176 Nietzscheprovided a brief outline of the decline of responsibility. "So we make
people responsible first for the impact of their actions, then for their
actions, then for their motives, and finally for their nature. Ultimately, we
learn that this nature is also not responsible, since it is an absolutely
inevitable result and a concretion of the elements and influences of past
and present things: hence, people cannot be held responsible for any-
thing, including their nature, their motives, their actions, and the impact
of their actions. We therefore realize that the history of moral feelings
is the history of an error, the error of responsibility" (2,63; HH I § 39).
Nietzsche was well aware of the significance of this oudook: "Man's
utter lack of responsibility for his actions and his nature is the bitterest
pill for the knowledgeable person to swallow" (2,103; HH I § 107).
Especially bitter for Nietzsche was the circumstance that our lack of
responsibility makes praising and blaming human conduct just as sense-
less as "praising and blaming nature and necessity" (2,103).
Nietzsche would nonetheless keep right on judging human affairs as
though people did have a choice and could make decisions. He would
thus delve into the problem Kant referred to as the antinomy of free-
dom. Nietzsche denied the existence of freedom and laid claim to it at
the same time—even in this very act of deniaL He was free to explain
away freedom. The antinomy of freedom implies that it is experienced
from a dual perspective. As a creature who acts spontaneously, I experi-
ence the freedom of action on my inner stage. My intellect, however,
drawing on the laws of causality, teaches me that culture does not make
leaps and neither do I; everything is causally determined. We act now,
and we will always be able to find a necessity and causality for our actions
in retrospect In the moment of action and choice, causality does not
help us, yet we must decide nonetheless. The experience of freedom is
like a revolving stage: we live from freedom, but when we try to analyze
it, it cannot be grasped. This antinomy was the secret center of gravity
underlying all of Kantian philosophy. Kant himself conceded it when
he confessed in a letter that the problem of freedom had awakened him
from his "dogmatic slumber" and brought him to the critique of reason: