366 Kant: A Biography
and the next person to defy the king's orders might have to pay an even
higher price.
Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason:
"An Example of... Obedience"?The Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason consists of the published es¬
say "Of the Radical Evil in Human Nature" and the rejected "Concerning
the Battle of the Good against the Evil Principle for Dominion over the
Human Being," as well as "The Victory of the Good Principle over the Evil
Principle, and the Founding of a Kingdom of God on Earth" and "Of Re¬
ligion and Priestcraft." The four essays are preceded by a relatively short
Preface, dated January 6,1794.
The first sentence sounds a tone of defiance. "Morality, insofar as it is
based on the concept of the human being as one who is free but who also,
just because of this freedom, binds himself through his reason to uncon¬
ditional laws, is in need neither of the idea of another being above him in
order that he recognize his duty nor of an incentive other than the law it¬
self in order that he observe it."^138 If we find such a need in us, it is our
own fault. One of the implications is that decrees are neither necessary nor
useful. Kant is still more explicit. "Obey authority!" is, he points out, also
a moral command that can legitimately be extended to religion. Therefore,
it is only proper that a book on religion should itself be "an example of this
obedience." Still, this obedience cannot consist in blindly observing "the
law in a single decree," but only in coherent respect for the totality of all
laws. Kant admits that the censorship decree is indeed a law, but he sug¬
gests that insofar as it is incompatible with the large majority of the laws
(passed under Frederick, one might add), it is obedience that makes defi¬
ance necessary.
In the first essay, or Book I, Kant takes up the question of whether hu¬
man beings are by nature "either morally good or morally evil."^139 For Kant,
this disjunction can mean only that there must be in the human being "a
first ground (to us inscrutable) for the adoption of good or evil (unlawful)
maxims."^140 His answer is that there is in us a first ground for moral evil.
It consists in what he calls "the ultimate ground for the acceptance or the
observance of our maxims according to the laws of freedom."^141 This means,
in Kant's language, that the ultimate ground is rational. Indeed, the claim
that each human being is evil means that "he is conscious of the moral law
and yet has incorporated into his maxim the (occasional) deviation from