsofmorality (Nietzsche’sgenealogy)and a unilateral attack on morality. Nietzsche himself stressed the positive dimension of his enterprise, for instance in §345 of The Gay Science (book 5). The title of the section reads, “Morality as a problem,” which already suggests quite plainly that it is a matter of problematizing morality and its value,thatis,of questioning it,asopposedtotakingitforgrantedandleaving it unquestioned. Nietzsche explains: Even if a morality has grown out of an error, the realization of this fact would not as much as touch the problem of its value. Thus nobody up to now has examined the value of that most famous of all medicines which 82 · the origins of responsibility is called morality; and the first step would be—for once to question it. Well then, precisely this is our task.3 This task is all the more necessary given that, as Nietzsche notes, such a questioning approach—asking about the meaning and values of morality —is cruelly lacking. In Beyond Good and Evil, he takes issue with the so-called “science of morals” in which there is always something lacking, “strange as it may sound: the problem of morality itself; what was lacking was any suspicion that there was something problematic there” (BGE, 98). As he insists in The Gay Science, “It is evident that up to now morality was no problem at all,” or “I see nobody who ventured a critique of moral valuations” (GS, 284). What does Nietzsche mean by making morality into a problem? What does he mean by “critique”? Not a negative enterprise, as critique for Nietzsche is not an attack against morality but rather an inquiry into the history of the origins of morality; it is a matter of attempting to explore “the history of the origins of these [moral] feelings...