Critique of Judgement (Bernard Translation)

judgment about beauty is to remain pure. Similarly, in the case of the sublime, we must not be afraid of the object, even though it is frightening in certain aspects.

This idea—that feelings of sublimity are triggered by the loneliness of an Alpine peak or the grandeur of an earthquake—is now a familiar one; but it was not so in Kant’s day. Switzerland had not yet become the vacation destination of Europe. While natural beauty was a common topic for poets and painters, it was not generally recognized that "taste" also had to do with the sublime. The Travels of Horace-Bénédict de Saussure a Swiss physicist and mountain traveler often considered the founder of alpinism, Albrecht von Haller’s poem The Alps original German: Die Alpen, and this work by Kant mark the beginning of a new era in how we view the sublime and terrifying aspects of nature. It is quite remarkable that the man who could write so movingly about the emotions inspired by grand and wild scenery had never seen a mountain in his life. The power and insight of his observations here stand in sharp contrast to the weakness of some of his remarks about the characteristics of beauty. For instance, he proposes the strange theory that color in a painting is merely an external attraction original: "extraneous charm" and does not really add to the beauty of the form depicted; in fact, he suggests it actually distracts the mind from it. If his criticisms on this point were correct, they would make John Flaxman an English artist known for his minimalist, line-based neoclassical drawings a "truer" artist than the great masters of color like Titian or Paolo Veronese. Indeed, his discussion of painting or music is not very appreciative; to the end, he remained a creature of pure reason.

Regarding the analysis he provides of the various arts, little