¶ … Role of Memory in Shaping Morality Oscar Wilde once wrote that, "The man with a clear conscience probably has a poor memory." The role of memory and remembering in shaping moral decisions is a concept that is central to sections of Hannah Arendt's Responsibility and Judgment and Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals as both texts wrestle with how one knows that an action is morally wrong. It is a question that goes back to the earliest days of philosophical inquiry under Socrates: Does the understanding of morality come inherently from something within man or is it merely inculcated by society and thereby remembered. Drawing from her own experiences as a German Jewish refugee and after World War II as a reported at the Nuremberg Trials, Arendt argues that morality must exist beyond the scale of the individual as there is too much variability within humanity's perspective on moral judgments. In contrast, Nietzsche argues that all men are...

In this essay, it will be demonstrated that Nietzsche and Arendt possess conflicting perspective on the role which memory plays in shaping human action and the moral value it should carry.
In Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, it is considered where morality comes from in the beginning of society, "How is a memory to be made for the man-animal? How is an impression to be so deeply fixed upon this ephemeral understanding, half dense, and half silly, upon this incarnate forgetfulness, that it will be permanently present?" (pg 44) This line of questioning reflects Nietzsche perspective that what is called morality is only something "burnt" into the human psyche. Early man created morality and religion out of, "tortures and sacrifice; the most dreadful sacrifices and forfeitures (among them…