CHAPTER XX
CRITICISM OF MORALITY (Cont.). RESPONSIBILITY, RIGHTS AND DUTIES, JUSTICE
I pass now to Nietzsche's views on certain details in morality, beginning with responsibility, rights and duties, and justice.
I
We saw, in dealing with the preceding period, that Nietzsche could make nothing of responsibility in the sense of accountability for one's actions—this idea resting on that of free will, which to him was illusory.[1] The utility of the idea he did not question, but it had no standing in foro scientiae. In another sense of the word, however, he held that responsibility could really exist, and that training to it had been a high historic function of morality itself. One is responsible in this sense who will do as he has agreed to do, who responds to the expectations he has created, who can be trusted. Nietzsche regards this as far from a state of nature for men; it is a cultural result and implies a process of social training. "To train up (heranzüchten) an animal who can (darf) promise—is this not just the paradoxical task which nature has set in respect to man? is it not the real problem of man?"[2] A preliminary requirement is memory. Psychologists and biologists have much to tell us of the meaning and physiological basis of memory; but how to get it or create it is another problem. Forgetfulness comes nearer being the natural state of man, and, what is more, forgetfulness has its uses. Nietzsche regards it as not merely a vis inertiae (perhaps the common view), but as an active power of inhibition, a form of health, by which the past is not forever kept in sight, and freedom is gained for fresh experience and the work of today. The person in whom this inhibitory apparatus
