Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note on citations
- Introduction
- KANT'S AESTHETICS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
- KANT'S AESTHETICS AND MORALITY: TOPICAL STUDIES
- Chapter 6 The beautiful and the sublime
- Chapter 7 Nature, art, and autonomy
- Chapter 8 Genius and the canon of art: a second dialectic of aesthetic judgment
- Chapter 9 Duties regarding nature
- Chapter 10 Duty and inclination
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 6 - The beautiful and the sublime
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note on citations
- Introduction
- KANT'S AESTHETICS IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT
- KANT'S AESTHETICS AND MORALITY: TOPICAL STUDIES
- Chapter 6 The beautiful and the sublime
- Chapter 7 Nature, art, and autonomy
- Chapter 8 Genius and the canon of art: a second dialectic of aesthetic judgment
- Chapter 9 Duties regarding nature
- Chapter 10 Duty and inclination
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
INTERPRETATIONS OF THE SUBLIME
In Kant and the Claims of Taste, I argued that Kant's analysis of the sublime does not materially add to his argument for the inter subjective validity of aesthetic judments, and narrowly speaking that may be true. But more broadly, I also wrote that Kant's analysis of the sublime “will not be of much interest to modern sensibilities, and thus … most of what we can or will learn from Kant must come from his discussion of judgments of beauty.” No statement in that book has come in for more criticism than this remark, and justifiably so. By way of mitigating circumstances, I can only plead that my dismissal of the sublime accurately reflected, not its centrality in Kant's own thought, but at least the prevailing attitude in the analytical aesthetics of the preceding two decades, which (for better or worse) provided the background for my initial work on Kant's aesthetics during the 1970s. But at least my decision not to discuss the sublime at that time saved me from saying any nonsense about it. I cannot say as much for everything else that has recently been written on the topic.
In the years since I published that unfortunate remark, or perhaps even beginning a few years before 1979, the sublime has become a topic of great interest, certainly (but by no means exclusively) among literary theorists.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Kant and the Experience of FreedomEssays on Aesthetics and Morality, pp. 187 - 228Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993