Abstract

Immanuel Kant's first way of answering the main question of the First Piece in Religion‐whether human beings are good or evil by nature‐has been to examine the necessary conditions for being human, insofar as these relate “to our capacity for desire”, the rational faculty that governed Kant's considerations in CPrR. As creatures of desire who are “condemned to be free” in the way we use our volition, we are animals who must choose a rational principle to govern our desires. Our original predisposition to good is not a “contingent” possibility; rather, it is necessary for the very possibility of our nature that we desire to remain alive, to compare ourselves with others, and to respect the moral law. This predisposition therefore functions as the first aspect of what (in the three Critiques) Kant would have called the transcendental boundary defining his topic.