y
"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
_decadence_, 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 _decadence_ as a philosophy--_that is
Kant_!--

12.

I put aside a few sceptics, the types of decency in the history of
philosophy: the rest haven't the slightest conception of intellectual
integrity. They behave like women, all these great enthusiasts and
prodigies--they regard "beautiful feelings" as arguments, the "heaving
breast" as the bellows of divine inspiration, conviction as the
_criterion_ of truth. In the end, with "German" innocence, Kant tried to
give a scientific flavour to this form of corruption, this dearth of
intellectual conscience, by calling it "practical reason." He
deliberately invented a variety of reasons for use on occasions when it
was desirable not to trouble with reason--that is, when morality, when
the sublime command "thou shalt," was heard. When one recalls the fact
that, among all peoples, the philosopher is no more than a development
from the old type of priest, this inheritance from the priest, this
_fraud upon self_, ceases to be remarkable. When a man feels that he has
a divine mission, say to lift up, to save or to liberate ma