In thinking of the famous passage in the “Critique of Practical Reason,” where Kant introduces man as a part of the intelligible cosmos, it may be asked how Kant assured himself that the moral law was inherent in personality. The answer Kant gave was simply that no other and no nobler origin could be found for it. He goes no further than to say that the categorical imperative is the law of the noumenon, belonging to it and inherent in it from the beginning. That, however, is the nature of ethics. Ethics make it possible for the intelligible ego to act free from the shackles of empiricism, and so through ethics, the existence of whose possibilities logic assures us, is able to become actual in all its purity.
There remains a most important point in which the Kantian system is often misunderstood. It reveals itself plainly in every case of wrong-doing.
Duty is only towards oneself; Kant must have realised this in his earlier days when first he felt an impulse to lie. Except for a few indications in Nietzsche, and in Stirner, and a few others, Ibsen alone seems to have grasped the principle of the Kantian ethics (notably in “Brand” and “Peer Gynt”). The following two quotations also give the Kantian view in a general way:
First Hebbel’s epigram, “Lies and Truth.”
“Which do you pay dearer for, lies or the truth? The former costs you yourself, the latter at most your happiness.”
Next, the well-known words of Sleika from the “Westöstlichen Diwan”:
All sorts go to make a world,
The crowd and the rogue and the hero;
But the highest fortune of earth’s children
Is always in their own personality.
It matters little how a man lives
If only he is true to himself;
It matters nothing what a man may lose
If he remains what he really is.
It is certainly true that most men need some kind of a God. A few, and they are the men of genius, do not bow to an alien law. The rest try to justify their doings and misdoings, their thinking and existence (at least the mental side of it), to some one else, whether it be the personal God of the Jews, or a beloved, respected, and revered human being. It is only in this way that they can bring their lives under the social law.
Kant was permeated with his conviction, as is conspicuous in the minutest details of his chosen life-work, that man was responsible only to himself, to such an extent that he regarded this side of his theory as self-evident and least likely to be disputed. This silence of Kant has brought about a misunderstanding of his ethics—the only ethics tenable from the psychologically introspective standpoint, the only system according to which the insistent strong inner voice of the one is to be heard through the noise of the many.