Introduction

In October 1785 Gottlieb Hufeland (1760–1817), then a twenty-five-year-old scholar with doctorates in philosophy and law at the University of Jena, sent Kant a copy of his book on natural right (see AK 10:388–389, 412–413). Kant was requested to review it for the Fenaer Allegemeine Literaturzeitung (see AK 10:398–399), and the review appeared on April 18, 1786 (AK 13:173).

Hufeland's approach to ethics is Wolffian, basing ethics in general on the striving for perfection. He attempts to derive the individual's right from the obligation to pursue one's own perfection, arguing that it entails the authorization to use coercion to defend one's perfection and to act so as to increase it. Kant's review praises the thoroughness and scholarship of Hufeland's book, and expresses optimism about Hufeland's future contributioon to this and other areas of philosophy.

In his review Kant emphasizes the points on which he and Hufeland agree, such as the apriority of principles of right, but criticizes Hufeland's derivation of right from an obligation, arguing that this leads to the paradox that people have no rights they may not press to the full, and also leaves indeterminate the extent of an individual's rights. Kant's own approach, already present in the Critique of Pure Reason, is to base right on the conditions of everyone's external freedom under universal laws (A316/B373).

The manuscript for this book was virtually complete only a few months before the death of Mary J. Gregor on October 31, 1994. She had finished not only nearly all of the texts themselves, but also the introductions and editorial notes accompanying the individual works. Only two short essays remained to be translated. Apart from minor revisions (to which she had agreed), the only other editorial work left to be done was the General Introduction and the glossaries. Some corrections in the translations were due to the helpful comments of B. Sharon Byrd, Thomas McCarthy, and Georg Geismann.

Gregor's translations of Kant are characterized not only by meticulous linguistic accuracy and scholarly erudition but also by an unfailing sense of style and an uncanny ability to render Kant's meaning into readable and even elegant English. Over a period of more than thirty years, she produced excellent English versions of Kant's writings: The Doctrine of Virtue (1964), Anthropology from a Pragmatic Standpoint (1974), The Conflict of the Faculties (1979), “On the Philosopher's Medicine of the Body” (1985), and the whole of the Metaphysics of Morals (1991). Her translations of all these works are being used as the basis of the Cambridge Edition versions.

In addition to her accomplishments as a translator, Gregor made significant contributions to Kant scholarship. She wrote articles on Kant's moral and political philosophy, and her book Laws of Freedom (1963) was almost alone at the time in stressing the indispensability of the Metaphysics of Morals for a proper understanding of Kant's ethical theory.

Introduction

Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) was a publisher, satirical novelist, and popular enlightenment philosopher of empiricist sympathies who attacked Kant and his philosophy for its forbidding style of writing and its use of abstruse terminology (see Metaphysics of Morals, editorial note 8.) In 1796, after Nicolai had ridiculed Schiller for his use of Kantian jargon, Kant alluded to Nicolai's criticisms in Metaphysics of Morals (6:208-209), insisting that they do not apply to the critical philosophy itself. Shortly thereafter, in his novel Leben und Meinungen Sempronius Gundiberts (1798), Nicolai responded by explicitly directing his satires at Kant himself. On the title page appeared the phrase “The ridiculous despotism,” drawn from Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, B xxxv) but now directed back at him. In the novel the terminology of a priori and a posteriori was employed both playfully and contemptuously, and variants of it were devised for purposes of ridicule.

In the same year, Nicolai also published a posthumous volume of Vermischten Schriften by the conservative writer Justus Möser (1720–1794), containing an uncompleted fragment of an essay on “Theory and Practice,” directed polemically against Kant's essay on the same topic. When Kant condemns as unjust some existing social and political arrangements (in particular, the political privileges of the hereditary nobility), Möser dismisses this as the irresponsible work of a ridiculous “theorist” who is out of touch with “practical” reality. This too angered Kant, and the philosopher held Nicolai as well as Möser responsible for the attempt to make a laughingstock of him.

Introduction

In 1795 King Frederick William II of Prussia withdrew from the War of the First Coalition and, on April 5, concluded the separate Peace of Basel with the revolutionary government of France. In a letter of August 15 of the same year (12: 35) Kant offered the Königsberg publisher Nicolovius what may well be the most widely read of his informal works, Toward Perpetual Peace.

Projects for “perpetual peace,” and criticisms of them, had been in the air since 1713, when the Abbé St. Pierre, a secretary at the congress preceding the Treaty of Utrecht, had published the first two volumes of his Projet pour rendre la paix perpetuelle en Europe. Among the more prominent of his defenders and critics were Leibniz, Voltaire, Frederick the Great, and Rousseau. As might be expected, Kant was aware of the debate. In a Reflection that Adickes dates from about 1755 Kant notes Bayle's view that, although “it is possible in abstracto to put the rules of Christianity into practice, this is not the case with regard to princes: it was impossible in connection with the Abbé St. Pierre's proposal” (6: 241; AK 16, #2116). As the present essay shows, Kant did not consider the idea of a league of nations impossible, but he did not rely for his evidence upon experience of how princes have behaved.

Introduction

Kant's essay “On the Wrongfulness of Unauthorized Publication of Books” was first published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in May 1785. On June 5 the editor of the journal, Johann Erich Biester, wrote to Kant about other matters and, in passing, expressed the hope that Kant would soon use “our mouth, in order to deliver your speech to the public by means of us.” Apart from the fact that, as the opening paragraph of this essay indicates, the topic of literary piracy was being discussed at the time, nothing definite is known about the occasion for this essay. Perhaps Kant's discussion of the subject twelve years later, in Part I of The Metaphysics of Morals, was an attempt to substantiate his assertion that the case he makes is “undoubtedly to be found in the elementary concepts of natural right” and to provide “the requisite eloquence of Roman legal scholarship,” insofar as this could be done within the limits of metaphysical first principles.

Kant himself was eventually involved in legal difficulties because of the cavalier way in which questions of copyright were treated. Had Kant given J. H. Tieftrunk permission to include, in his proposed collection of Kant's minor writings, all three parts of Der Streit der Fakultäten? Tieftrunk assumed that he had and published all three, though not in serial order. The authorized publisher of the book, C. F. Nicolovius, brought a lawsuit against Tieftrunk, who cited as his evidence Kant's failure to object when proofs for the collection were sent to him.

Introduction

In his Preface to the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Kant stated his intention of writing a book to be called The Metaphysics of Morals. There is no indication that he intended to produce a work entitled the Critique of Practical Reason. Metaphysics, he explained, has two parts, metaphysics of nature and metaphysics of morals, and just as a critique of pure speculative reason is the only foundation for a metaphysics of nature, so a critique of pure practical reason is the only foundation for a metaphysics of morals. However, what it was necessary and feasible to do could be done in the course of laying the foundation for the metaphysics of morals. Section III of the Groundwork, the transition to a “critique of pure practical reason,” would suffice.

By April 1786 Kant had begun his extensive revisions for the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason and, early in the course of making them, apparently entertained the thought of adding to it a critique of practical reason. In November 1786 the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung, announcing the forthcoming publication of the new edition, said that in it a critique of pure practical reason would be appended to the critique of pure speculative reason contained in the first edition (AK 3:556). However, no such addition was made. In April 1787 Kant had completed his revisions, and his only extensive rewriting beyond the Transcendental Analytic was in the Dialectic's chapter on “The Paralogisms of Pure Reason,” a part having no direct bearing on moral philosophy.

Editor's introduction

Der Streit der Fakultäten first appeared in the autumn of 1798, published by Friedrich Nicolovius in Königsberg.

The Conflict of the Faculties brings together three different essays Kant had written at various times. Sometime between June and October 1794, Kant wrote an essay on the prerogatives of the philosophical faculty in relation to the theological faculty of the university. Clearly it was at least partly an attempt to justify the manner in which he had circumvented the censors in publishing the Religion (see the Translator's Introduction to that work). After Wöllner's letter of reproof and Kant's subsequent promise not to lecture or publish on religious subjects (see General Introduction and below, AK 7:5–11), the liberal theologian C. F. Stäudlin in Göttingen offered the philosopher the opportunity to publish this new essay free of the Prussian censorship (AK 11:488). But Kant regarded this as a violation of his promise to the king, and therefore felt duty bound to decline Stäudlin's invitation (AK 11:513–15).

After the death of King Frederick William II, however, Kant chose to regard himself as released from his promise and free to publish his essay on the relation of the philosophical and theological faculties. But he expanded the scope of his original essay to include the relation of the “lower” faculty (of philosophy) to all three of the university's “higher” faculties (of theology, law, and medicine). Based on his account of freedom of expression given in “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), Kant maintains that the three “higher” faculties have duties to the state.

Translator's introduction

Dilthey's reconstruction in 1890 of the events that led to the publication of Kant's Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft is now a classic on which every subsequent account has depended. In brief, this is what happened. In February 1792, Kant sent to J. E. Biester, the editor of the Berlinische Monatsschrift, an essay entitled “Concerning Radical Evil in Human Nature.” Kant's letter to Biester is lost. However, we learn from another letter that Kant wrote the following year to C. F. Stäudlin that he had intended the essay as the first of four pieces on religion to be published in Biester's journal. The essay was approved in Berlin for publication by the philosophy censor, G. F. Hillmer, on the ground that (as Biester reported to Kant) “after careful reading he [Hillmer] had found this writing, like the rest of Kant's, only intended for, and of appeal to, the thoughtful scholar, adept to enquiry and distinctions – not any reader in general.” The second essay to be sent, however, was not so fortunate, and its eventual rejection by the censors is what occasioned Kant's famous confrontation with censorship.

Preventive censorship had been an accepted political fact in Kant's Prussia even under the relatively enlightened reign of Frederick II. In 1749 a royal edict (revised and made more stringent in 1772) had established a Berlin Censorship Commission to which all writing printed in the realm had to be submitted for prior examination and approval.

Translator's introduction

Das Ende aller Dinge was first published in June 1794 in the Berlinische Monatschrift 23, pp. 495–522.

By 1792 J. E. Biester, editor of the Berlinische Monatschrift, had moved his publication to Jena to avoid the Prussian religious censors. On April 10, 1794, Kant wrote him criticizing the political philosophy of the Hanover conservative August Rehberg and connecting it with the censorship activities of Hermes and Hillmer, who “have taken their positions as overseers of secondary schools and have thereby acquired influence over the universities with respect to how and what is supposed to be taught there.” Then he abruptly ends the letter with this final paragraph: “The essay I will send you soon is entitled ‘The End of All Things,’ which will be partly plaintive and partly funny to read” (AK 11:496–7).

Having endured the difficulties with the censors in getting the Religion published, Kant's outlook was anything but sanguine regarding the prospects for free thought and discussion of religious topics in Prussia. “The End of All Things” is a plea for Christians to be true to what is best in their religion by adopting a “liberal” way of thinking; but because it is a plea directed at the Prussian religious authorities, it is one Kant expects to fall on deaf ears. Thus it is couched in the form of a sly, bitter satire, which approaches its political theme only indirectly.

Editor's introduction

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's Metaphysica was the leading text of Wolffian rationalism in the late eighteenth century. Kant lectured nearly every year on the Metaphysica, whose fourth part is on natural theology. But he did not often lecture on natural theology by itself. During this critical period he announced lectures on this topic only once, in the winter semester of 1785–86 but J. G. Hamann reports that he lectured on theology to an “astonishing throng” in the winter semester of 1783–84.

Transcriptions from one or both sets of these lectures came into the possession of Friedrich Theodor Rink, the editor during Kant's lifetime of Kant's lectures on physical geography (1802) and pedagogy (1803). After Rink's death in 1810, these materials were purchased, along with other transcriptions of Kant's lectures on metaphysics, by Karl Heinrich Ludwig Pölitz, who first published the Vorlesungen über die philosophische Religionslehre in 1817 (second edition, 1830), followed four years later by the Vorlesungen über die Metaphysik (1821).

Kant used three texts in his lecture course: the theology section of Baumgarten's Metaphysica; the Vorbereitung zur natürlichen Theologie by Johann August Eberhard, with whom Kant was involved in a polemical exchange in the early 1790s; and Christoph Meiners, Historia doctrinae de uno vero Deo (1780). The introductory section of the lectures seems to refer mainly to Eberhard (see AK 28:1033), but the lectures as a whole are mostly a commentary on Baumgarten's Metaphysica §§ 815–982.

The subjects of religion and rational theology are integral to many of Kant's writings. Reflections on rational theology and the theological interpretation of nature were central to some of Kant's first important writings: the Universal Natural History and Nova dilucidatio (both 1755) and the Only Possible Ground of Proof for a Demonstration of God's Existence (1763). Rational theology and rational religious faith also figure prominently in all three Critiques: the Ideal of Pure Reason and Canon of Pure Reason in the first, the Dialectic of the second, and the Methodology of Teleological Judgment in the third. Although the writings translated in this volume do not therefore encompass the whole of his writings on religion and rational theology, they do contain the texts in which Kant dealt primarily with religion. They also document the history of one of the most critical and dramatic periods in Kant's professional life – the history of the process by which the philosopher came into collision with the Prussian authorities over the content of his teachings on religion.

Religious background

Kant received a strict religious upbringing from his parents, who were both devout pietists. Pietism was a seventeenth-century Christian revival movement that originated in Germany and was a powerful influence on German culture through the eighteenth century. It resembles in some ways other contemporary religious movements, such as the Quakers and Methodists in England or Chassidism among European Jews.

Translator's introduction

This essay, “Uber das Mißlingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodicee,” was first published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, September 1791, 194–225. In a letter dated December 29, 1789, to its editor Johann Erich Biester, Kant had expressed his intention to contribute to the journal. In the letter, Kant had added: “I now have, however, a work of just about a month to complete.…” Once that work, (undoubtedly the Critique of Judgment) had been completed, he planned to fill the time with some compositions perhaps suitable to Biester's journal. The present essay apparently represents the fulfillment of that plan.

It is difficult to state with certainty, for lack of any explicit statement on the part of Kant, what motivated him to write the essay. We know that it was the first of a series of writings on theological and religious matters (all published in this volume) that occupied Kant after the accession to the throne in Prussia of the reactionary Frederick William II. That in writing the essay Kant was preoccupied by the repressive policies pursued by the new regime is clear from at least two places. The first is a passage (AK, 266) where Kant claims that Job would have stood little chance if judged before a synod or any other public body, “one alone excepted.” The exception is obviously the Berlin High Consistory, a church tribunal still staffed by enlightened clerics who had been appointed to their posts prior to the new administration and were now obstructing the actions of the new minister of education and religious affairs, J. C. Wöllner.