Religion and Rational Theology

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.