Appendix - Three manuscript reflections on optimism

Summary

[The composition of these three reflections was doubtless occasioned by the announcement (published in the Hamburger freyen Urtheilen und Nachrichten for 27 July 1753) of the theme proposed by the Prussian Royal Academy of Sciences for its 1755 prize-essay competition. The theme was to be Pope's optimism as it was expressed in the dictum ‘Everything is good.’ The competition attracted entries from, among others, Mendelssohn, Lessing, Wieland, and Reinhard, to which last the prize was awarded. Kant may himself have considered competing for the prize, but he did not in the end submit an entry. These three reflections were probably composed in 1753 or 1754. They are of philosophical interest for a number of reasons: They contain an anticipation of Kant's proof of the existence of God from the possibility of things – an argument attributed rather implausibly to Pope himself; they also contain a criticism of an aspect of Leibnizian optimism (the 1759 Optimism itself containing a defence of a different aspect of Leibnizian optimism). Reflection 3703 contains an outline of an argument in Pope's Essay on Man (1733–4), Episde IV; Reflection 3704 presents a statement of Leibnizian optimism (based on the Théodicée [1714]) and a comparison of the positions of Leibniz and Pope; Reflection 3705 contains a criticism of the Leibnizian version of optimism. A French translation by François Marty was published in 1980 under the tide Premières réflexions sur I'optimisme (in Alquié, 1980, vol. I, pp. 25–34). The text of the three manuscript reflections is fragmentary; breaks in the manuscript are indicated by four dots enclosed in square brackets.]

REFLECTION 3703

You ask: who is happier in the world, the virtuous person or the vicious? If the matter is investigated, it will be found that there is always something intermingled with the advantages enjoyed by the wrong-doer which the virtuous person does not desire and on account of which he would not wish to change his state with that of the other.