Responsibility, Continental Perspectives on

Abstract

The development of many ethical theories in the twentieth century in the continental tradition has taken place against the background of Nietzsche's celebrated critique of morality, a critique that has often been described as a relativistic or a nihilistic enterprise of destruction of values leading to the impossibility of ethical responsibility. However, one paradoxically notes the central role played by the concept of responsibility in the works of many contemporary continental thinkers, such as Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, and Derrida, among others. The question of ethical responsibility has been a constant concern of contemporary continental thought. Nietzsche's deconstructive genealogy of responsibility and its fundamental concepts (causality, agency, will, subjectivity) can be said to open the way for a re‐elaboration of the senses of responsibility. The question of responsibility is re‐engaged in post‐Nietzschean continental thought, which explores its postmetaphysical, phenomenological, and ontological senses, away from the traditional metaphysical interpretation of responsibility as accountability of the free autonomous subject. Responsibility becomes rethought in such a context, in a novel and original way, that is, away from an ideology of subjectivity, free will, and power, in which responsibility is conceived of as the securing of a sphere of mastery for a willful subject.