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Kant, Critique of Judgment, “Analytic of the Sublime”

PHIL 409, Kant and the twentieth century, Fall 2026

Assigned: pp. 97–100, 103–117, 124–126Open original PDF ↗

1 §23

Kant borrows most of the structure of the analytic of the beautiful in the introduction to the sublime: The sublime:

  • is something we discern through reflective judgments (rather than through determinate judgments);
  • is something we “like for its own sake”;
  • doesn’t depend on sensation or on a determinate concept;
  • has to do with a certain interplay of cognitive faculties;
  • involves judgments that “are singular” but “universally valid for all subjects” (the purportedly universally valid judgment being that the contemplation of such and such will give a rise to an experience of pleasure).

Differences?

  • The beautiful is “bounded”; “but the sublime can also be found in a formless object, , insofar as we present unboundedness, either [as] in the object or because the object prompts us to present it, while yet we add to this unboundedness the thought of its totality” (98)
    • As background: Reason is the faculty that insatiably asks for justifications (indeed reasons) which, when found, are thought of as conditions of this or that. One of the things that reason by design produces is a sort of vision of the unconditioned condition explanatory of a series of conditioneds. Reason’s appearance in the following distinction is attached to “the thought of [the] totality” that is projected alongside the experience of formlessness.
  • The beautiful is “the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of the understanding” whereas the sublime is “the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of reason” (98).
  • The beautiful has to do with quality, the sublime with quantity: The experience of the sublime is like the sense that this or that is “too much.”
  • The beautiful “carries with it directly a feeling of life’s being furthered, and hence is compatible with charms and with an imagination at play” (98)—a useful description, for two reasons:
    1. It highlights the reason why Kant is so keen on distinguishing between the beautiful and the agreeable, and
    2. It highlights the sense of the purposive and pleasurable elements in the perception of beauty. Kant had defined pleasure as self-sustaining activity: activity by doing which the activity has a tendency to persist. A purpose is something that gives the reason why something exists. If beauty is pleasurable and purposive, it must be activity revealing to us a sort of justification for having the kind of cognitive makeup we have, while also sustaining us in having it, as it were; that is, is “a feeling of life’s being furthered.”
  • And then, vis-a-vis the last point, the contrast to the sublime: The sublime is:

a pleasure that arises only indirectly: it is produced by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger. (98)

This two-stage procedure should be our default schema for making sense of the experience of the sublime, which may be put simply this way: It is fear followed by elation. Kant calls the feeling of the sublime “seriousness, rather than play, in the imagination’s activity” (98). I am not, in the loose sense, ‘having a good time’ in the experience of the sublime, the way that I am in the experience of the beautiful.

Hence, too, this liking is incompatible with charms, and, since the mind is not just attracted by the object but is alternately always repelled as well, the liking for the sublime contains not so much a positive pleasure as rather admiration and respect, and so should be called a negative pleasure. (98)

Kant calls the following “the intrinsic and most important distinction between the sublime and the beautiful”:

(Independent) natural beauty carries with it a purposiveness in its form, by which the object seems as it were predetermined for our power of judgment, so that this beauty constitutes in itself an object of our liking. On the other hand, if something arouses in us, merely in apprehension and without any reasoning on our part, a feeling of the sublime, then it may indeed appear, in its form, contrapurposive for our power of judgment, incommensurate with our power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination, and yet we judge it all the more sublime for that. (98–99)

This all describes only the first moment, but it is helpful in that regard. Beauty is harmony; the sublime is a lack of harmony; but it is a lack of harmony that is, ultimately, pleasurable in some way.

I want to look at this paragraph on p. 99 backward, like this:

  • “Thus the vast ocean . . . ”—certain experiences excite the mind beyond sensible limits
  • “For what is sublime, in the proper meaning of the term, . . . ”—hence the sublime is not contained in sensibility but only in the mind, specifically in reason
  • “Instead, all we are entitled to say . . . ”—the object is an occassion for eliciting the work of reason etc.
  • “We see from this at once . . . ”—the conclusion

1.1 Beauty, understanding, and the sublime

I want to look through this second passage on p. 99, highlighted in green, owing to its helping us think about a question that will certainly become a question down the road, which is: What on earth is the ‘teleology’ stuff all about?

Beauty involves a feeling of subjective purposiveness, which we can put this way: The world out there is, in some respects, structured in such a way that it is in agreement or harmony with my capacities for perception. The feeling of the beautiful is in many ways similar to (or is itself?) a ground or justification for belief in nature’s being structured in such a way that it will make sense to me. This sort of remark might answer one structural question (what’s the deal with teleology and beauty in the same work?) but opens another more fundamental one: Exactly what is the connection between aesthetic judgment, or judgments of reflection in general, and understanding (specifically knowledge of ‘nature’ or all appearances)? Is beauty a special or even anomalous case, or is it the fundamental one?

This setup in any event then provides a useful contrast to the sublime, which we can think of, at least in part, premised on a sort of cognitive failure. See pp. 99–100.

The contrast between the beautiful and the sublime more or less forces Kant into the position of saying that the beautiful may not be, say, objective in nature, but there is something intrinsically objectual or object-oriented to it—even if, in the final analysis, beauty is a matter of harmony in the interplay between subjective faculties. Meanwhile the sublime is entirely internal in scope. See this passage (in green) on p. 100.

2 §25

In §24 Kant distinguishes between into two sorts of ‘sublime’:

  • the mathematical, the quantitatively large; and
  • the dynamical

He justifies the distinction like this:

For while taste for the beautiful presupposes and sustains the mind in restful contemplation, the feeling of the sublime carries with it, as its character, a mental agitation connected with our judging of the object. But (since we like the sublime) this agitation is to be judged subjectively purposive, and so the imagination will refer this agitation either to the cognitive power or to the power of desire, but in both cases the purposiveness of the given presentation will be judged. only with regard to these powers (without any purpose or interest). (101)

Thus, the feeling of the sublime, when connected to the faculty of cognition (when it overwhelms it), is called ‘mathematical’, which is the concern of this and §§26 and 27. When connected to the faculty of desire (when it overwhelms it), is called ‘dynamical’.

What is the mathematical sublime? It is the “absolutely large,” Kant says (103). What is “absolutely large”? It is whatever is “large beyond comparison” (ibid.). Now, first of all, there is no “absolute concept of a magnitude,” only comparative ones: Every concept of a “unit” by which we measure magnitudes is itself comparative.

If I say simply that something is large, it seems that I have no comparison in mind at all, at least no comparison with an objective measure, because in saying this I do not determine at all how large [groß] the object is. But though my standard of comparison is merely subjective, my judgment still lays claim to universal assent. (104)

To say that something is large, without the comparative (e.g., that it is so many feet or miles long), and yet to “claim to universal assent,” requires that the ‘fact’, say, to which others are supposed to assent is not a sensible or objective one. See the highlighted passage on p. 104.

When we say that something is incomparably large, what we’re saying is indexed not to the size of the thing but to our faculty of presentation. Here again I want to work backward through a series of claims. See the highlighted passage on p. 105.

  • “If (under . . . ”—We say something is large without reference to a determinate concept, we are making a claim “about our presentation of the object”; and this presentation (to the extent that it involves pleasure) “is subjectively purposive for a certain use we can make of our cognitive powers in estimating magnitude”
    • “subjective purposiveness” with respect to the sublime here is something like the joy or pleasure we get from contemplating how large something that is extremely large is
  • “But—and this . . . “—What we “like” about the sublime isn’t the object, then, so much as it is “a liking for the expansion of the imagination itself”
  • “It is noteworthy . . . “—Thus the sublime is liking for the expansion of the imagination that is provoked by an object

(Why does Kant say we hold “small” things in “contempt”? I have no idea.)

A further conclusion then comes at the bottom of p. 105. The sublime, as such, has no objective source, no source in the understanding; there is no harmony of imagination and understanding involved, but there is some sort of pleasure.

Kant ventures a claim about how the feeling of the sublime arises for us on p. 106.

3 §26

Consider first the claim on p. 108, describing a certain limit to ‘comprehension’ of a quantity. Think of imagining each of the following, ascending in a series:

  • triangle (three sides)
  • square (four sides)
  • pentagon (five sides)

and so on. You can probably picture each in your mind up to about six sides. After that, things start to get tricky. Can you picture, in your mind, a seventeen-sided shape (a septadecagon)?

The sublime involves more than just this failure. See the top of p. 109 for a description of the feeling of the sublime.

3.1 ‘Crude nature’ and the sublime

Where do we encounter the sublime? What sort of objects or experiences give rise to the feeling of the sublime?

Kant first notes that the “liking” associated with the sublime is

a liking connected with a presentation from which one would least expect it, namely, a presentation that makes us aware of its own inadequacy and hence also of its subjective unpurposiveness for the power of judgment in its estimation of magnitude. (109)

One thing interesting about the fact that “liking” is involved in both the beautiful and the sublime is that it supposes a fairly open idea about what “liking” is. In any event, the liking involved here attaches to the very opposite of ‘subjective purposiveness’.

From what does it arise? See this second passage on p. 109. (What is ’crude nature’? It is nature conceived without purpose.)

3.2 Purposiveness, unpurposiveness, and reason

The challenge with the sublime is that, in addition to the fact that it isn’t an intuition+concept sort of cognition, it also doesn’t involve the sort of subjective purposiveness that the beautiful does (it is unpurposive in some respects), and yet it involves some sort of ‘liking’, and with it some sort of ‘purposiveness’.

Kant’s claim here is going to be that it has to do not with the imagination and understanding at play with each other, as it does in the case of the beautiful, but instead with certain felt prerogatives of reason. Let’s work, again, backward.

4 §27

This first paragraph of §27 on p. 114 shouldn’t involve too much that will go over our heads.

And this slightly expanded version of the two-stage procedure on pp. 114–115 is also fairly digestible, I think.

And see this straightforward contrast between the sublime and the beautiful on pp. 115–116. (Some of this discussion of the “agitation” of the imagination on p. 115 is compelling stuff, but conceptually I think we have the thought.)

And note here the resolution of the conflict between the unpurposive and purposive dimensions of the sublime in the middle of p. 116.

5 §29

So much for the ‘mathematical’ sublime. What of the ‘dynamic’?

The mathematical sublime is about power or “might” (Macht). “When in an aesthetic judgment we consider nature as a might that has no dominance over us, then it is dynamically sublime” (p. 119). Nature is sublime when its power appears awesome to us and yet ‘has no dominance over us’.

Nature rises to the level of the dynamically sublime when it appears to us “as an object of fear” (ibid.). But its being an object of fear does not require that we are afraid of it.

We can, however, consider an object fearful without being afraid of it, namely, if we judge it in such a way that we merely think of the case where we might possibly want to put up resistance against it, and that any resistance would in that case be utterly futile. (119–120)

See this conclusion to §28 on p. 123.

In §29 Kant leads with the idea that judgments of the sublime involve a level of cultivation that judgments of beauty don’t. We’ve seen that the feeling of the sublime is aroused when we sense our “supersensible vocation,” i.e., our reason, is not “dominated” by the power of nature. Simply, then: “In order for the mind to be attuned to the feeling of the sublime, it must be receptive to ideas” (p. 124). See the highlighted follow-up on p. 124 and the chunk on p. 125.

6 The ‘general comment’

I want to read this general comment at some point this semester, but let’s leave it for later discussion of the sublime (say for example as we read Lyotard).