11.

One more word against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention, our most personal self-defense and necessity: in any other sense, it is merely a danger. What does not determine our life harms it: a virtue merely from a feeling of respect for the concept "virtue," as Kant wanted it, is harmful. The "virtue," the "duty," the "good in itself," the good with the character of impersonality and universal validity - phantoms in which decline, the final exhaustion of life, the Königsberg Chinese-ness a reference to Kant's provincial and rigid nature expresses itself. The reverse is commanded by the deepest laws of preservation and growth: that everyone should invent his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. A people perishes when it confuses its duty with the concept of duty in general. Nothing ruins more deeply, more inwardly than any "impersonal" duty, any sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction. - That one has not sensed Kant's categorical imperative as life-threatening! ... Only the theologian instinct took it under its protection! - An action to which the instinct of life forces one has its proof of being a right action in the pleasure it brings: and that nihilist with Christian-dogmatic intestines understood pleasure as an objection... What destroys more quickly than thinking, feeling, working without inner necessity, without a deeply personal choice, without pleasure? As an automaton of "duty"? It is practically the recipe for décadence, even for idiocy... Kant became an idiot. - And that was a contemporary of Goethe! This disaster of a spider was considered the German philosopher, - is still considered so! ... I refrain from saying what I think of the Germans... Did Kant not see in the French Revolution the transition from the inorganic form of the state to the organic? Did he not ask himself if there is an event that could not be explained otherwise than through a moral disposition of humanity, so that with it, once and for all, the "tendency of humanity toward the good" might be proven? Kant's answer: "that is the revolution." The misguided instinct in everything and everyone, the counter-nature as instinct, the German décadence as philosophy - that is Kant.

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