Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

see also aesthetic , beauty , measure , pleasure , proportion , reason In PE the sublime appears in a list of ‘partially analysable concepts’, including space and time, as well as the feelings of the beautiful and the disgusting (p. 280, p. 252). The reason why feelings such as the sublime and beautiful cannot be analyzed is due to their arising ‘not so much [from] the nature of external things that arouse them as upon each person's own disposition to be moved by these to pleasure and pain’ (OBS p. 207, p. 45). However, Kant does offer a partial characterization of the feeling of the sublime, mainly by way of contrast to the beautiful: both are pleasant, but while the beautiful charms, the sublime ‘moves’ the Gemut (OBS p. 209, p. 47); the sublime must be simple, the beautiful adorned and ornamented. In OBS Kant uses the distinction mainly as a means for characterizing objects and human types, but in CJ he has extended the concept to include the feeling aroused by the failure of the imagination to comprehend the ‘absolutely great’, whether in terms of measure (mathematical sublime) or might (dynamically sublime). Central to the account of the sublime is the way in which it seems ‘to contravene the ends of our power of judgement, and to be ill-adapted to our faculty of presentation, and to be as it were an outrage on the imagination’ (CJ §23). However, while the sublime is ... log in or subscribe to read full text