The Antichrist · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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 Königsberg. Quite the contrary is demanded by the most profound laws of self-preservation and of growth: to wit, that every man find his _own_ 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_!--
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.