59-60 A Case of Diminished Responsbility

Secure though somewhat disgruntled in his new prison, Moosbrugger has time to reflect. And what does he reflect on?

Above all, he had to make a dignified exit, for his life had been a battle for his rights. In solitary, Moosbrugger considered what his rights were. He couldn't say. But they were something he had cheated of all his life. . . . Suddenly, he had it: "Right is justice." That was it. His right was his justice! . . . He had been cheated of his justice!

But how had this come about? He decides that "something was going on inside him that separated him by a hairbreadth from the natural order and was not quite steady."  Moosbrugger struggles with the effort to think about his condition.

He thought slowly anyway, the words gave him trouble, he never had enough words, and sometimes, when he was talking to someone, the other man would look at him in surprise: he wouldn't understand how much was being said in the one word Moosbrugger was uttering so slowly.

Moosbrugger hears voices and has visions, but dismisses them as unimportant.  For him, "the important thing was that it is not at all important whether something is inside or outside; in his condition, it was like clear water on both sides of a transparent sheet of glass."  His primary conviction was "that no thing could be singled out by itself, because things hang together."

In Chapter 60 the narrator sums up Moosbrugger's situation by saying he "was one of those borderline cases in law and forensic medicine known even to the layman as a case of diminished responsibility."

Was Moosbrugger sane or insane? Was he accountable for his actions or not?  Here we are in the situation of psychiatrists being asked to define a person's mental condition in a court of law.

They distinguish between incurable mental conditions, the kind [that] with God's help will improve after a while of their own accord, and the kind that the doctor cannot cure either but that the patient could have avoided . . . These second and third groups . . . the angel of medicine treats as sick people when they come to him in his private practice, but whom he shyly leaves to the angel of law when he encounters them in his forensic practice. 

Everyone in the court was convinced that Moosbrugger was insane, "but it was not in a way that corresponded to the conditions of insanity laid down by the law, so this insanity could not be acknowledged by conscientious minds."

It is about the difficult distinction between a moral being who has sufficient insight and will to be responsible for his actions -- and one who does not.  It is a question of Moosbrugger's insight into the morality of his impulses and what strength of will he has to "control" the impulses society (but not necessarily Moosbrugger) defines as "immoral."