Critique of Judgement (Bernard Translation)

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

...rather expresses a purposiveness original: "purposiveness"; the quality of appearing to have been designed for a purpose, even if no specific purpose is known. of the subject in respect to the object. Nothing in nature is truly sublime; instead, sublimity actually resides in the mind and there alone. Indeed, as true Beauty is found, strictly speaking, only in the beauty of form, the idea of the sublime is triggered instead by those objects which are formless and represent a violation of purpose.

A distinction that is not needed when discussing the Beautiful becomes necessary when we proceed to further analyze the Sublime The feeling of being overwhelmed by something vast or powerful.. In aesthetic judgments about the Beautiful, the mind is in restful contemplation; however, in the case of the Sublime, a mental movement is excited (pp. 105 and 120). This movement, because it is pleasing, must involve a "purposiveness" in the harmony of our mental powers. This purposiveness may relate either to our faculty of knowledge or to our faculty of desire. In the first case, the sublime is called the Mathematically Sublime—the sublime of mere size or magnitude, the absolutely great. In the second case, it is the sublime of power, known as the Dynamically Sublime. Gioberti Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–1852), an Italian philosopher and politician., an Italian writer on the philosophy of Taste, pushed this distinction so far that he used it to explain the relationship between Beauty and Sublimity. "The dynamical Sublime," he says, "creates the Beautiful; the mathematical Sublime contains it"—a remark with which Kant would likely have no argument.

In both cases, however, we find that the feeling of the Sublime awakens in us a feeling of the supersensible destination of man The idea that human beings have a spiritual or moral purpose that goes beyond the physical, material world.. "The very capacity of conceiving the sublime," Kant tells us,