11.
A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our
invention; it must spring out of our personal need and defence. In
every other case it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to
our life menaces it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect
for the concept of “virtue,” as Kant would have it, is
pernicious. “Virtue,” “duty,” “good for its own
sake,” goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of universal
validity—these are all chimeras, and in them one finds only an expression
of the decay, the last collapse of life, the Chinese spirit of Konigsberg.
Quite the contrary is demanded by the most profound laws of self-preservation
and of growth: to wit, that every man find hisown virtue, his own
categorical imperative. A nation goes to pieces when it confounds its
duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing works a more complete and
penetrating disaster than every “impersonal” duty, every sacrifice
before the Moloch of abstraction.—To think that no one has thought of
Kant's categorical imperative as dangerous to life!...The theological
instinct alone took it under protection !—An action prompted by the
life-instinct proves that it is a right action by the amount of
pleasure that goes with it: and yet that Nihilist, with his bowels of Christian
dogmatism, regarded pleasure as an objection . . . What destroys a man
more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any
deep personal desire, without pleasure—as a mere automaton of duty? That
is the recipe for décadence, and no less for idiocy. . . Kant
became an idiot.—And such a man was the contemporary of Goethe! This
calamitous spinner of cobwebs passed for the German
philosopher—still passes today! . . . I forbid myself to say what I think
of the Germans. . . . Didn't Kant see in the French Revolution the transformation
of the state from the inorganic form to the organic? Didn't he ask himself
if there was a single event that could be explained save on the assumption of a
moral faculty in man, so that on the basis of it, “the tendency of mankind
toward the good” could be explained, once and for all time? Kant's
answer: “That is revolution.” Instinct at fault in everything and
anything, instinct as a revolt against nature, German
décadence as a philosophy—that is
Kant!——