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Paul Guyer on Immanuel Kant

Episode 24

Genius

Featuring Paul Guyer

Audio episode · 16 min

Paul Guyer on A Kant Primer

Fourteen rooms of imitation Goya, and not one canvas that looks back at you. Somewhere in that museum is everything Immanuel Kant meant by a word he never explains: spirit. In this episode, Genius, Paul Guyer walks through section forty nine of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, where imagination outruns every concept, where Dante and Milton solve a problem no rule could touch, and where a stroll through the Prado becomes a test anyone can run. Then comes Wagner, whose music Guyer will not pretend away and whose lies he will not excuse. Under it all sits one question: can a beautiful thing be built on a lie?

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Paul Guyer's Kant lets you hire a man if you pay him fairly. Garth Greenwell's Adam Verver pays the Prince perfectly and still does him a profound wrong.

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Nature Gives the Rule

John Kaag's Thoreau lifts Kant's definition of genius and gives it to a Concord woodchopper. Paul Guyer's Kant has one condition Thoreau refuses: be understood.

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What Was Kant's Copernican Revolution?

Kant's Copernican revolution: objects conform to the mind, which supplies space and time — securing science on a foundation Guyer himself doubts.

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What Is Kant's Categorical Imperative?

Kant's categorical imperative tests the policy behind your act: can you will it as universal law? Guyer shows where Kant's own arguments fall short.

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Why Is Freedom the Keystone of Kant's Philosophy?

Guyer reads Kant's three Critiques as one arch with freedom as its keystone: a theory of knowledge built to make room for a will nature cannot explain.

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The Will That Gives the Law

Kant and Nietzsche agree the human will gives itself the law — and split on whether that law binds everyone or only its maker.

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