On Promises

What's in a promise? If you believe Nietzsche, the whole of human history (insofar as it's human, but that's another post entirely). A promise privileges one future over another. It invests the actualization of that future with moral content. No one, after all, likes an oath-breaker.
There's a question of power here. We don't all get what we want. Some promises conflict, and so some will be broken. Whose promises get kept is a complicated question. Nietzsche would call it strength, but that seems a bit simplistic. Strength comes in many forms. Suffice to say, where history is concerned, the result is more important than the process.
The astute among you will have noticed the wrinkle. Strength may determine virtue, but history defines strength. Enter the accountants of value. The promise may bind the future, but memory tells us whose promises were kept. A simple thing to to make strength out of convenience by re-fashioning a broken promise according to an actual outcome, or to deny strength by hiding the connection between past and present.
So what is a promise without control over its terms? Ah, the naivety of Nietzsche's nobility! To be defined by the exercise of strength without concern for its maintenance. They never stood a chance (if indeed they ever existed). Guile always beats strength.
Even if it holds true, a promise is a form of tyranny. It holds the present accountable for the past, enslaving who you are to who you were. We do this every day. Some call it identity. I call it a cop-out. Who among us is a static creature? Who would want to be? Does change not define us every bit as much as continuity?
A promise, then, is a moment of bravado, a foundational gesture that breeds anxiety as soon as it's uttered. The initial premise of this writing lays in ruins; has anything been gained? Perhaps. Beneath the promise is the sense of duration. Without memory, without foresight, we have nothing but the ever-emerging ever-dying present. The promise both creates history and gives it meaning.
If there's a resolution to this thought, it is that this dual function of a promise tells us much more about living than the constraints it entails. The continuity of past, present, and future also contains difference, and from that difference manifests value. To become historical does not have to mean being an accountant of virtue, but perhaps reveals the contingency of virtue and the all-too-human imperative to attend to its creation and destruction in the pursuit of a way through life.