Kant: A Biography

372 Kant: A Biography

carried on the fight. That he was concerned not only with religious freedom,

but ultimately with full-fledged civil freedom, is clear from a footnote, in

which he observed:

I admit that I am not comfortable with th[e] way of speaking, which even clever men

are wont to use: "A certain people (intent on civil freedom) is not ripe for freedom";

"The bondsmen of a landed proprietor are not yet ripe for freedom"; and so too,

"People are not yet ripe for freedom of belief." For on this assumption freedom will

never come, since we cannot ripen to it if we are not already established in it.

In an obvious allusion to the French Revolution, he went on to say:

To be sure, the first attempts will be crude, and in general also bound to greater hard¬

ships and dangers... yet we do not ripen to freedom otherwise than through our own

attempts. I raise no objections if those in power, being constrained by the circum¬

stances of the time, put off relinquishing these three bonds far, very far into the fu¬

ture. But to make it a principle that those who are once subjected to them are essentially

unsuited to freedom. .. this is an intrusion into the prerogatives of divinity itself, which

created human beings for freedom.^173

This meant not only religious freedom, but also civil freedom and freedom

from any kind of bondage. One might have expected a swift and decisive

response from the powers that be.

"On the Old Saw": Addressing

One of the "Earthly Demi-Gods"

Yet nothing happened, at least at first. Kant remained somewhat cautious,
but not overly so. In March of 1793 he was asked by the Berlin publisher
Johann Carl Philip Spener to republish his 1784 essay on an "Idea for a
Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point ofView." He declined, say¬
ing that a pygmy who placed great value on his hide should not get involved
when "the strong ones of the world are in a state of intoxication, regard¬
less of whether it results from the breath of the Gods or from that of a
Mufette."^174 In September 1793, the essay Kant had promised Biester a
year earlier appeared in the Monatsschrift. It was entitled "On the Old Saw
'That May Be Right in Theory, but It Won't Work in Practice. '"^175 This was
hardly an exclusively moral essay, however. Kant addressed such issues as
the freedom of the press, the right to revolution, the authority to wage war,
the preservation of peace, and the nature and authority of government in
general. It was another contribution to a political discussion that the king
would rather not have seen developing.