The Twilight of the Idols · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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One word more against Kant as a _moralist._ A virtue _must_ be _our_ invention, our most personal defence and need: in every other sense it is merely a danger. That which does not constitute a condition of our life, is merely harmful to it: to possess a virtue merely because one happens to respect the concept “virtue,” as Kant would have us do, is pernicious. “Virtue,” “Duty,” “Goodness in itself,” goodness stamped with the character of impersonality and universal validity—these things are mere mental hallucinations, in which decline the final devitalisation of life and Königsbergian Chinadom find expression. The most fundamental laws of preservation and growth, demand precisely the reverse, namely:—that each should discover _his_ own virtue, his own Categorical Imperative. A nation goes to the dogs when it confounds its concept of duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing is more profoundly, more thoroughly pernicious, than every impersonal feeling of duty, than every sacrifice to the Moloch of abstraction.—Fancy no one’s having thought Kant’s Categorical Imperative _dangerous to life!_ ... The instinct of the theologist alone took it under its wing!—An action stimulated by the instinct of life, is proved to be a proper action by the happiness that accompanies it: and that nihilist with the bowels of a Christian dogmatist regarded happiness as an _objection ..._.
What is there that destroys a man more speedily than to work, think, feel, as an automaton of “duty,” without internal promptings, without a profound personal predilection, without joy? This is the recipe _par excellence_ of decadence and even of idiocy.... Kant became an idiot—And he was the contemporary of Goethe! This fatal spider was regarded as _the_ German philosopher,—is still regarded as such!... I refrain from saying what I think of the Germans.... Did Kant not see in the French Revolution the transition of the State from the inorganic to the _organic_ form? Did he not ask himself whether there was a single event on record which could be explained otherwise than as a moral faculty of mankind; so that by means of it, “mankind’s tendency towards good,” might be _proved_ once and for all? Kant’s reply: “that is the Revolution.” Instinct at fault in anything and everything, hostility to nature as an instinct, German decadence made into philosophy_—that is Kant!_
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.