In this lecture, we'll try to define two terms related to the idea of beauty – the sublime and prettiness.

For Kant, the sublime was a quite specific notion, bearing no resemblance to beauty. As he saw it, beauty always shows itself in a concrete form, while the sublime conveys the impression of being limitless. Beyond their nature, however, the beautiful and the sublime also differ in the emotions they evoke. The beautiful evokes a calm, tranquil pleasure, while the pleasure of the sublime is tinged with sadness. According to Kant, contemplating the sublime inspires a slight sorrow, a sort of aspiration toward infinity that the mind can't completely embrace. This is the source of our discomfort, however agreeable it might also be. And because our effort to embrace the sublime necessarily fails, it becomes elevated in our eyes, yielding a higher form of satisfaction. In his Critique of Judgment, therefore, Kant saw the idea of the sublime as quite distinct from that of beauty.

But if Kant's theory were true, the sublime could never exist in any well-defined thing – in classical literature, for example. But what could be more precise than the “Qu'il mourût!” of Horace? Yet isn't this a good example of the sublime?

So we don't agree with Kant that there's an abyss between beauty and the sublime. The sublime is simply the highest expression of beauty – beauty raised to its greatest intensity.