Melissa Groenebaum

Kant's radical evil. Religion within the boundary of pure reason Melissa Groenebaum

Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Philosophy - Philosophy of the 17th and 18th Centuries, grade: 1,2, National University of Ireland, Galway, language: English, abstract: ?Der Mensch ist von Natur aus böse." (Human nature is evil) Stating this, Kant refers to a problem which has been from time immemorial a problem of Moral Philosophy. But what exactly does Kant mean, stating this? One interpretation could be that nature brings the evilness from the outside and makes a human evil, that it is the environment which is responsible for any human evilness. Another interpretation could be that men are evil by nature in a way that they are born evil and evilness is a human's feature, why everybody is evil. Probably Kant did not either mean the one nor the other.