The Highest Good

Immanuel Kant promises that virtue and happiness belong together, that a proof exists, and that the proof must come from pure reason alone. Paul Guyer reads the promise, then goes looking for the payment. This episode follows the highest good from a hope of heaven in the first Critique to the postulates of God and immortality in the second, and then to the claim Guyer knows is controversial and makes anyway: something quietly happens to one of those postulates in the books that follow. The ending belongs to a boy raised in a devout house in Königsberg, and to what freeing yourself actually costs.