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.