"Till I die I will not remove mine Integrity from Me". On Kant’s ‘Anthropological’ Theodicy

For several reasons, Kant’s writing On the Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy (1791) can be considered one of the principal turning points in the final years of Kant’s philosophical production. First, for its particular chronological position within the whole of Kant’s writings, second, for the themes it deals with, and third, for the way in which it links them to one another.Despite the conciseness, the articulation of the Miscarriage allows Kant to embrace in a single overview some themes, which are unfortunately often considered as mutually independent within the Kant-Forschung. The incompatibility between the moral perspective of pure practical reason and the merely fideistic and eschatological perspective, trespassing in the mystic sphere, is well expressed in the Miscarriage, at the end of the refutation of the pretended philosophical defences of God’s wisdom. Here Kant shows that even the most radical trials expressing the incompatibility between human logic and divine wisdom are rooted at least in the will to conceive of the two dimensions as having something in common, whereas in reality this would be impossible.