According to Kant, men cannot do evil for the sake of evil. A satanic act of resistance against the moral law is impossible, and therefore the idea of ultimate evil is called a “mere idea”. However, it isn’t impossible to realize the idea of satanic evil, as is widely thought: the idea of ultimate evil can be fully realized by the everyday evil of men, as if they were ultimately evil. Kant exposes this structure within his Doctrine of Right (1797) (...) as an extension of his philosophy of radical evil, presented in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793). This interpretation will be developed in a close reading of the crucial passage – where it is the revolutionizing people of France who are held responsible for having realized the idea of satanic evil. (shrink)