Kant and Nietzsche: "Categorical" or Essay

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Living authentically "as if" my actions had the force of reason strikes me as very similar to living in deliberate opposition to reason -- which, in a contemporary milieu, often entails structuring a life according to personal experience or even faith. In an era in which the irrational is widely accepted and even embraced -- through the thought of Freud, Kierkegaard, and others in addition to Nietzsche himself -- Kant's confidence in the a priori categories of reason as self-evident universal organizing principles seems innocent at best.

Finally, in a society that jealously protects the perspective of the individual, Kant's appeal to universal or even "categorical" patterns of thought and morality is difficult to integrate into everyday life. If society reserves judgment on moral questions, then how can we ascribe objective force to our own maxims for a just life? Perhaps ironically, the best way to live under such circumstances is to follow Kant under our own auspices and apply his imperative as universally applicable to our own lives, while granting the Nietzschean inapplicability of any such moral principle to anyone else. As an individual, I can always choose to wrestle with the Kantian imperative in my own life, and thus live with some degree of self-consistency and, from my perspective, "reason.

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" As long as I organically embrace it in all its hypothetical nature ("as if"), it has the potential to generate authenticity -- to become, as Nietzsche would say, "the heaviest thing."

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