Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes: Historisch-kritische Edition

The search for god is dictated not from without but from a profound sense of one's own moral being & worthiness to be happy. The core of Kant's argument remains relevant to the experience of ordinary persons. He wished to strengthen belief in god & in the spiritual nature of humankind.
This 1763 essay is important in understanding the development of his thought. It exposed the flaw in the Cartesian argument that the existence of a perfect being could be deduced from an idea or concept of such. Similarly, he saw the problem inherent in the Leibnizian view of a philosophical system modeled on mathematics: a philosopher who, like a mathematician, began with an arbitrary definition remained trapped in a circle of words. In The One Possible Basis for a Demonstration of the Existence of God, he diverged from the familiar forms of ontological argument. The result was a brilliant approach to divine being that anticipated his mature Critique of Pure Reason.
With this Bison Book edition, The One Possible Basis appears in paperback for the first time. Gordon Treash's English translation, the only modern one, faces pages containing the original German. Treash, who is a professor of philosophy at Mount Allison Univ., Sackville, New Brunswick, edited, with Paul A. Bogaard, Metaphysics as Foundation: Essays in Honor of Ivor Leclerc. Also available as a Bison Book is Kant's last major essay, The Conflict of the Faculties ('92).
Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (Königsberg: Johann Jakob Kanter, 1763), xiv, 205pp. [Ak. 2:65-163] “The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God.” Trans. with an intro. by Gordon Treash (Abaris, '79; repr. Univ. of Nebraska Press, '94). Trans. by David Walford & Ralf Meerbote in Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), pp.111-201.
This bears a “1763” publication date, but was in fact published mid-Dec. of 1762, as suggested by Hamann's letter of 21 Dec. 1762, which notes that the work had “just left the press” [Walford '92, lvii, lix].
Kant argues here that the existence of god is prior to god’s & the world’s possibilility; predication presupposes some prior thing to be predicated, but what exists prior to any & all conditions is “pure existence” (i.e., god).