Immanuel Kant is usually considered the German philosopher, but Nietzsche called him a “catastrophic spider”—a system maker who spun a web of idealism that had entangled too many good thinkers. Kant embodied the Enlightenment ideals of order, harmony, rationality, and, above all, duty—philosophical concepts Nietzsche spent his entire life trying to dismantle. Kant was interested in self-control, but it was a precise, passionless kind of control that Nietzsche claimed was perfectly fitted to Christian notions of piety and self-sacrifice.
