Part I — Analytic of the Sublime

Second Book A 74 Analytic of the Sublime.

23 Transition from the Faculty for Judging the Beautiful to That for Judging the Sublime.

The beautiful agrees with the sublime in that both please for their own sake. Further, both presuppose neither a judgment of sense nor a logically determining judgment, but a judgment of reflection. Consequently satisfaction depends neither on a sensation, as with the agreeable, nor on a determinate concept, as with satisfaction in the good, yet is nevertheless referred to concepts, although it remains undetermined which. Thus satisfaction is linked to the mere presentation or the faculty of presentation, whereby the faculty of presentation, or imagination, in a given intuition is regarded as harmonizing with the understanding's or reason's faculty of concepts, as promoting the latter. Hence both kinds of judgments are also singular judgments that nevertheless announce themselves as universally valid with regard to every subject, although they lay claim only to the feeling of pleasure and to no cognition of the object.

But notable differences between the two are also A 75 evident. The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in limitation; the sublime, by contrast, can also be found in a formless object, insofar as boundlessness is represented in it or occasioned by it, yet its totality is also thought. Thus the beautiful seems to be taken as the presentation of an indeterminate concept of the understanding, the sublime as that of a similar concept of reason. Hence satisfaction in the former is connected with the representation of quality, in the latter with that of quantity. The latter satisfaction also differs greatly in kind from the former: the former (the beautiful) directly carries with it a feeling of the furtherance of life, and is therefore compatible with charms and a 245 playful imagination; the latter (the feeling of the sublime), however, is a pleasure that arises only indirectly, being produced through the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital powers followed at once by a still stronger outpouring of them. Thus, as emotion, it seems to be not play but seriousness in the imagination's activity. Hence it is also incompatible with charms; and since the mind is not merely attracted by the object but alternately repelled by it again and again, satisfaction in the sublime contains not so much positive pleasure as admiration A 76 or respect—that is, it deserves to be called negative pleasure.

But the most important and inward distinction between the sublime and the beautiful is surely this: if, as is fitting here, we first consider only the sublime in natural objects (for the sublime in art is always restricted by the conditions of agreement with nature), natural beauty (self-subsisting beauty) carries with it a purposiveness in its form, through which the object seems, as it were, predetermined for our power of judgment, and thus constitutes in itself an object of satisfaction. By contrast, what arouses the feeling of the sublime in us, without reasoning, merely in apprehension, may in its form appear counterpurposive for our power of judgment, incommensurate with our faculty of presentation, and as it were violent to the imagination, yet is judged all the more sublime for that very reason.

But from this we see at once that we express ourselves incorrectly when we call any object of nature sublime, although we can quite correctly call very many of them beautiful. For how can what is apprehended as counterpurposive in itself be designated by an expression of approval? We can say no more than that the object is suited to the presentation of a sublimity that can be found in the mind. For the sublime proper A 77 can be contained in no sensible form, but concerns only ideas of reason; although no presentation adequate to them is possible, they are stirred and called into the mind precisely through this inadequacy, which can be presented sensibly. Thus the vast ocean stirred up by storms cannot be called sublime. Its sight is dreadful; and the mind must already have been filled with various ideas 246 if such an intuition is to attune it to a feeling that is itself sublime, as the mind is incited to leave sensibility and occupy itself with ideas containing a higher purposiveness.

Self-subsisting natural beauty reveals to us a technique of nature that represents nature as a system according to laws whose principle we do not find in our entire faculty of understanding: namely, a purposiveness relative to the use of judgment with regard to appearances, so that these must be judged as belonging not merely to nature in its purposeless mechanism, but also to an analogy with art. Thus it actually extends, not indeed our cognition of natural objects, but our concept of nature as mere mechanism to the concept of that same nature as art, which invites profound investigations into the possibility of such a form. But in what we commonly call sublime in nature A 78, there is so little that leads to particular objective principles and forms of nature conforming to them that nature instead arouses the ideas of the sublime most strongly in its chaos, or in its wildest, most unregulated disorder and devastation, provided only that magnitude and power are apparent. From this we see that the concept of the sublime in nature is far less important and rich in consequences than the concept of the beautiful in nature; and that it indicates nothing purposive in nature itself, but only in the possible use of its intuitions to make a purposiveness within ourselves, wholly independent of nature, felt. For the beautiful in nature we must seek a ground outside ourselves, but for the sublime merely within ourselves and in the way of thinking that introduces sublimity into the representation of nature. This is a very necessary preliminary remark, which wholly separates the ideas of the sublime from that of a purposiveness of nature and makes the theory of the sublime a mere appendix to the aesthetic judging of nature's purposiveness. For through it no particular form in nature is represented; rather, only a purposive use that the imagination makes of its representation is developed.

24 A 79 247 On the Division of an Investigation of the Feeling of the Sublime.

As regards the division of the moments of aesthetic judging of objects in relation to the feeling of the sublime, the analytic can proceed according to the same principle as in the analysis of judgments of taste. For as a judgment of aesthetic reflective judgment, satisfaction in the sublime, just as in the beautiful, must represent itself as universally valid in quantity, without interest in quality, subjective purposiveness in relation, and this latter as necessary in modality. In this respect, then, the method will not depart from that of the preceding section—unless one counts it as a difference that there, where the aesthetic judgment concerned the form of the object, we began by investigating quality, whereas here, given the formlessness that can belong to what we call sublime, we shall begin with quantity as the first moment of aesthetic judgment about the sublime. The ground for this can be seen from the preceding §.

But the analysis of the sublime needs a division not required by the analysis of the beautiful: namely, into the mathematically and the dynamically sublime.

For the feeling of the sublime carries as its characteristic a movement of the mind connected with judging the A 80 object, whereas taste for the beautiful presupposes and maintains the mind in calm contemplation. But this movement is to be judged subjectively purposive (since the sublime pleases); thus it is referred through the imagination either to the faculty of cognition or to the faculty of desire. In both relations, however, the purposiveness of the given representation is judged only with regard to these faculties (without end or interest). The first is then attributed to the object as a mathematical, the second as a dynamical attunement of the imagination, and the object is consequently represented as sublime in this twofold manner.

A. 248 On the Mathematically Sublime.

25 Nominal Definition of the Sublime.

We call sublime what is absolutely great. But being great and being a magnitude are entirely different concepts (greatness and quantity). Likewise, simply saying that something is great is quite different from saying that it is absolutely great A 81 (great absolutely, not comparatively). The latter is what is great beyond all comparison.—But what does the expression that something is great, small, or middling mean? What it designates is no pure concept of the understanding, still less an intuition of sense, and just as little a concept of reason, since it carries no principle of cognition with it. It must therefore be a concept of the power of judgment, or descend from one, and have as its ground a subjective purposiveness of the representation in relation to judgment. That something is a magnitude (a quantity) can be cognized from the thing itself without any comparison with others: namely, when a multiplicity of homogeneous elements together constitutes one thing. But how great it is always requires something else, which is also a magnitude, as its measure. Since, however, in judging magnitude what matters is not merely multiplicity (number), but also the magnitude of the unit (the measure), and the magnitude of the latter always in turn needs something else as a measure with which it can be compared, we see that all determination of the magnitude of appearances can supply absolutely no absolute concept of a magnitude, but always only a comparative concept.

Now when I simply say that something is great, it seems that I have no comparison in mind at all, at least with no A 82 objective measure, since how great the object is remains entirely undetermined. But although the standard of comparison is merely subjective, the judgment nevertheless claims universal assent. The judgments “the man is beautiful” and “he is tall” are not restricted merely to the judging subject, but, like theoretical judgments, demand everyone's assent.

249 But since a judgment designating something simply as great is intended to say not merely that the object has a magnitude, but also to attribute that magnitude to it as a distinction over many others of the same kind, without determinately specifying this superiority, a standard is certainly laid at its foundation. We presuppose that we can assume this standard to be the same for everyone, yet it is usable not for any logical (mathematically determinate) judging of magnitude, but only for aesthetic judging, since it is a merely subjective standard underlying judgment as it reflects on magnitude. It may, moreover, be empirical, such as the average size of the human beings known to us, animals of a certain kind, trees, houses, mountains, and the like; or a standard given a priori, which, through deficiencies in the judging subject, is restricted to subjective conditions of presentation in a concrete instance—as, in the practical sphere, the greatness of a certain virtue, or of public freedom and justice in a country; A 83 or, in the theoretical sphere, the degree of correctness or incorrectness of an observation or measurement, and the like.

Here it is remarkable that, even if we have no interest at all in the object—that is, its existence is indifferent to us—its mere magnitude, even when it is considered formless, can nevertheless carry a satisfaction with it that is universally communicable, and hence contains consciousness of a subjective purposiveness in the use of our cognitive faculties. But this is not a satisfaction in the object, as with the beautiful (for it may be formless), where reflective judgment finds itself purposively attuned in relation to cognition in general; rather, it is satisfaction in the expansion of the imagination in itself.

When we say simply of an object (under the restriction mentioned above) that it is great, this is not a mathematically determining judgment but a mere reflective judgment upon its representation, which is subjectively purposive for a certain use of our cognitive powers in estimating magnitude. We then always connect a kind of respect with the representation, just as we connect contempt with what we call simply small. Moreover, judging things as great or small extends to everything, even to all their qualities; hence we call even beauty great or small. 250 The reason for this is that whatever we may present in intuition according to the prescription of the power of judgment A 84 (and thus represent aesthetically) is, without exception, appearance, and therefore also a quantum.

But when we call something not merely great but absolutely great, great without qualification and in every respect (beyond all comparison), that is, sublime, we soon see that we permit no standard adequate to it to be sought outside it, but only within it. It is a magnitude equal to itself alone. It follows that the sublime is to be sought not in the things of nature but solely in our ideas; in which of these it lies must, however, be reserved for the deduction.

The explanation above may also be expressed as follows: Sublime is that in comparison with which everything else is small. Here we readily see that nothing can be given in nature, however great we judge it, that could not, viewed in another relation, be diminished to the infinitely small; and conversely, nothing is so small that, compared with still smaller standards, it could not expand for our imagination to the magnitude of a world. Telescopes have furnished abundant material for the first observation, microscopes for the second. Nothing, therefore, that can be an object of the senses can, considered on this A 85 footing, be called sublime. But precisely because our imagination contains a striving to advance to infinity, while our reason lays claim to absolute totality as a real idea, the very inadequacy of our faculty for estimating the magnitude of things in the sensible world to this idea awakens the feeling of a supersensible faculty within us. And it is the use that the power of judgment naturally makes of certain objects on behalf of this latter feeling, not the object of the senses, that is absolutely great, while every other use is small in comparison. Thus it is the disposition of mind brought about by a certain representation occupying the reflective power of judgment, and not the object, that must be called sublime.

We can therefore add to the preceding formulas explaining the sublime this further one: Sublime is that which, even to be able to think it, proves a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of the senses.

26 251 On the estimation of the magnitude of natural things required for the idea of the sublime.

The estimation of magnitude through numerical concepts (or their signs in algebra) is mathematical; that in mere intuition (by the eye) is aesthetic. Now we can obtain determinate concepts of A 86 how great something is only through numbers (or at least approximations through numerical series continuing to infinity), whose unit is the measure; and to this extent every logical estimation of magnitude is mathematical. But since the magnitude of the measure must itself be assumed as known, if this in turn were to be estimated only through numbers whose unit would have to be another measure, and thus mathematically, we could never have a first or fundamental measure, and consequently no determinate concept of a given magnitude. The estimation of the magnitude of the fundamental measure must therefore consist simply in our being able to grasp it immediately in an intuition and use it through the imagination to present numerical concepts: that is, every estimation of the magnitude of natural objects is ultimately aesthetic (that is, determined subjectively and not objectively).

Now for the mathematical estimation of magnitude there is indeed no greatest magnitude (for the power of numbers extends to infinity); but for aesthetic estimation there certainly is a greatest. Of this I say that, when it is judged as an absolute measure beyond which none greater is subjectively possible (for the judging subject), it carries with it the idea of the sublime and produces an emotion that no mathematical estimation of magnitudes through numbers can bring about (except insofar A 87 as that aesthetic fundamental measure is kept alive in the imagination). For the latter always presents only relative magnitude through comparison with others of the same kind, whereas the former presents magnitude absolutely, so far as the mind can grasp it in a single intuition.

To take a quantum intuitively into the imagination, so as to use it as a measure or unit for estimating magnitude through numbers, requires two acts of this faculty: apprehension (apprehensio) and comprehension (comprehensio aesthetica). Apprehension presents no difficulty, for it can proceed to 252 infinity; but comprehension grows more difficult the further apprehension advances, and soon reaches its maximum, namely the aesthetically greatest fundamental measure for estimating magnitude. For when apprehension has advanced so far that the partial representations of sensible intuition first apprehended are already beginning to fade in the imagination while it advances to apprehend further ones, it loses on one side just as much as it gains on the other, and comprehension has a greatest limit beyond which it cannot go.

This explains what Savary observes in his accounts of Egypt: that one must come neither too close to the pyramids nor remain too far away to receive the full emotion A 88 of their magnitude. For in the latter case the parts apprehended (their stones piled one above another) are represented only obscurely, and their representation has no effect on the subject’s aesthetic judgment. In the former case, however, the eye needs some time to complete its apprehension from base to summit; during this time the earlier apprehensions always partly fade before the imagination has taken in the later ones, and comprehension is never complete.—The same consideration may also suffice to explain the bewilderment, or sort of perplexity, said to overcome the spectator on first entering St. Peter’s in Rome. Here there is a feeling of the inadequacy of one’s imagination to present the idea of a whole; in this the imagination reaches its maximum and, in striving to extend it, sinks back into itself, yet is thereby brought into an affecting satisfaction.

I shall say nothing yet about the ground of this satisfaction, which is connected with a representation from which one would least expect it—one, namely, that makes us aware of the inadequacy, and thus the subjective contrapurposiveness, of the representation for the power of judgment in estimating magnitude. I observe only that, if the aesthetic judgment is to be pure (unmixed with any teleological judgment as a judgment of reason A 89), and an example is to be given that fully suits the critique of the aesthetic power of judgment, the sublime must be exhibited not in products of art (buildings, columns, and so on), where a human end determines both form and magnitude, nor in natural things whose concept already carries a determinate end with 253 it (animals whose natural vocation is known, for example), but in raw nature—and even here only insofar as it carries no charm of its own, or emotion arising from actual danger—simply insofar as it contains magnitude. For in this manner of representation nature contains nothing monstrous (nor anything magnificent or dreadful); the magnitude apprehended may have grown as great as one pleases, provided the imagination can still comprehend it in a whole. An object is monstrous when by its magnitude it destroys the end constituting its concept. But the mere presentation of a concept that is almost too great for any presentation (bordering on the relatively monstrous) is called colossal, because the end of presenting a concept is made difficult by the object’s intuition being almost too great for our faculty of apprehension.—A pure judgment on the sublime, however, must have no end of the object whatever as its determining ground if it is to be aesthetic A 90 and not mingled with any judgment of understanding or reason.

Since everything that is to please the merely reflective power of judgment without interest must carry in its representation a subjective purposiveness, and one universally valid as such, yet here no purposiveness of the object’s form (as in the beautiful) underlies the judging, the question arises: what is this subjective purposiveness? And through what is it prescribed as a norm, so as to supply a ground for universally valid satisfaction in the mere estimation of magnitude—and indeed in an estimation carried to the point where our faculty of imagination proves inadequate to present the concept of a magnitude?

In the composition required to represent magnitude, the imagination advances of itself to infinity without encountering any hindrance; but the understanding guides it through numerical concepts, for which the imagination must supply the schema. In this procedure, which belongs to the logical estimation of magnitude, there is indeed something objectively purposive according to the concept of an end (as every measurement is), but nothing purposive and pleasing for the aesthetic power of judgment. Nor is there anything in this intentional purposiveness that A 91 254 would require us to drive the magnitude of the measure, and thus the comprehension of the manifold in a single intuition, to the limit of the imagination’s capacity, as far as it can possibly reach in its presentations. For in the understanding’s estimation of magnitudes (arithmetic) we get just as far whether we carry the comprehension of units to the number 10 (in the decimal system) or only to 4 (in the quaternary system), and then generate further magnitude, in composition—or, if the quantum is given in intuition, in apprehension—merely progressively (not comprehensively), according to an adopted principle of progression. In this mathematical estimation of magnitude, the understanding is equally well served and satisfied whether the imagination chooses as its unit a magnitude we can grasp at a glance, such as a foot or a rod, or a German mile, or even the earth’s diameter, which the imagination can indeed apprehend but cannot comprehend in a single intuition (not through comprehensio aesthetica, although certainly through comprehensio logica in a numerical concept). In either case the logical estimation of magnitude proceeds unhindered to infinity.

But now the mind listens within itself to the voice of reason, which demands totality for all given magnitudes, even those that can never be entirely apprehended but are nevertheless judged (in sensible representation) A 92 as entirely given. It therefore demands comprehension in one intuition and a presentation for all those members of a progressively increasing numerical series; nor does it exempt even the infinite (space and elapsed time) from this demand, but rather makes it unavoidable to think of this (in the judgment of common reason) as given whole (in its totality).

The infinite, however, is absolutely (not merely comparatively) great. Compared with it, everything else (among magnitudes of the same kind) is small. But most importantly, even being able to think it as a whole indicates a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of the senses. For this would require a comprehension supplying, as its unit, a standard that stood in a determinate, numerically expressible relation to the infinite—which is impossible. Yet even to be able to think the given infinite without contradiction requires in the human mind a faculty that is itself supersensible. For only through this faculty and 255 its idea of a noumenon—which itself admits of no intuition, but is nevertheless laid as a substrate beneath the intuition of the world as mere appearance—is the infinite of the sensible world comprehended whole under a concept in the purely intellectual estimation of magnitude, A 93 although in mathematical estimation it can never be thought as a whole through numerical concepts. Even a faculty for being able to think the infinite of supersensible intuition as given (in its intelligible substrate) surpasses every standard of sensibility and is great beyond all comparison even with the faculty of mathematical estimation; admittedly not in a theoretical respect, for the sake of the cognitive faculty, but still as an expansion of the mind, which feels itself capable of crossing the boundaries of sensibility in another respect (the practical).

Nature is therefore sublime in those of its appearances whose intuition carries with it the idea of its infinity. This can occur only through the inadequacy of even the greatest effort of our imagination in estimating an object’s magnitude. Now in mathematical estimation the imagination is equal to any object, so as to supply a sufficient measure for it, because the understanding’s numerical concepts can, through progression, make any measure adequate to any given magnitude. It must therefore be in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude that we feel the effort at comprehension, exceeding the imagination’s capacity, to grasp progressive apprehension within a whole of intuition, and at the same time perceive the inadequacy of this A 94 faculty, unlimited in its progression, to grasp and employ a fundamental measure suited to estimating magnitude with the least expenditure of understanding. Now nature’s true, unchanging fundamental measure is its absolute whole, which, in nature as appearance, is infinity comprehended. But since this fundamental measure is a self-contradictory concept (because an absolute totality of a progression without end is impossible), that magnitude of a natural object upon which the imagination fruitlessly expends its entire capacity for comprehension must lead the concept of nature to a supersensible substrate (underlying both nature and our faculty of thought). This is great beyond every standard of the senses, and thus allows us to judge not so much 256 the object as the disposition of mind in estimating it as sublime.

Thus, just as in judging the beautiful the aesthetic power of judgment relates the imagination in its free play to the understanding, so as to accord with its concepts in general (without determining them), so in judging a thing as sublime it relates the same faculty to reason, so as to accord subjectively with its ideas (without determining which). That is, it brings about a disposition of mind conformable to and compatible with the disposition that A 95 the influence of determinate (practical) ideas upon feeling would produce.

From this we also see that true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the judging subject, not in the natural object whose judging occasions this disposition. Who would call shapeless mountain masses, towering above one another in wild disorder with their pyramids of ice, or the gloomy, raging sea, and so on, sublime? Yet the mind feels itself uplifted in judging them when, contemplating them without regard to their form, it surrenders itself to the imagination and to a reason connected with it without any determinate end, merely to enlarge it, and nevertheless finds the imagination’s entire power inadequate to reason’s ideas.

Examples of the mathematically sublime in nature, in mere intuition, are supplied by all those cases in which the imagination is given not so much a greater numerical concept as a great unit to serve as a measure (to shorten the numerical series). A tree that we estimate by a person’s height may provide a standard for a mountain; and if the mountain were, say, a mile high, it could serve as the unit for the number expressing the earth’s diameter, to make the latter intuitive; the earth’s diameter could serve for the planetary system known to us, A 96 this in turn for the Milky Way. And the immeasurable multitude of such Milky Way systems, known as nebulae, which presumably form yet another such system among themselves, leaves us expecting no limits here. Now in the aesthetic judging of so immeasurable a whole, the sublime lies not so much in the magnitude of the number as in our reaching ever greater units as we advance. The systematic division of the universe 257 contributes to this, continually representing everything great in nature as small in turn; more properly, it represents our imagination in all its boundlessness, and nature with it, as vanishing in comparison with reason’s ideas when it is to provide a presentation adequate to them.

27 On the quality of the satisfaction in judging the sublime.

The feeling of our faculty’s inadequacy to attain an idea that is a law for us is respect. Now the idea of comprehending every appearance that may be given to us in the intuition of a whole is one imposed upon us by a law of reason, which recognizes no other determinate, universally valid, and unchanging measure than the absolute whole. A 97 But our imagination, even in its greatest effort to comprehend a given object in a whole of intuition, as demanded of it (and thus to present reason’s idea), demonstrates its limits and inadequacy, yet at the same time its vocation to bring about adequacy to this idea as a law. The feeling of the sublime in nature is therefore respect for our own vocation, which by a certain subreption we render to an object of nature (mistaking respect for the idea of humanity in our own subject for respect for the object). This makes, as it were, intuitively evident to us the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive faculties over the greatest faculty of sensibility.

The feeling of the sublime is therefore a feeling of displeasure arising from the inadequacy of the imagination, in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude, to estimation by reason, and at the same time a pleasure awakened by the agreement of this very judgment of the inadequacy of our greatest sensible faculty with ideas of reason, insofar as striving toward them is nevertheless a law for us. For it is a law (of reason) for us, and belongs to our vocation, to estimate everything that nature, as an object of the senses, contains that is great for us as small in comparison with ideas of reason; and whatever stirs within us the feeling of this supersensible A 98 vocation accords with that law. 258 Now the imagination’s greatest effort to present the unit for estimating magnitude is a relation to something absolutely great, and consequently also a relation to reason’s law that this alone be adopted as the supreme measure of magnitudes. Thus the inner perception of the inadequacy of every sensible standard to reason’s estimation of magnitude is an accord with reason’s laws, and a displeasure that stirs in us the feeling of our supersensible vocation, according to which it is purposive, and therefore a pleasure, to find every standard of sensibility inadequate to the ideas of reason.

In representing the sublime in nature, the mind feels itself moved, whereas in its aesthetic judgment upon nature’s beauty it remains in calm contemplation. This movement may be compared (especially at its beginning) to a tremor, that is, to a rapidly alternating repulsion from and attraction to the very same object. What exceeds the imagination’s capacity (to which it is driven in apprehending intuition) is, as it were, an abyss in which it fears losing itself; yet for reason’s idea of the supersensible it is not excessive but lawful to produce such an effort of the imagination: A 99 hence it is attractive again to precisely the degree that it was repellent to mere sensibility. Yet the judgment itself always remains merely aesthetic, because, without grounding itself on a determinate concept of the object, it represents only the subjective play of the mental powers (imagination and reason) as harmonious even through their contrast. For just as imagination and understanding produce subjective purposiveness of the mental powers through their accord in judging the beautiful, so imagination and reason here produce it through their conflict: namely, a feeling that we possess pure, independent reason, or a faculty for estimating magnitude whose superiority can be made intuitive only through the insufficiency of the faculty that, in presenting magnitudes (of sensible objects), is itself unlimited.

Measuring a space (as apprehension) is at the same time describing it, and thus an objective movement in the imagination and a progression; comprehending the manifold in the unity not of thought but of intuition, and thus what has been successively apprehended in a single instant, is, by contrast, a regression that cancels the temporal condition in 259 the imagination’s progression and makes coexistence intuitive. It is therefore (since temporal succession is a condition of inner sense and of an intuition) a subjective movement of the A 100 imagination by which it does violence to inner sense, a violence that must be all the more noticeable the greater the quantum that imagination comprehends in a single intuition. Thus the effort to take into a single intuition a measure of magnitudes whose apprehension requires an appreciable time is a manner of representation that, considered subjectively, is contrapurposive, but objectively is required for estimating magnitude and is therefore purposive. Yet the very same violence done to the subject through the imagination is judged purposive for the mind’s entire vocation.

The quality of the feeling of the sublime is that it is a feeling of displeasure concerning the aesthetic faculty of judging an object, a displeasure nevertheless represented in that judgment as purposive. This is possible because our own incapacity discloses the consciousness of an unlimited capacity in the same subject, and the mind can judge the latter aesthetically only through the former.

In the logical estimation of magnitude, the impossibility of ever reaching absolute totality by advancing in the measurement of things in the sensible world, in time and space, was recognized as objective, that is, as an impossibility of thinking the infinite as given, and not as merely A 101 subjective, that is, as an inability to grasp it. For there no regard whatever is paid to the degree of comprehension in a single intuition as a measure; everything depends on a numerical concept. But in an aesthetic estimation of magnitude, the numerical concept must fall away or be altered, and the imagination’s comprehension into the unity of a measure (thus avoiding concepts of a law for the successive generation of concepts of magnitude) is alone purposive for it.—Now when a magnitude almost reaches the utmost limit of our capacity to comprehend in a single intuition, yet the imagination is challenged by numerical magnitudes (for which we are conscious of our faculty as unlimited) to aesthetic comprehension in a still greater unit, we feel ourselves aesthetically confined within limits in our mind. Yet the displeasure, with regard to the necessary expansion of the imagination into adequacy with what is unlimited in our faculty of reason, namely the 260 idea of the absolute whole—and thus the contrapurposiveness of the imagination’s faculty—is nevertheless represented as purposive for the ideas of reason and their awakening. Precisely thereby, however, the aesthetic judgment itself becomes subjectively purposive for reason as the source of ideas, that is, of an intellectual comprehension in comparison with which every aesthetic comprehension is small; and the object is received as sublime with a pleasure A 102 possible only through a displeasure.

B. On the dynamically sublime in nature.

28 On nature as a power.

Power is a capacity superior to great obstacles. This same capacity is called dominion when it is superior even to the resistance of something that itself possesses power. Nature, considered in aesthetic judgment as a power that has no dominion over us, is dynamically sublime.

If nature is to be judged by us as dynamically sublime, it must be represented as arousing fear (although, conversely, not every object that arouses fear is found sublime in our aesthetic judgment). For in aesthetic judging (without a concept), superiority over obstacles can be judged only by the magnitude of the resistance. Now what we strive to resist is an evil, and, if we find our capacity unequal to it, an object of fear. Thus for the aesthetic power of judgment, nature can count as a power, and hence as dynamically sublime, only insofar as it is regarded as an object of fear. A 103

But we can regard an object as fearful without being afraid of it, namely when we judge it in such a way that we merely think of the case in which we might wish to resist it, and recognize that all resistance would then be utterly in vain. Thus the virtuous person fears God without being afraid of him, because wishing to resist him and his commandments is not a case he apprehends 261 for himself. Yet in every such case, which he thinks of as not intrinsically impossible, he recognizes God as fearful.

Someone who is afraid cannot judge the sublime in nature at all, any more than someone possessed by inclination and appetite can judge the beautiful. The former flees the sight of an object that inspires dread; and it is impossible to find satisfaction in a terror that is seriously felt. Hence the agreeableness arising when a trouble ceases is relief. But relief at deliverance from a danger is a relief accompanied by the resolve never to expose oneself to it again; indeed, one does not even like to think back upon that sensation, much less seek out the occasion for it.

Bold, overhanging, almost threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the A 104 sky and advancing with lightning and crashing thunder, volcanoes in all their destructive force, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean in revolt, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river, and the like reduce our capacity for resistance to an insignificant trifle beside their power. But their sight becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in safety; and we gladly call these objects sublime because they raise the soul’s strength above its accustomed measure and disclose within us a capacity for resistance of an entirely different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against nature’s seeming omnipotence.

For just as in nature’s immeasurability and our inability to find a standard proportionate to the aesthetic estimation of the magnitude of its domain we found our own limitation, yet at the same time in our faculty of reason found another, nonsensible standard, which includes that infinity itself under itself as a unit, and beside which everything in nature is small—thus finding in our mind a superiority over nature even in its immeasurability—so too the irresistibility of nature’s power, while making us recognize our physical impotence as natural beings, A 105 also discloses a capacity to judge ourselves independent of it, and a superiority over nature on which rests a self-preservation of an entirely different kind from that which nature outside us can assail and endanger. 262 In this, humanity in our person remains undiminished, although the human being would have to succumb to that dominion. In this way nature is judged sublime in our aesthetic judgment not insofar as it arouses fear, but because it summons our strength (which is not nature) within us to regard the things we care about (possessions, health, and life) as small, and consequently to regard its power—to which we are certainly subject in these matters—as nevertheless having no such dominion over us and our personality that we would have to bow before it when our highest principles and their maintenance or abandonment were at stake. Thus nature is here called sublime merely because it raises the imagination to present those cases in which the mind can make felt the sublimity of its own vocation even above nature.

This self-esteem loses nothing through our having to find ourselves safe in order to feel this inspiring satisfaction, and thus through the possibility that, because the danger is not serious, the sublimity of our mental faculty might likewise (as it could seem) not be serious. A 106 For the satisfaction here concerns only the vocation of our faculty disclosed in such a case, just as the predisposition to it lies in our nature; its development and exercise, however, remain entrusted to us and incumbent upon us. And there is truth in this, however conscious a person may be of his present actual impotence when he extends his reflection so far.

This principle may indeed seem too far-fetched and overreasoned, and thus beyond the scope of an aesthetic judgment; but observation of humanity proves the contrary, and shows that it can underlie the most ordinary judgments, although we are not always conscious of it. For what is an object of the greatest admiration even to the savage? A person who is not terrified, who is not afraid, and thus does not yield to danger, yet at the same time sets vigorously to work with full deliberation. Even in the most civilized condition this exceptional esteem for the warrior remains; only we further demand that he also display all the virtues of peace—gentleness, compassion, and even a fitting care for his own person—precisely because these reveal that danger cannot subdue his mind. Thus however much people may dispute, in comparing the statesman with the general, which deserves the higher A 107 263 esteem, aesthetic judgment decides for the latter. Even war, when conducted with order and sacred respect for civil rights, has something sublime about it, and makes the way of thinking of the people who conduct it in this manner all the more sublime, the more dangers they have faced and courageously withstood. A long peace, by contrast, tends to make the mere spirit of commerce dominant, and with it base self-interest, cowardice, and softness, thereby degrading the people’s way of thinking.

Against this explanation of the concept of the sublime, insofar as sublimity is ascribed to power, there seems to stand our custom of representing God in thunderstorms, tempests, earthquakes, and the like as showing himself in his wrath, yet also in his sublimity; for imagining a superiority of our mind over the effects, and seemingly even over the intentions, of such a power would be both folly and sacrilege. Here it seems that not a feeling of the sublimity of our own nature, but rather submission, dejection, and a feeling of utter impotence would be the disposition of mind appropriate to the appearance of such an object, and ordinarily connected with its idea on the occasion of such natural events. In religion generally, prostration, A 108 worship with bowed head, contrite and fearful gestures and voices, seems the only fitting conduct in the presence of the Deity; hence most peoples have adopted it and still observe it. Yet this disposition of mind is by no means intrinsically and necessarily connected with the idea of the sublimity of a religion and its object. A person who is genuinely afraid because he finds cause within himself—conscious that his reprehensible disposition sets him against a power whose will is irresistible and also just—is in no state of mind to admire divine greatness, which requires a disposition toward calm contemplation and an entirely free judgment. Only when he is conscious of his sincere disposition pleasing to God do those effects of power serve to awaken in him the idea of this being’s sublimity, insofar as he recognizes in himself a sublimity of disposition conforming to its will, and is thereby raised above fear of those effects of nature, which he does not regard as outbreaks 264 of its wrath. Even humility, as an unsparing judgment of one’s faults—which, with the consciousness of good dispositions, might otherwise easily be cloaked under the frailty of human nature—is a sublime disposition of mind: voluntarily A 109 to submit to the pain of self-reproach in order gradually to eradicate its cause. Only in this way does religion differ inwardly from superstition. The latter grounds in the mind not reverence for the sublime, but fear and dread before an overpowering being to whose will the terrified person sees himself subjected without nevertheless esteeming it. From this, of course, nothing can arise but the courting of favor and flattery in place of a religion of good conduct.

Thus sublimity is contained in no thing in nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious of being superior to nature within us and thereby also to nature outside us (insofar as it influences us). Everything that arouses this feeling in us, including the power of nature that challenges our strength, is then called sublime (though improperly); and only by presupposing this idea within us and referring to it are we capable of reaching the idea of the sublimity of that being which inspires deep respect in us not merely through the power it displays in nature, but still more through the capacity placed within us to judge that power without fear and to think of our vocation as sublime above it.

29 A 110 On the modality of the judgment on the sublime in nature.

There are countless things in beautiful nature concerning which we can directly demand that everyone’s judgment agree with ours, and can also expect this without much risk of error; but we cannot so readily promise ourselves that our judgment on the sublime in nature will find acceptance with others. For it seems to require a far greater cultivation not only of the aesthetic power of judgment but also of the cognitive faculties underlying it, if one is to pass judgment upon this excellence of natural objects.

265 The mind’s disposition toward the feeling of the sublime requires a receptivity to ideas. For it is precisely in nature’s inadequacy to these—and thus only in presupposing them and straining the imagination to treat nature as a schema for them—that what repels sensibility, yet is at the same time attractive, consists: because this is a force reason exerts upon sensibility solely to enlarge it into conformity with reason’s proper domain (the practical), and to let it look out toward the infinite, which for sensibility is an abyss. Indeed, without the development of moral ideas, what we, prepared through cultivation, A 111 call sublime will appear merely repellent to the uncultivated person. In the proofs of nature’s force in its destructiveness, and the vast scale of its power beside which his own vanishes into nothing, he will see only the hardship, danger, and distress that would surround anyone confined there. Thus the good and otherwise sensible Savoyard peasant (as Mr. de Saussure relates) unhesitatingly called all lovers of the icy mountains fools. Who knows whether he would have been so entirely wrong, had that observer undertaken the dangers to which he exposed himself there merely from enthusiasm, as most travelers do, or to be able someday to give impassioned descriptions of them? But his intention was to instruct humanity; and the excellent man felt the soul-elevating sensation himself and gave it to the readers of his travels as a bonus.

Yet because judgment on the sublime in nature requires cultivation (more than judgment on the beautiful), it is not thereby first produced by cultivation, or introduced into society merely by convention. Rather, it has its foundation in human nature, and specifically in something that, together with sound understanding, we may demand and require of everyone: namely, the predisposition A 112 to feeling for (practical) ideas, that is, to moral feeling.

On this rests the necessity that others’ judgment of the sublime agree with ours, a necessity we include in our own judgment. For just as we charge someone who is indifferent in judging a natural object we find beautiful with a lack of taste, so we say that someone who remains unmoved by what we judge sublime has no feeling. Yet we demand both of every person and also presuppose them in anyone 266 who has some cultivation, with this difference alone: the former, because in it the power of judgment relates the imagination merely to the understanding as the faculty of concepts, we demand outright of everyone; the second, because in it judgment relates the imagination to reason as the faculty of ideas, we demand only under a subjective presupposition (which we nevertheless believe ourselves entitled to require of everyone), namely that of moral feeling in the human being. In this way we also ascribe necessity to this aesthetic judgment.

In this modality of aesthetic judgments, namely the necessity they claim, lies a principal moment for the critique of the power of judgment. For precisely this makes an a priori principle recognizable in them and lifts them out of empirical psychology, where they would otherwise remain buried A 113 among the feelings of pleasure and pain (with only the meaningless epithet of a finer feeling). It thus places them, and through them the power of judgment, among those that have a priori principles as their foundation, and as such draws them into transcendental philosophy.

General remark on the exposition of aesthetic reflective judgments.

In relation to the feeling of pleasure, an object is to be counted either as agreeable, or beautiful, or sublime, or good (absolutely) (iucundum, pulchrum, sublime, honestum).

The agreeable, as an incentive of desires, is always of one and the same kind, whatever its source and however specifically different the representation (of sense and sensation, considered objectively) may be. Hence in judging its influence on the mind, all that matters is the quantity of charms (simultaneous and successive), and as it were only the mass of agreeable sensation; it can therefore be made intelligible only through quantity. Nor does it cultivate, but belongs to mere enjoyment.—The beautiful, by contrast, requires the representation of a certain quality of the object, one that can also be made intelligible and brought under concepts (although in aesthetic judgment it is not brought under them); and it cultivates by teaching us at the same time to attend to purposiveness in the feeling of pleasure.—The sublime consists merely in the relation in which A 114 267 the sensible, in the representation of nature, is judged suitable for a possible supersensible use.—The absolutely good, judged subjectively according to the feeling it inspires (the object of moral feeling), as the determinability of the subject’s powers through the representation of an absolutely necessitating law, is distinguished chiefly by the modality of a necessity resting on a priori concepts, which contains not merely a claim to everyone’s assent but a command for it. In itself it belongs not to the aesthetic but to the purely intellectual power of judgment; nor is it ascribed to nature, but to freedom, in a judgment that is determining, not merely reflective. But the determinability of the subject through this idea—and indeed of a subject capable of feeling within itself obstacles in sensibility, yet also superiority over sensibility through overcoming them, as a modification of its state—that is, moral feeling, is nevertheless so far akin to the aesthetic power of judgment and its formal conditions that it can serve to represent the lawfulness of action from duty as aesthetic at the same time, that is, as sublime or even as beautiful, without sacrificing its purity. This would not occur if one sought to bring it into a natural connection with the feeling of the agreeable.

If we draw the result from the preceding exposition of both kinds of aesthetic judgment, the following brief explanations emerge:

Beautiful is what pleases in mere judging (thus not through the sensation of sense according to a concept of the understanding). A 115 It follows of itself that it must please without any interest.

Sublime is what pleases immediately through its resistance to the interest of the senses.

Both, as explanations of universally valid aesthetic judging, refer to subjective grounds: on the one hand, grounds of sensibility insofar as they are purposive on behalf of the contemplative understanding; on the other, insofar as they are purposive against sensibility, but for the ends of practical reason—both nevertheless united in the same subject in relation to moral feeling. The beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature, without interest; the sublime, to esteem it even against our (sensible) interest.

268 The sublime may be described in this way: it is an object (of nature) whose representation determines the mind to think of nature as unable to attain an adequate presentation of ideas.

Taken literally and considered logically, ideas cannot be presented. But when we expand our empirical faculty of representation (mathematically or dynamically) for the intuition of nature, reason inevitably enters as the faculty of the independence of absolute totality, and produces the mind’s effort, though a vain one, to make the representation of the senses adequate to this totality. This effort, and the feeling that the idea is unattainable by the imagination, is itself a presentation of our mind’s subjective purposiveness in employing the imagination for its supersensible vocation, and compels us subjectively to think nature itself in its totality as the presentation of something supersensible, A 116 without being able to accomplish this presentation objectively.

For we soon become aware that nature in space and time wholly lacks the unconditioned, and thus also absolute magnitude, which even the most ordinary reason nevertheless demands. This also reminds us that we are dealing only with nature as appearance, and that this itself must still be regarded as the mere presentation of a nature in itself (which reason holds in the idea). But this idea of the supersensible—which we cannot further determine, and thus cannot cognize nature as its presentation but can only think it—is awakened in us by an object whose aesthetic judging strains the imagination to its limit, whether of expansion (mathematically) or of its power over the mind (dynamically). This judging rests on the feeling of a vocation of the mind that wholly exceeds the domain of the imagination (moral feeling), in regard to which the object’s representation is judged subjectively purposive.

Indeed, a feeling for the sublime in nature can hardly be thought without connecting with it a disposition of mind similar to the disposition for moral feeling. And although immediate pleasure in the beautiful in nature likewise presupposes and cultivates a certain liberality of thought, that is, independence of satisfaction from mere sensory enjoyment, it nevertheless represents freedom more in play than in a lawful occupation. The latter is the 269 true character of human morality, where reason must do violence to sensibility; only in the aesthetic judgment on A 117 the sublime this violence is represented as exercised by the imagination itself, as an instrument of reason.

Satisfaction in the sublime in nature is therefore only negative (whereas satisfaction in the beautiful is positive): namely, a feeling of the imagination’s deprivation of its freedom by its own act, in being purposively determined according to a law other than that of empirical use. Through this it gains an expansion and power greater than what it sacrifices, but whose ground is hidden from it; instead it feels the sacrifice or deprivation and at the same time the cause to which it is subjected. The astonishment bordering on terror, the dread and sacred shudder that seize the spectator at the sight of mountain masses rising toward heaven, deep chasms with waters raging in them, deeply shadowed wildernesses inviting melancholy reflection, and so on, are, in the safety he knows himself to enjoy, not actual fear. They are only an attempt to engage with it through the imagination, in order to feel that same faculty’s power to unite the movement of mind thereby aroused with its state of rest, and thus to be superior to nature within ourselves, and consequently also to nature outside us insofar as it can influence our feeling of well-being. For the imagination according to the law of association makes our state of contentment physically dependent; but the same imagination according to principles of the power of judgment’s schematism (and thus insofar as it is subordinated to freedom) is an instrument of reason and its ideas, and as such a power to maintain our independence against natural influences, to diminish as small what by the former reckoning is great, and thus to place the A 118 absolutely great only in its own (the subject’s) vocation. This reflection of the aesthetic power of judgment, raising itself into adequacy with reason (yet without a determinate concept of reason), represents the object itself as nevertheless subjectively purposive through the objective inadequacy of the imagination, in its greatest expansion, to reason (as the faculty of ideas).

Here we must attend throughout to what was already noted above: in the transcendental aesthetic of the power of judgment, 270 only pure aesthetic judgments must be at issue. Consequently, examples must not be drawn from beautiful or sublime objects of nature that presuppose the concept of an end; for then the purposiveness would either be teleological or rest upon mere sensations of an object (pleasure or pain), and thus in the first case would not be aesthetic, and in the second would not be merely formal. Thus when we call the sight of the starry heavens sublime, we must not base our judging on concepts of worlds inhabited by rational beings, taking the bright points with which we see the space above us filled as their suns, moving in orbits most purposively arranged for them. We must take it simply as we see it, as a vast vault embracing everything; and only under this representation must we place the sublimity that a pure aesthetic judgment ascribes to this object. Likewise, we must be able to find the sight of the ocean sublime not as we think it when enriched with all manner of knowledge (which is not contained in immediate intuition)—say, as a vast realm of aquatic creatures, as the great reservoir for the vapors that A 119 fill the air with clouds for the benefit of the land, or as an element that indeed separates continents but nevertheless makes the greatest intercourse among them possible, for these yield nothing but teleological judgments. Rather, we must take the ocean merely as poets do, according to what meets the eye: when contemplated at rest, perhaps, as a clear mirror of water bounded only by the sky; but when turbulent, as an abyss threatening to engulf everything, and yet find it sublime. The same must be said of the sublime and beautiful in the human figure, where we must not look back to concepts of the ends for which all its limbs exist as determining grounds of judgment, or allow agreement with them to influence our aesthetic judgment (which would then no longer be pure), although their not conflicting with those ends is certainly a necessary condition even of aesthetic satisfaction. Aesthetic purposiveness is the lawfulness of the power of judgment in its freedom. Satisfaction in the object depends on the relation in which we wish to place the imagination, provided only that it maintains the mind in free activity by itself. If, by contrast, something else, whether sensory sensation or a concept of understanding, 271 determines the judgment, it is indeed lawful, but not the judgment of a free power of judgment.

Thus when one speaks of intellectual beauty or sublimity, first, these expressions are not entirely correct, because these are aesthetic ways of representing that would not be found in us at all if we were merely pure intelligences (or even placed ourselves in thought in that condition). Second, although both, as objects of an A 120 intellectual (moral) satisfaction, are compatible with aesthetic satisfaction insofar as they rest upon no interest, they are nevertheless difficult to reconcile with it in another respect, because they are to produce an interest. If the presentation is to accord with satisfaction in aesthetic judging, this could never occur there except through an interest of the senses connected with it in the presentation; but this impairs and contaminates intellectual purposiveness.

The object of a pure and unconditional intellectual satisfaction is the moral law in the power it exercises within us over each and every incentive of the mind preceding it. And since this power really makes itself aesthetically recognizable only through sacrifices (which are a deprivation, although for the sake of inner freedom, yet disclose within us an unfathomable depth of this supersensible faculty, with consequences extending beyond all reckoning), satisfaction is negative from the aesthetic side (in relation to sensibility), that is, opposed to this interest, but positive when considered from the intellectual side, and connected with an interest. It follows that the intellectual good, purposive in itself (the morally good), must, when judged aesthetically, be represented not so much as beautiful as sublime, so that it awakens the feeling of respect (which disdains charm) rather than love and familiar affection; because human nature accords with that good not so much of its own accord as through the violence reason does to sensibility. Conversely, what we call sublime in nature outside us, or even within us (certain affects, for example), is represented only as a A 121 power of the mind to rise above certain obstacles of sensibility through moral principles, and becomes interesting in this way.

I shall dwell a little on this last point. The idea of the good accompanied by 272 affect is called enthusiasm. This state of mind seems sublime, so much so that people commonly assert that nothing great can be accomplished without it. But every affect¹⁰ is blind, either in its choice of end or, even if reason has supplied the end, in its execution; for it is that movement of mind which renders it incapable of freely deliberating upon principles so as to determine itself by them. Thus it can in no way merit reason’s satisfaction. Aesthetically, nevertheless, enthusiasm is sublime, because it is a straining of our powers through ideas that give the mind an impetus far more powerful and lasting than the impulse of sensory representations. But (strange as this seems) even freedom from affect (Apatheia, Phlegma in significatu bono—apathy, phlegm in the good sense) in a mind vigorously A 122 pursuing its unchanging principles is sublime, and indeed in a far more excellent way, because it also has the satisfaction of pure reason on its side. Such a disposition alone is called noble: an expression later applied also to things, such as buildings, clothing, literary style, bodily bearing, and the like, when these arouse not so much astonishment (affect at the representation of novelty exceeding expectation) as admiration (an astonishment that does not cease when novelty is lost). This occurs when ideas in their presentation accord unintentionally and artlessly with aesthetic satisfaction.

Every affect of the vigorous kind (that is, one that awakens the consciousness of our powers to overcome every resistance—animi strenui, of a courageous mind) is aesthetically sublime: anger, for example, and even despair (namely indignant, not despondent, despair). An affect of the melting kind, however (which makes the very effort to resist an object of displeasure—animum languidum, a languishing mind), has nothing noble 273 about it, but may be counted among the beauties of a disposition. Hence the emotions that can grow to the strength of affect are also very different. There are courageous emotions and tender ones. The latter, if they rise to affect, are good for nothing; the propensity toward them is called sentimentality. A sympathetic grief that will not be consoled, or one to which we deliberately surrender when it concerns fictitious evils, allowing fantasy to deceive us into treating them as real, reveals and produces a soft but also weak soul. Such a soul shows a beautiful side and may indeed be called fanciful, but not even enthusiastic. Novels, tearful plays, A 123 insipid moral precepts that toy with so-called noble sentiments (though falsely so called), but in fact enervate the heart and make it insensible to the stern prescription of duty, incapable of any respect for the dignity of humanity in our person and for human rights (something quite different from human happiness), and incapable of any firm principles at all; even religious preaching that recommends groveling, base courting of favor and flattery, surrendering all trust in our own capacity to resist the evil within us, instead of a vigorous resolve to try the powers that remain to us despite all our frailty in overcoming inclinations; the false humility that finds in self-contempt, in whining, feigned repentance, and in a merely passive state of mind the only way to please the supreme being—all these are incompatible even with what might be counted as beauty of disposition, and far less with what might be counted as its sublimity.

But even tempestuous movements of mind, whether connected under the name of edification with religious ideas, or, as belonging merely to cultivation, with ideas containing a social interest, can by no means claim the honor of a sublime presentation, however greatly they strain the imagination, unless they leave behind a disposition of mind that influences, even if only indirectly, the consciousness of its strength and resolve toward what carries purely intellectual purposiveness with it (the supersensible). Otherwise all these emotions belong only to the exercise we welcome for the sake of health. The agreeable exhaustion that A 124 follows such a shaking through the play of affects is an enjoyment 274 of well-being arising from the restored balance of the various vital powers within us. In the end it amounts to the same thing as the enjoyment the sensualists of the Orient find so comfortable when they have their bodies kneaded, as it were, and all their muscles and joints gently pressed and bent; only in the former case the moving principle is largely within us, while in the latter it is entirely outside us. Thus many a person believes himself edified by a sermon although nothing has been built up within him (no system of good maxims), or improved by a tragedy although he is merely glad to have happily dispelled his boredom. The sublime must therefore always have a relation to the way of thinking, that is, to maxims securing supremacy for the intellectual and for ideas of reason over sensibility.

We need not fear that the feeling of the sublime will lose anything through such an abstract manner of presentation, which becomes wholly negative with regard to the sensible; for although the imagination finds nothing beyond the sensible to which it can hold, it nevertheless feels itself unbounded precisely through this removal of its barriers. That separation is therefore a presentation of the infinite, which for this very reason can never be anything but a merely negative presentation, yet still expands the soul. Perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish book of law than the commandment: “You shall not make for yourself an image, nor any likeness of what is in heaven, or on the earth, or under the earth,” and so on. This commandment alone can explain the enthusiasm the Jewish people felt for their religion in their civilized epoch when comparing themselves with other peoples, or the pride that Mohammedanism A 125 inspires. The same holds for the representation of the moral law and the predisposition to morality within us. It is an entirely mistaken fear that, if we deprive this representation of everything that can commend it to the senses, it would then carry with it only cold, lifeless approval, and no moving power or emotion. The very reverse is true: for where the senses now see nothing before them, yet the unmistakable and indelible idea of morality remains, it would be more necessary to moderate the impetus of an unbounded imagination, lest it rise to enthusiasm, than to seek help for these ideas in images and childish trappings out of fear that they lack strength. Hence governments 275 have also gladly allowed religion to be richly furnished with such accessories, and have thus sought to deprive their subjects of the trouble, but also of the capacity, to extend their spiritual powers beyond the limits one arbitrarily wishes to set for them, and through which one can manage them more easily as merely passive beings.

This pure, soul-elevating, merely negative presentation of morality, by contrast, brings no danger of fanaticism, which is a delusion of wishing to see something beyond all bounds of sensibility, that is, to dream according to principles (to rave with reason), precisely because the presentation in the former case is merely negative. For the inscrutability of the idea of freedom completely bars the way to every positive presentation; the moral law, however, is in itself sufficiently and originally determining within us, so that it does not even permit us to look for a determining ground outside it. If A 126 enthusiasm may be compared with delirium, fanaticism may be compared with delusional insanity, which of all things is least compatible with the sublime, because it is broodingly ridiculous. In enthusiasm, as an affect, the imagination is unbridled; in fanaticism, as an ingrained, brooding passion, it is without rules. The former is a passing accident that may sometimes befall the soundest understanding; the latter is a disease that deranges it.

Simplicity (artless purposiveness) is, as it were, nature’s style in the sublime, and so too the style of morality, which is a second (supersensible) nature. Of this we know only the laws, without being able to reach through intuition the supersensible faculty within ourselves that contains the ground of this legislation.

It should further be noted that, although satisfaction in the beautiful, just as in the sublime, is distinguished from other aesthetic judgments not only by universal communicability, but also acquires through this property an interest in relation to society (in which it can be communicated), nevertheless separation from all society is also regarded as something sublime when it rests on ideas that look beyond every sensible interest. To be sufficient to oneself, and thus not to need society, yet without being unsociable, that is, fleeing it, is something approaching the sublime, as is every elevation above needs. By contrast, to flee people from misanthropy, because one bears them hostility, 276 or from anthropophobia (fear of people), because one fears them as enemies, is in part hateful and in part contemptible. Yet there is a misanthropy (very improperly so called), a predisposition toward which A 127 often appears with age in the minds of many well-disposed people. It is philanthropic enough as regards benevolence, but long, sad experience has carried it far from satisfaction in human beings. Evidence of this is the inclination toward seclusion, the fanciful wish to spend one’s life with a small family on a remote country estate, or even (among the young) the dreamed-of happiness of an island unknown to the rest of the world, which novelists and writers of Robinsonades know so well how to exploit. Falsehood, ingratitude, injustice, the childishness of the ends we ourselves consider important and great, in pursuit of which people inflict every conceivable evil upon one another, stand in such contradiction to the idea of what they could be if they wished, and so oppose the lively desire to see them better, that, in order not to hate them when one cannot love them, renouncing all social pleasures seems only a small sacrifice. This sadness—not over the evils fate inflicts on other people (of which sympathy is the cause), but over those they inflict on themselves (which rests on antipathy in principles)—is sublime because it rests on ideas, whereas the former can likewise count only as beautiful.—Saussure, as insightful as he is thorough, says in his account of his Alpine travels concerning Bonhomme, one of the Savoyard mountains: “A certain insipid sadness reigns there.” He therefore also knew an interesting sadness, inspired by the sight of a wilderness to which people might wish to withdraw in order to hear A 128 and learn nothing more of the world, yet which must not be so entirely inhospitable that it offers human beings only a life of extreme hardship.—I make this remark solely to recall that even sorrow (not dejected sadness) may be counted among the vigorous affects when it has its ground in moral ideas; but when founded on sympathy, and lovable as such, it belongs only among the melting affects. My purpose is thereby to draw attention to the disposition of mind that is sublime only in the first case. 277

We may now compare the transcendental exposition of aesthetic judgments just completed with the physiological exposition developed by a Burke and many acute thinkers among us, to see where a merely empirical exposition of the sublime and beautiful leads. Burke¹¹, who deserves to be named the foremost author in this manner of treatment, arrives by this path (p. 223 of his work) at the conclusion “that the feeling of the sublime rests on the drive for self-preservation and on fear, that is, a pain which, because it does not go so far as actually to disrupt the bodily parts, produces movements capable of arousing agreeable sensations by clearing the finer or coarser vessels of dangerous and troublesome obstructions; not indeed pleasure, but a kind of pleasing shudder, a certain tranquility mingled with A 129 terror.” The beautiful, which he grounds on love (from which he nevertheless wishes desire to be separated), he traces (pp. 251–252) “to the relaxation, release, and slackening of the body’s fibers, and thus a softening, dissolution, exhaustion, a sinking, dying away, and melting with pleasure.” He then confirms this explanation not only through cases in which the imagination in connection with the understanding, but even through cases in which sensory sensation, can arouse in us the feeling both of the beautiful and of the sublime.—As psychological observations, these analyses of the phenomena of our mind are exceedingly fine and supply rich material for the favorite inquiries of empirical anthropology. Nor can it be denied that all representations in us, whether objectively merely sensible or wholly intellectual, can nevertheless be connected subjectively with pleasure or pain, however imperceptible either may be (because they all affect the feeling of life, and none, insofar as it is a modification of the subject, can be indifferent). We may even grant, as Epicurus maintained, that pleasure and pain are ultimately always bodily, whether they begin with the imagination or even with representations of the understanding: because life without the 278 feeling of the bodily organ would be merely consciousness of one’s existence, but no feeling of well-being or ill-being, that is, of the furtherance or inhibition of vital powers; for the mind by itself is wholly life (the principle of life itself), and hindrances or furtherances must be sought outside it yet within the human being, and thus in its connection with the body.

But if satisfaction in an object is placed entirely A 130 in its gratifying us through charm or emotion, then we must not require anyone else to assent to the aesthetic judgment we pass; for on that matter everyone rightly consults only his private sense. But then all censure of taste also ceases entirely, unless we made the example others give through the accidental agreement of their judgments into a command for our assent. We would presumably resist such a principle, appealing to the natural right to submit a judgment resting on the immediate feeling of our own well-being to our own sense, not that of others.

Thus if a judgment of taste must count not as egoistic but necessarily as pluralistic by its inner nature—that is, for its own sake, not for the sake of the examples others give of their taste—if we esteem it as a judgment entitled at the same time to demand everyone’s assent, then some a priori principle (whether objective or subjective) must underlie it. This can never be reached by tracking down empirical laws of changes in the mind, because these reveal only how we judge, but do not command how we ought to judge, and indeed in such a way that the command is unconditional. Yet judgments of taste presuppose just this, in seeking to have satisfaction connected immediately with a representation. Thus an empirical exposition of aesthetic judgments may well make the beginning by supplying material for a higher investigation; a transcendental elucidation of this faculty is nevertheless possible and belongs essentially to the critique of taste. A 131 For unless taste had a priori principles, it could not possibly assess others’ judgments and pronounce approval or rejection upon them with even some appearance of right.

What remains belonging to the analytic of the aesthetic power of judgment contains, first of all, the

10 Affects are specifically distinct from passions. The former refer merely to feeling; the latter belong to the faculty of desire and are inclinations that make any determination of choice through principles difficult or impossible. The former are tempestuous and unintentional, the latter enduring and deliberate: thus indignation as anger is an affect, but as hatred (vengefulness) a passion. The latter can never, in any relation, be called sublime: because in affect the mind’s freedom is indeed hindered, but in passion it is abolished.

11 According to the German translation of his work: Philosophical Inquiries into the Origin of Our Concepts of the Beautiful and Sublime. Riga, Hartknoch, 1773.

Second Book A 74 Analytic of the Sublime.

23 Transition from the ability to judge the beautiful to the ability to judge the sublime.

The beautiful agrees with the sublime in that both please for their own sake. They also agree in presupposing neither a judgment of sense nor a logically determining judgment, but a judgment of reflection. Consequently, satisfaction depends neither on a sensation, like satisfaction in the agreeable, nor on a definite concept, like satisfaction in the good. Yet it is still related to concepts, though which concepts remains undetermined. Satisfaction is thus tied to mere presentation or the capacity for it. In a given intuition, the faculty of presentation, imagination, is considered as agreeing with the understanding's or reason's faculty of concepts, as promoting the latter. Hence both kinds of judgments are singular judgments, yet announce themselves as universally valid for every subject, although they claim only the feeling of pleasure and no knowledge of the object.

But important differences between the two are also A 75 obvious. Natural beauty concerns the object's form, which consists in limitation. The sublime, by contrast, can also be found in a formless object, insofar as limitlessness is represented in it or occasioned by it, yet its totality is also thought along with it. Thus the beautiful seems to be taken as the presentation of an indeterminate concept of understanding, and the sublime as that of a corresponding concept of reason. Satisfaction in the former is therefore connected with the representation of quality, in the latter with that of quantity. The latter satisfaction also differs greatly in kind from the former. The beautiful directly carries a feeling of life's advancement and is therefore compatible with sensory attractions and an 245 imagination at play. But the feeling of the sublime is a pleasure arising only indirectly. It is produced by the feeling of a momentary check of the vital powers, followed immediately by their stronger outpouring. As an emotion, it therefore seems to involve not play but seriousness in imagination's activity. It is consequently incompatible with sensory attractions. Since the mind is not merely attracted by the object but is alternately also repeatedly repelled, satisfaction in the sublime contains not so much positive pleasure as admiration A 76 or respect. It therefore deserves to be called negative pleasure.

But perhaps the most important inner difference between the sublime and the beautiful is this. As is proper, we will first consider only the sublime in natural objects; the sublime in art is always restricted by the conditions of agreement with nature. Self-standing natural beauty carries with it a purposiveness in its form, through which the object seems, as it were, predetermined for our power of judgment, and thus constitutes in itself an object of satisfaction. By contrast, what arouses the feeling of the sublime in us without reasoning, merely in taking it in, may appear in its form contrary to the ends of our judgment, unsuited to our faculty of presentation, and almost violent to imagination. Yet it is judged all the more sublime for that very reason.

This immediately shows that in general we speak incorrectly when we call any object of nature sublime, although we can quite correctly call many of them beautiful. How can what is taken in as contrary to an end in itself be designated by an expression of approval? We can say only that the object is suitable for presenting a sublimity that can be found in the mind. For the genuinely sublime A 77 cannot be contained in any sensible form. It concerns only ideas of reason. Although no presentation adequate to them is possible, these ideas are stirred and called into the mind precisely by this inadequacy, which can be presented sensibly. Thus the vast ocean churned up by storms cannot be called sublime. Its appearance is terrifying. The mind must already be filled with various ideas 246 if such an intuition is to attune it to a feeling that is itself sublime. The mind is prompted to leave sensibility behind and occupy itself with ideas containing a higher purposiveness.

Self-standing natural beauty reveals to us a technique of nature. This represents nature as a system according to laws whose principle we do not find anywhere in our faculty of understanding: the principle of a purposiveness relative to judgment's use regarding appearances. These must therefore be judged as belonging not merely to nature in its mechanism without ends, but also to an analogy with art. Natural beauty thus really extends not our knowledge of natural objects, but our concept of nature as mere mechanism into a concept of that same nature as art. This invites deep investigations into the possibility of such a form. But in what we commonly call sublime A 78 in nature, there is nothing at all leading to particular objective principles and corresponding natural forms. Rather, nature most arouses ideas of the sublime in its chaos, its wildest and most irregular disorder and devastation, provided only that magnitude and power are visible. From this we see that the concept of the sublime in nature is far less important and rich in consequences than the concept of the beautiful in it. In general, it indicates nothing purposive in nature itself, but only in the possible use of its intuitions to make us feel within ourselves a purposiveness entirely independent of nature. For natural beauty we must seek a ground outside ourselves; for the sublime, only within ourselves and in the way of thinking that introduces sublimity into the representation of nature. This is a very necessary preliminary remark. It completely separates the ideas of the sublime from the idea of a purposiveness of nature, and makes the theory of the sublime a mere appendix to the aesthetic judging of nature's purposiveness. For it represents no particular form in nature, but develops only a purposive use that imagination makes of its representation.

24 A 79 247 On dividing an investigation of the feeling of the sublime.

As regards dividing the moments of aesthetically judging objects in relation to the feeling of the sublime, the Analytic can proceed according to the same principle used in analyzing judgments of taste. For as a judgment of aesthetic reflective judgment, satisfaction in the sublime, like satisfaction in the beautiful, must represent universal validity according to quantity, freedom from interest according to quality, subjective purposiveness according to relation, and this purposiveness as necessary according to modality. The method will therefore not differ from that of the preceding section, unless we count the following as a difference. There, because aesthetic judgment concerned the object's form, we began by investigating quality. Here, because formlessness may belong to what we call sublime, we will begin with quantity as the first moment of an aesthetic judgment about the sublime. The reason for this can be seen from the preceding §.

But the analysis of the sublime needs a division not required by the analysis of the beautiful: into the mathematically and the dynamically sublime.

For the feeling of the sublime has as its characteristic a movement of the mind connected with judging the A 80 object, whereas taste for the beautiful presupposes and maintains the mind in calm contemplation. This movement is to be judged subjectively purposive, since the sublime pleases. Through imagination it is therefore related either to the faculty of cognition or to the faculty of desire. In both relations, however, the purposiveness of the given representation is judged only with regard to these faculties, without an end or interest. The first is then attributed to the object as a mathematical attunement of imagination, the second as a dynamic one. The object is therefore represented as sublime in these two ways.

A. 248 On the mathematically sublime.

25 Definition of the term sublime.

We call sublime what is absolutely great. But being great and being a magnitude are entirely different concepts (greatness and quantity). Likewise, simply (without qualification) saying that something is great is quite different from saying it is absolutely great A 81 (great absolutely, not comparatively). The latter is what is great beyond all comparison.—But what does it mean to say something is great, small, or medium-sized? What this designates is not a pure concept of understanding, still less a sensory intuition, and no more a concept of reason, because it carries no principle of cognition with it. It must therefore be a concept of judgment, or derive from such a concept, and take as its basis a subjective purposiveness of the representation in relation to judgment. We can recognize from the thing itself, without any comparison with others, that something is a magnitude (a quantity): namely, when a multiplicity of things of the same kind together make up one. But how great it is always requires something else, which is also a magnitude, as its measure. In judging magnitude, however, what matters is not merely multiplicity, number, but also the size of the unit, the measure. The size of this unit always in turn needs something else as a measure with which it can be compared. We thus see that every determination of the magnitude of appearances can supply no absolute concept of a magnitude at all, but always only a comparative concept.

When I simply say something is great, it seems that I have no comparison in mind, at least with no A 82 objective measure, because this does not determine at all how great the object is. Yet although the standard of comparison is merely subjective, the judgment still claims universal agreement. The judgments "The man is beautiful" and "He is tall" are not confined merely to the subject judging. Like theoretical judgments, they demand everyone's agreement.

249 A judgment that simply designates something as great does not merely mean that the object has a magnitude. It also attributes that magnitude to it as a distinction over many others of the same kind, without definitely stating the distinction. Such a judgment certainly has a standard at its basis, one we presuppose can be assumed the same for everyone. But it is usable not for logical, mathematically determined judging of magnitude, only for aesthetic judging. For it is a merely subjective standard underlying judgment as it reflects on magnitude. It may be empirical, like the average size of the human beings we know, animals of a certain kind, trees, houses, mountains, and so on. Or it may be a standard given a priori that the shortcomings of the judging subject restrict to subjective conditions of concrete presentation. In the practical sphere, examples are the magnitude of a certain virtue or of public freedom and justice in a country; A 83 in the theoretical sphere, the magnitude of the accuracy or inaccuracy of an observation or measurement, and the like.

What is remarkable here is that even if we have no interest in the object, if we are indifferent to its existence, its mere magnitude can still carry a universally communicable satisfaction, even when it is considered formless. This therefore contains awareness of a subjective purposiveness in the use of our cognitive faculties. Because the object here may be formless, this is not satisfaction in it as in the case of the beautiful, where reflective judgment finds itself purposively attuned in relation to cognition in general. It is instead satisfaction in the expansion of imagination itself.

When we say simply that an object is large (with the restriction mentioned above), this is not a mathematically determining judgment. It is only a reflective judgment about our representation of it, which is subjectively purposive for a certain use of our cognitive powers in estimating magnitude. We then always connect a kind of respect with the representation, just as we connect contempt with what we call simply small. Besides, judging things as large or small extends to everything, even to all their qualities. So we even call beauty great or small. 250 The reason is that anything we can present in intuition under the direction of the power of judgment A 84 (and so represent aesthetically) is an appearance, and therefore also a quantity.

But when we call something not only large but absolutely large, large in every respect and beyond all comparison—that is, sublime—we soon see that we allow no standard adequate to it to be sought outside it, but only within it. It is a magnitude equal only to itself. It follows that the sublime must be sought not in things in nature but only in our ideas. Which ideas these are must be left for the deduction.

The explanation above can also be put this way: The sublime is that in comparison with which everything else is small. We can easily see that nothing in nature, however large we judge it, could not be reduced to something infinitely small when viewed in another relation. Conversely, nothing is so small that comparison with still smaller standards could not enlarge it to the size of a world for our imagination. Telescopes have given us plenty of material for the first observation, and microscopes for the second. So, viewed on this A 85 basis, nothing that can be an object of the senses can be called sublime. But our imagination strives to advance to infinity, while our reason demands absolute totality as a real idea. For this very reason, the inadequacy of our power to estimate the magnitude of things in the sensible world for this idea awakens the feeling of a supersensible power in us. What is absolutely large is the use judgment naturally makes of certain objects to produce this feeling, not the object of the senses. Compared with that use, every other use is small. So it is the state of mind produced by a certain representation occupying reflective judgment, and not the object, that must be called sublime.

We can therefore add this to the earlier formulas explaining the sublime: The sublime is what we cannot even think of without showing a power of the mind that exceeds every standard of the senses.

26 251 Estimating the magnitude of natural things as required for the idea of the sublime.

Estimating magnitude through numerical concepts (or their signs in algebra) is mathematical. Estimating it in mere intuition, by the eye, is aesthetic. We can indeed get definite concepts of A 86 how large something is only through numbers (or at least approximations through numerical series continuing to infinity), whose unit is the measure. In this respect all logical estimation of magnitude is mathematical. But we must assume that the magnitude of the measure is known. If we had to estimate this in turn only through numbers whose unit would have to be another measure, and thus mathematically, we could never have a first or basic measure, and so could never have a definite concept of a given magnitude. Estimating the magnitude of the basic measure must therefore consist simply in grasping it directly in an intuition and using it through imagination to present numerical concepts. That is, all estimation of the magnitude of natural objects is ultimately aesthetic: determined subjectively, not objectively.

Now there is no greatest magnitude for mathematical estimation, since the power of numbers extends to infinity. But there certainly is a greatest magnitude for aesthetic estimation. I maintain that when we judge this as an absolute measure, beyond which no greater measure is subjectively possible for the judging subject, it brings with it the idea of the sublime. It produces an emotion that no mathematical estimation of magnitude through numbers can produce—except insofar A 87 as that aesthetic basic measure is kept alive in the imagination. Mathematical estimation always presents only relative magnitude by comparison with others of the same kind. Aesthetic estimation presents magnitude absolutely, as far as the mind can grasp it in a single intuition.

Taking a quantity into imagination through intuition, so that it can serve as a measure or unit for estimating magnitude through numbers, requires two acts of this power: apprehension (apprehensio) and comprehension (comprehensio aesthetica). Apprehension presents no difficulty, since it can continue to 252 infinity. But comprehension becomes harder as apprehension advances. It soon reaches its maximum: the aesthetically greatest basic measure for estimating magnitude. For when apprehension has advanced so far that the partial representations of sensible intuition first apprehended begin to fade in the imagination while it moves on to apprehend more, it loses as much on one side as it gains on the other. Comprehension thus has a maximum beyond which it cannot go.

This explains Savary's observation in his accounts of Egypt: to feel the full impact A 88 of the pyramids' size, we must be neither very close to them nor too far away. If we are too far away, the parts apprehended—their stones laid one above another—are represented only indistinctly, and their representation has no effect on the subject's aesthetic judgment. But if we are too close, the eye needs some time to complete its apprehension from base to summit. During that time the earlier parts always partly fade before the imagination has taken in the later ones, and comprehension is never complete.—The same thing can also explain the bewilderment, or kind of embarrassment, that reportedly comes over a viewer on first entering St. Peter's in Rome. Here there is a feeling that the imagination is inadequate to present the idea of a whole. In doing so imagination reaches its maximum, and in trying to expand it collapses back into itself. Yet this puts it into a state of deeply felt satisfaction.

For now I will say nothing about the basis of this satisfaction. It is connected with a representation from which we would least expect it: one that makes us aware of the inadequacy of the representation for judgment in estimating magnitude, and thus of its subjective lack of purposiveness. I will only note that if the aesthetic judgment is to be pure (not mixed with any teleological judgment, which is a judgment of reason A 89), and if we are to give an example fully suited to a critique of aesthetic judgment, we must not exhibit the sublime in products of art, such as buildings, columns, and so on. In these a human end determines both form and size. Nor should we exhibit it in natural things whose concept already involves a definite end 253, such as animals with a known natural function. We must exhibit it in raw nature, merely insofar as it contains magnitude—and even there only insofar as it carries no charm in itself or emotion arising from actual danger. In this way of representing it, nature contains nothing monstrous, nor anything magnificent or horrifying. The magnitude apprehended may have grown as much as we like, provided imagination can comprehend it in a whole. An object is monstrous when its size destroys the end that constitutes its concept. But a mere presentation of a concept that is almost too large for any presentation, bordering on the relatively monstrous, is called colossal. This is because presenting the concept is made harder when the intuition of its object is almost too large for our power of apprehension.—But a pure judgment about the sublime must not have any end of the object as its determining ground, if it is to be aesthetic A 90 and not mixed with any judgment of understanding or reason.

Everything that is to please merely reflective judgment without interest must involve, in its representation, subjective purposiveness that as such is universally valid. Yet here the judgment is not based on any purposiveness in the object's form, as it is with the beautiful. So we must ask: What is this subjective purposiveness? And what prescribes it as a norm, so that it provides a basis for universally valid satisfaction in the mere estimation of magnitude—even when this estimation is pushed as far as the inadequacy of our imagination to present the concept of a magnitude?

In putting together what is needed to represent magnitude, imagination naturally goes on to infinity without anything stopping it. Understanding guides it through numerical concepts, for which imagination must provide the schema. This procedure belongs to the logical estimation of magnitude. It contains something objectively purposive in accordance with the concept of an end, as every measurement does, but nothing purposive and pleasing for aesthetic judgment. Nor does this intentional purposiveness contain anything A 91 254 that requires us to increase the size of the measure, and thus the comprehension of a multiplicity in one intuition, to the limit of imagination's power—as far as it can possibly reach in presenting things. In intellectual estimation of magnitude, or arithmetic, we get just as far whether we comprehend units up to 10, in the decimal system, or only up to 4, in the quaternary system. We then produce further magnitudes by putting things together, or, if the quantity is given in intuition, by apprehending it, in a merely progressive rather than comprehensive way, according to an assumed principle of progression. In this mathematical estimation of magnitude, understanding is served and satisfied equally well whether imagination chooses as its unit a magnitude we can grasp at a glance, such as a foot or a rod, or a German mile or even the earth's diameter. These last can be apprehended, but cannot be comprehended in one intuition by imagination—not through comprehensio aesthetica, though they can certainly be brought into a numerical concept through comprehensio logica. In both cases logical estimation of magnitude goes on to infinity without obstruction.

But the mind now listens to the voice of reason within it. Reason demands totality for all given magnitudes, even those that can never be apprehended completely but are nevertheless judged, in sensible representation, A 92 as completely given. It therefore demands their comprehension in one intuition, and a presentation of all the members of an ever-increasing numerical series. It does not exempt even the infinite—space and elapsed time—from this demand. Instead, it makes it unavoidable for ordinary reason, in judging, to think of the infinite as given as a whole, in its totality.

But the infinite is absolutely, not merely comparatively, large. Compared with it, everything else of the same kind of magnitude is small. Most importantly, even to be able to think it as a whole indicates a power of mind that exceeds every standard of the senses. For this would require a comprehension providing a standard as its unit that stood in a definite, numerically expressible relation to the infinite. That is impossible. Yet even to be able to think the given infinite without contradiction requires a power in the human mind that is itself supersensible. Only through this power and 255 its idea of a noumenon can the infinity of the sensible world be comprehended as a whole under one concept in a purely intellectual estimation of magnitude. This noumenon admits no intuition of itself, but is laid down as the substrate of our intuition of the world as mere appearance. A 93 In mathematical estimation, by contrast, the infinite can never be thought as a whole through numerical concepts. Merely having the power to think the infinite of supersensible intuition as given in its intelligible substrate exceeds every standard of sensibility. It is great beyond any comparison even with the power of mathematical estimation. Admittedly this is not for a theoretical purpose, in the service of cognition. But it does expand the mind, which feels able to cross the limits of sensibility for another purpose: the practical one.

Nature is therefore sublime in those of its appearances whose intuition involves the idea of its infinity. This can happen only through the inadequacy of even our imagination's greatest effort to estimate an object's magnitude. For mathematical estimation, however, imagination is equal to every object and can provide a sufficient measure for it. Understanding's numerical concepts can, by progression, make any measure adequate to any given magnitude. It must therefore be aesthetic estimation in which we feel the effort to comprehend progressive apprehension in a whole of intuition—an effort beyond imagination's power. At the same time we perceive that this power, though unlimited A 94 in its advance, is inadequate to grasp and use a basic measure suitable for estimating magnitude with the least expenditure of understanding. Now the true, unchanging basic measure of nature is its absolute whole, which, in nature as appearance, is infinity comprehended. But this basic measure is a self-contradictory concept, because the absolute totality of an endless progression is impossible. So a magnitude in a natural object on which imagination fruitlessly spends its whole power of comprehension must lead our concept of nature to a supersensible substrate underlying both nature and our power of thought. This substrate is great beyond every standard of the senses. It thus leads us to judge as sublime not so much 256 the object as our state of mind in estimating it.

In judging the beautiful, aesthetic judgment relates imagination in its free play to the understanding, so that it agrees with the understanding's concepts in general, without determining them. In the same way, when judging a thing as sublime, it relates that same power to reason, so that it agrees subjectively with reason's ideas, without specifying which. In other words, it produces a state of mind that accords with, and is compatible with, the one A 95 that the influence of definite practical ideas would produce in feeling.

This also shows that true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the person judging, not in the natural object that brings about this state when we judge it. Who would call shapeless mountain masses, piled on one another in wild disorder with their pyramids of ice, or the dark, raging sea, and so on, sublime? But the mind feels lifted up in its own judgment. In contemplating these things without regard to their form, it gives itself over to imagination and to a reason connected with imagination, though without any definite end, simply to expand it. Yet it finds the whole power of imagination inadequate to reason's ideas.

Every case in which imagination is given not so much a larger numerical concept as a large unit of measure, to shorten numerical series, provides an example of the mathematically sublime in nature in mere intuition. A tree whose height we estimate against a person's height can serve as a measure for a mountain. If this mountain were, say, a mile high, it could serve as the unit for the number expressing the earth's diameter, to make that diameter intuitive. The earth's diameter could serve for the planetary system known to us, A 96 and that system for the Milky Way. The immeasurable multitude of such Milky Way systems, called nebulae, which presumably form another such system among themselves, gives us no reason to expect a limit here. In the aesthetic judgment of so immeasurable a whole, the sublime lies not so much in the size of the number as in our reaching ever larger units as we advance. The systematic division of the universe 257 helps in this. It makes everything large in nature appear small in turn. More precisely, it makes our imagination in all its boundlessness, and nature with it, appear to vanish before reason's ideas when imagination is supposed to provide a presentation adequate to them.

27 The quality of satisfaction in judging the sublime.

The feeling that our power is inadequate to attain an idea that is a law for us is respect. Now the idea of comprehending any appearance that may be given to us in the intuition of a whole is imposed on us by a law of reason. Reason recognizes no other definite, universally valid, and unchanging measure than the absolute whole. A 97 But even in its greatest effort to comprehend a given object in a whole of intuition, as demanded of it, and thus to present reason's idea, our imagination shows its limits and inadequacy. At the same time, however, it shows its vocation to bring about adequacy to this idea as a law. So the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation. Through a certain substitution—confusing respect for the object with respect for the idea of humanity in ourselves—we show this respect to a natural object. The object makes, as it were, intuitively clear to us the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive powers over the greatest power of sensibility.

The feeling of the sublime is therefore a feeling of displeasure because imagination, in its aesthetic estimation of magnitude, is inadequate to estimation by reason. At the same time, pleasure is aroused because this very judgment of the inadequacy of our greatest sensible power agrees with reason's ideas, insofar as striving toward them is a law for us. For it is a law of reason for us, and belongs to our vocation, to estimate everything large that nature offers us as an object of the senses as small compared with reason's ideas. Whatever awakens the feeling of this supersensible A 98 vocation in us agrees with that law. 258 Now imagination's greatest effort to present a unit for estimating magnitude refers to something absolutely large. It therefore also refers to reason's law of accepting this alone as the highest measure of magnitudes. So our inner perception that every sensible standard is inadequate to reason's estimation of magnitude agrees with reason's laws. It is a displeasure that awakens in us the feeling of our supersensible vocation. In relation to that vocation, finding every standard of sensibility inadequate to reason's ideas is purposive, and therefore pleasurable.

In representing the sublime in nature the mind feels moved, whereas in an aesthetic judgment about nature's beauty it is in calm contemplation. This movement, especially at first, can be compared with a shaking: a rapid alternation of repulsion from and attraction to the very same object. What overwhelms imagination, and toward which it is driven in apprehending intuition, is like an abyss in which it fears losing itself. Yet producing such an effort of imagination does not overwhelm reason's idea of the supersensible; it accords with its law. A 99 So it is attractive to the very degree that it was repellent to mere sensibility. Yet the judgment itself always remains merely aesthetic. Without being based on a definite concept of the object, it represents the subjective play of the mental powers, imagination and reason, as harmonious even through their contrast. In judging beauty, imagination and understanding produce subjective purposiveness of the mental powers through their agreement. Here imagination and reason do so through their conflict. They produce a feeling that we possess pure, independent reason, or a power of estimating magnitude whose superiority can be made intuitive only through the inadequacy of that power which is itself unlimited in presenting magnitudes of sensible objects.

Measuring a space, as apprehension, is also tracing it, and so is an objective movement in imagination and a progression. Comprehending a multiplicity in the unity not of thought but of intuition—bringing what was apprehended successively into a single instant—is, by contrast, a regression. It cancels the condition of time in 259 imagination's progression and makes coexistence intuitive. Since succession in time is a condition of inner sense and of an intuition, this is a subjective movement of A 100 imagination that does violence to inner sense. This violence must be more noticeable the greater the quantity imagination comprehends in one intuition. Trying to take into a single intuition a measure of magnitude whose apprehension requires a noticeable amount of time is therefore a way of representing that, subjectively considered, runs against our purpose. Objectively, however, it is required for estimating magnitude and is thus purposive. Yet the very same violence that imagination inflicts on the subject is judged purposive for the mind's whole vocation.

The quality of the feeling of the sublime is this: it is a feeling of displeasure concerning our power of aesthetic judgment of an object, yet this displeasure is also represented as purposive. This is possible because our own incapacity reveals the awareness of an unlimited power in the same subject. The mind can judge this latter power aesthetically only through the former.

In logical estimation of magnitude, the impossibility of ever reaching absolute totality by progressively measuring things of the sensible world in time and space was recognized as objective. That is, it was an impossibility of thinking the infinite as given, and not merely A 101 a subjective inability to grasp it. For there we pay no attention to the degree of comprehension in one intuition as a measure; everything depends on a numerical concept. But in aesthetic estimation of magnitude the numerical concept must be dropped or changed. Only imagination's comprehension into the unity of a measure is purposive for it, thus avoiding concepts of a law for successively producing concepts of magnitude.—Now suppose a magnitude nearly reaches the utmost limit of our ability to comprehend it in one intuition. Suppose imagination is nevertheless called upon, by numerical magnitudes for which we are aware that our power is unlimited, to comprehend it aesthetically in a larger unit. Then we feel aesthetically confined within limits in our mind. Yet the displeasure is represented as purposive in relation to the necessary expansion of imagination to match what is unlimited in our reason: the 260 idea of the absolute whole. Thus imagination's lack of purposiveness is represented as purposive for reason's ideas and their awakening. This in turn makes the aesthetic judgment itself subjectively purposive for reason as the source of ideas—that is, of an intellectual comprehension compared with which every aesthetic comprehension is small. And the object is received as sublime with a pleasure A 102 that is possible only through displeasure.

B. The dynamically sublime in nature.

28 Nature as a power.

Power is an ability superior to great obstacles. It is called dominion when it is also superior to the resistance of something that itself has power. Nature, considered in an aesthetic judgment as a power that has no dominion over us, is dynamically sublime.

For us to judge nature dynamically as sublime, we must represent it as arousing fear, although the reverse does not follow: not every object that arouses fear is found sublime in our aesthetic judgment. For in aesthetic judgment, without a concept, superiority to obstacles can be judged only by the magnitude of the resistance. Now what we try to resist is an evil, and if we find our ability unequal to it, it is an object of fear. So nature can count for aesthetic judgment as a power, and thus as dynamically sublime, only insofar as it is considered an object of fear. A 103

But we can consider an object fearsome without being afraid of it. We do this when we judge it by merely thinking of the case in which we might wish to resist it, and recognizing that all resistance would then be utterly useless. In this way a virtuous person fears God without being afraid of him. Such a person does not think of wanting to resist God and his commands as a case to be feared on their own part 261. Yet in any such case, which they think is not in itself impossible, they recognize God as fearsome.

Someone who is afraid cannot judge the sublime in nature, any more than someone captured by inclination and appetite can judge the beautiful. A frightened person flees the sight of an object that inspires dread, and it is impossible to find satisfaction in a terror that is seriously felt. So the agreeableness that comes from the ending of a distress is relief. But relief at being freed from danger comes with the resolve never to expose oneself to it again. We do not even like to think back on that feeling, much less seek an opportunity to experience it ourselves.

Bold, overhanging, seemingly threatening rocks; thunderclouds piling up in the sky A 104, advancing with lightning and crashes; volcanoes in all their destructive force; hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind; the boundless ocean in turmoil; a mighty river's high waterfall, and the like—all make our power of resistance seem an insignificant trifle compared with their might. But their sight becomes all the more attractive the more fearsome it is, provided we are in safety. We readily call these objects sublime because they raise the strength of the soul above its usual average. They reveal in us a power of resistance of an entirely different kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against nature's seeming omnipotence.

For nature's immeasurability, and our inability to find a standard proportionate to the aesthetic estimation of the magnitude of its domain, revealed our own limitations. Yet at the same time we found in our reason another, nonsensible standard. It includes even that infinity under itself as a unit, and everything in nature is small compared with it. We thus found in our mind a superiority over nature even in its immeasurability. In the same way, the irresistibility of nature's power makes us recognize our physical helplessness as natural beings. A 105 But it also reveals a power to judge ourselves independent of nature and a superiority over it. On this rests a self-preservation of quite another kind from the one that external nature can attack and endanger 262. Here the humanity in our person remains undiminished, even though the human being would have to succumb to that force. In this way nature is judged sublime in our aesthetic judgment not because it arouses fear, but because it calls up our strength—which is not nature—to regard the things we worry about, property, health, and life, as small. It thus calls us to regard nature's power, to which we are certainly subject in these respects, as nevertheless having no dominion over us and our personality to which we would have to bow when our highest principles, and maintaining or abandoning them, were at stake. So nature is called sublime here simply because it raises imagination to present those cases in which the mind can make itself feel the sublimity of its own vocation, even above nature.

This self-esteem loses nothing because we must find ourselves safe to feel this inspiring satisfaction. It does not follow that because the danger is not serious, the sublimity of our mental power is not serious either, as might seem to be the case. A 106 For here the satisfaction concerns only the vocation of our power disclosed in such a case, just as the predisposition to it lies in our nature. Developing and exercising it remains our responsibility and task. There is truth in this, however aware a person may be of their present actual helplessness when they extend their reflection this far.

This principle may seem far-fetched and contrived, and thus beyond the scope of an aesthetic judgment. But observation of human beings proves the contrary. It shows that this principle can underlie the most ordinary judgments, even when we are not always aware of it. For what is an object of the greatest admiration even to an uncivilized person? Someone who does not panic or become afraid, and so does not retreat from danger, yet acts energetically with full deliberation. Even in the most civilized condition this special respect for the warrior remains. We only demand in addition that the warrior display all the virtues of peace: gentleness, compassion, and even proper care for their own person. This is precisely because these show that danger cannot overpower their mind. So however much people may argue, in comparing a statesman with a general, about which deserves greater A 107 263 respect, aesthetic judgment decides for the latter. Even war, when conducted in an orderly way and with sacred respect for civil rights, has something sublime about it. It also makes the way of thinking of the people who wage it in this way all the more sublime, the more dangers they have faced and courageously withstood. A long peace, by contrast, generally makes a merely commercial spirit dominant, along with base self-interest, cowardice, and softness, and lowers the people's way of thinking.

There seems to be an objection to this analysis of the concept of the sublime as applied to power. In thunderstorms, tempests, earthquakes, and the like, we usually represent God as showing himself in his wrath, but also in his sublimity. Yet to imagine our mind superior to the effects, and seemingly even to the intentions, of such a power would be both foolish and sacrilegious. Here the state of mind suited to the appearance of such an object seems to be not a feeling of the sublimity of our own nature, but submission, dejection, and a feeling of complete helplessness. This is also what is usually connected with the idea of God during such natural events. In religion generally, prostration A 108 and worship with bowed head and with contrite, anxious gestures and voices seem the only appropriate conduct in the deity's presence. Most peoples have therefore adopted this conduct and still observe it. But this state of mind is by no means intrinsically and necessarily connected with the idea of the sublimity of a religion and its object. A person who is truly afraid because they find grounds for fear within themselves—being aware that their corrupt disposition offends a power whose will is irresistible and also just—is in no state of mind to admire divine greatness. That requires a disposition toward calm contemplation and a wholly free judgment. Only when a person is aware of a sincere disposition pleasing to God do those effects of power serve to awaken the idea of this being's sublimity. For then the person recognizes in themselves a sublimity of disposition that accords with God's will. They are thereby raised above fear of such natural effects, which they do not regard as outbreaks 264 of his wrath. Even humility, as an unsparing judgment of our faults, is a sublime state of mind. These faults might otherwise easily be excused by the frailty of human nature when we are conscious of good intentions. In humility we voluntarily A 109 submit to the pain of self-reproach in order gradually to root out its cause. Only in this way does religion differ inwardly from superstition. Superstition bases itself in the mind not on reverence for the sublime, but on fear and anxiety before an overpowering being to whose will the terrified person sees themselves subject without esteeming it. From this, of course, nothing can arise but attempts to win favor and ingratiate oneself, instead of a religion of good conduct.

So sublimity is contained in no natural thing, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become aware of being superior to nature within us, and thereby also to nature outside us insofar as it influences us. Everything that arouses this feeling in us, including nature's power which challenges our strength, is then called sublime, though improperly. Only by presupposing this idea in us, and in relation to it, can we reach the idea of the sublimity of that being who produces deep respect in us. He does so not merely through the power he shows in nature, but still more through the ability placed in us to judge that power without fear and to think of our vocation as sublime above it.

29 A 110 The modality of the judgment about the sublime in nature.

There are countless things in beautiful nature concerning which we can directly demand that everyone agree with our judgment, and can expect agreement without being far wrong. But we cannot so readily expect our judgment about the sublime in nature to find acceptance with others. For it seems to require a far greater cultivation, not only of aesthetic judgment but also of the cognitive powers underlying it, to judge this excellence of natural objects.

265 The mind's disposition toward the feeling of the sublime requires receptivity to ideas. For what repels sensibility yet also attracts it consists precisely in nature's inadequacy to these ideas. It thus presupposes them and the straining of imagination to treat nature as a schema for them. This is a force reason exercises on imagination, but only to expand it in keeping with reason's own practical domain and to let it look out toward the infinite, which for imagination is an abyss. In fact, without the development of moral ideas, what we call sublime when prepared by cultivation A 111 will seem merely repellent to an unrefined person. In the evidence of nature's force in its destructiveness, and in the vast scale of its power beside which their own vanishes into nothing, such a person will see only the hardship, danger, and distress that would surround anyone confined there. Thus, as Mr. de Saussure relates, a good and otherwise sensible Savoyard peasant unhesitatingly called all lovers of the icy mountains fools. And who knows whether he would have been entirely wrong if that observer had exposed himself to these dangers merely as an enthusiast, as most travelers do, or to be able to give dramatic descriptions of them later? But his aim was to instruct humanity. This excellent man felt that uplifting emotion and gave it to the readers of his travels as an extra part of their purchase.

But although the judgment about the sublime in nature requires cultivation—more than judgment about the beautiful—it is not first produced by cultivation or introduced into society merely by convention. Its basis lies in human nature: in something that, along with common understanding, we can attribute to and demand of everyone, namely the predisposition A 112 to feel for practical ideas, that is, moral feeling.

This is the basis for the necessary agreement of other people's judgments about the sublime with ours, a necessity we include in our own judgment. We accuse someone who is indifferent when judging a natural object we find beautiful of lacking taste. Likewise, we say that someone who remains unmoved by what we judge sublime has no feeling. We demand both of everyone, and also assume both in anyone 266 who has some cultivation. The difference is that we demand the first directly of everyone, because here judgment relates imagination only to understanding as the power of concepts. But we demand the second only on a subjective presupposition, since here judgment relates imagination to reason as the power of ideas. This presupposition is moral feeling in human beings, which we believe we are entitled to require of everyone. In this way we also attribute necessity to this aesthetic judgment.

A major point for the critique of judgment lies in this modality of aesthetic judgments: the necessity they claim. For this is what reveals an a priori principle in them. It raises them out of empirical psychology, where they would otherwise remain buried A 113 among feelings of pleasure and pain, with only the meaningless label of a finer feeling. It places them, and through them the power of judgment, among those based on a priori principles, and as such brings them into transcendental philosophy.

General remark on the exposition of aesthetic reflective judgments.

In relation to the feeling of pleasure, an object is counted as either agreeable, beautiful, sublime, or good absolutely (iucundum, pulchrum, sublime, honestum).

As an incentive to desires, the agreeable is always of one and the same kind, whatever its source and however specifically different the representation of sense and sensation may be when considered objectively. So in judging its influence on the mind, all that matters is the number of attractions, simultaneous and successive, and, as it were, the sheer amount of agreeable sensation. It can therefore be understood only through quantity. Nor does it cultivate us; it belongs merely to enjoyment.—The beautiful, by contrast, requires the representation of a certain quality of the object, which can also be made intelligible and brought under concepts, though it is not brought under them in an aesthetic judgment. It cultivates us by teaching us also to attend to purposiveness in the feeling of pleasure.—The sublime consists solely in the relation in which A 114 267 the sensible in our representation of nature is judged suitable for a possible supersensible use.—The absolutely good, judged subjectively by the feeling it inspires, is the object of moral feeling: the determinability of the subject's powers through the representation of a law that unconditionally obligates. It is distinguished above all by the modality of a necessity based on a priori concepts. This contains not merely a claim to everyone's approval, but a command that everyone approve. In itself it belongs not to aesthetic but to pure intellectual judgment. It is attributed not to nature but to freedom, and not in a merely reflective but in a determining judgment. Yet the determinability of the subject through this idea—that is, moral feeling—is related to aesthetic judgment and its formal conditions in a certain respect. Such a subject can feel within themselves both the obstacles of sensibility and a superiority to them through overcoming them, as a modification of their state. Moral feeling can therefore serve to represent the lawfulness of action from duty as also aesthetic, that is, sublime or even beautiful, without losing any of its purity. This would not be possible if we tried to connect it naturally with the feeling of the agreeable.

If we draw the result from the exposition so far of both kinds of aesthetic judgment, we get these short explanations:

Beautiful is what pleases in mere judging, and thus not through sensory sensation in accordance with a concept of understanding. A 115 It follows at once that it must please without any interest.

Sublime is what pleases immediately through its resistance to the interest of the senses.

Both, as explanations of universally valid aesthetic judgment, refer to subjective grounds. On one side sensibility is purposive for contemplative understanding; on the other, against sensibility, it is purposive for the ends of practical reason. Yet both are united in the same subject in relation to moral feeling. The beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature, without interest; the sublime prepares us to esteem it even against our sensible interest.

268 We can describe the sublime in this way: it is an object of nature whose representation determines the mind to think of nature's inability to attain a presentation of ideas.

Taken literally and considered logically, ideas cannot be presented. But if we expand our empirical power of representation, mathematically or dynamically, for the intuition of nature, reason inevitably enters as the power of independence of absolute totality. It produces the mind's effort, though a fruitless one, to make the representation of the senses adequate to that totality. This effort, and the feeling that imagination cannot attain the idea, is itself a presentation of our mind's subjective purposiveness in using imagination for its supersensible vocation. It compels us subjectively to think even nature in its totality as a presentation of something supersensible, A 116 without being able to achieve this presentation objectively.

For we soon realize that nature in space and time entirely lacks the unconditioned, and thus also absolute magnitude, which even the most ordinary reason demands. This also reminds us that we are dealing only with nature as appearance, and that even this must be viewed as a mere presentation of nature in itself, which reason has in its idea. This idea of the supersensible cannot be further determined by us. So we cannot cognize nature as its presentation, but can only think it. The idea is awakened in us by an object that, when judged aesthetically, strains imagination to its limit, either in its expansion, mathematically, or in its power over the mind, dynamically. This judgment is based on the feeling of a vocation of the mind that entirely exceeds imagination's domain—on moral feeling. In relation to this feeling, the object's representation is judged subjectively purposive.

In fact, a feeling for the sublime in nature can hardly be thought without connecting it with a state of mind similar to the one required for moral feeling. Immediate pleasure in nature's beauty also presupposes and cultivates a certain liberality of thought: satisfaction independent of mere sensory enjoyment. But it represents freedom more in play than in an occupation under laws. This latter is the 269 true character of human morality, where reason must do violence to sensibility. The difference is that in aesthetic judgment about A 117 the sublime, this violence is represented as exercised by imagination itself as an instrument of reason.

Satisfaction in the sublime in nature is therefore only negative, whereas satisfaction in the beautiful is positive. It is a feeling that imagination deprives itself of freedom by being purposively determined under a law other than that of empirical use. Imagination thereby gains an expansion and power greater than what it sacrifices. But the basis of this gain remains hidden from imagination itself; instead, it feels the sacrifice or deprivation, and at the same time the cause to which it is subjected. The astonishment bordering on terror, the dread and sacred awe that seize a viewer at the sight of mountain masses rising to the sky, deep chasms with raging waters, deeply shadowed wildernesses inviting melancholy reflection, and so on, are not actual fear when the viewer knows they are safe. They are only an attempt to enter into such a situation in imagination, in order to feel the power of this very faculty to unite the resulting movement of the mind with its state of rest. In this way we feel superior to nature within us, and thus also to nature outside us insofar as it can influence our feeling of well-being. For imagination under the law of association makes our state of contentment physically dependent. But that same imagination, under the principles of judgment's schematism and therefore subordinated to freedom, is an instrument of reason and its ideas. As such it is a power to assert our independence against nature's influences, to reduce to smallness what is large by the first standard, and thus to place the A 118 absolutely large only in the subject's own vocation. This reflection of aesthetic judgment, raising itself into adequacy with reason, though without a definite concept of reason, represents even the object as subjectively purposive through the objective inadequacy of imagination in its greatest expansion to reason as the power of ideas.

Here we must bear in mind a point already made above. In the transcendental aesthetics of judgment 270 we must deal only with pure aesthetic judgments. So our examples must not be taken from beautiful or sublime natural objects that presuppose the concept of an end. For then the purposiveness would either be teleological or rest on mere sensations of an object, pleasure or pain. In the first case it would not be aesthetic, and in the second it would not be merely formal purposiveness. So when we call the sight of the starry sky sublime, we must not base our judgment on concepts of worlds inhabited by rational beings, and then regard the bright points filling the space above us as their suns, moving in orbits arranged very purposively for them. We must judge it simply as we see it: a vast vault enclosing everything. Only under this representation must we place the sublimity a pure aesthetic judgment attributes to this object. Likewise, we must not judge the ocean as we think it when enriched with all kinds of knowledge not contained in immediate intuition: as a vast realm of aquatic creatures, as the great reservoir for the evaporation that fills A 119 the air with clouds for the benefit of the land, or as an element that separates continents yet makes the greatest communication among them possible. These yield nothing but teleological judgments. Instead, we must be able to find the ocean sublime simply as poets do, by what meets the eye: when calm, as a clear mirror of water bounded only by the sky; when restless, as an abyss threatening to swallow everything. The same applies to the sublime and beautiful in the human figure. We must not look back to concepts of the ends for which all its limbs exist as determining grounds of our judgment. Nor must we let their agreement with those ends influence our aesthetic judgment, which would then no longer be pure. Admittedly, their not conflicting with those ends is a necessary condition even of aesthetic satisfaction. Aesthetic purposiveness is the lawfulness of judgment in its freedom. Satisfaction in the object depends on the relation in which we wish to place imagination, provided it keeps the mind freely occupied on its own. If something else, whether sensory sensation or a concept of understanding, 271 determines the judgment, it is indeed lawful, but not the judgment of a free power of judgment.

So when we speak of intellectual beauty or sublimity, first, these expressions are not entirely accurate. These are aesthetic ways of representing, which would not occur in us at all if we were merely pure intelligences, or even placed ourselves in that position in thought. Second, although both as objects of A 120 intellectual, moral satisfaction are compatible with aesthetic satisfaction insofar as they do not rest on an interest, they are difficult to reconcile with it in another respect. They are supposed to produce an interest. If their presentation is to agree with satisfaction in aesthetic judgment, this could occur there only through a sensory interest connected with their presentation. But this impairs and contaminates intellectual purposiveness.

The object of a pure and unconditional intellectual satisfaction is the moral law in the power it exercises within us over each and every incentive of the mind preceding it. This power really makes itself aesthetically known only through sacrifices. These are a deprivation, though for the sake of inner freedom, yet they disclose in us an unfathomable depth of this supersensible power, with consequences stretching beyond our view. So satisfaction, considered aesthetically in relation to sensibility, is negative, that is, opposed to this interest. Considered intellectually, however, it is positive and connected with an interest. It follows that the intellectually good, which is purposive in itself—the morally good—must, when aesthetically judged, be represented not so much as beautiful as sublime. It should awaken more the feeling of respect, which scorns charm, than that of love and familiar affection. For human nature agrees with that good not spontaneously, but only through the violence reason does to sensibility. Conversely, what we call sublime in nature outside us, or even within us, such as certain affects, is represented only as a A 121 power of the mind to rise above certain obstacles of sensibility through moral principles, and becomes interesting through this.

I will dwell a little on the latter point. The idea of the good accompanied by 272 affect is called enthusiasm. This state of mind seems so sublime that people commonly maintain that nothing great can be achieved without it. But every affect¹⁰ is blind, either in choosing its end or, even if reason has given that end, in carrying it out. For it is that movement of the mind which makes it incapable of freely considering principles in order to determine itself by them. So it cannot in any way deserve reason's satisfaction. Yet aesthetically enthusiasm is sublime, because it is a straining of our powers through ideas that give the mind an impetus far more powerful and lasting than the impulse from sensory representations. But, strange as this may seem, even absence of affect (Apatheia, Phlegma in significatu bono—apathy or calmness in the good sense), in a mind vigorously pursuing A 122 its unchanging principles, is sublime, and in a far superior way, because it also has the satisfaction of pure reason on its side. Such a disposition alone is called noble. The expression is later applied also to things such as buildings, clothing, writing style, bodily bearing, and the like, when they arouse not so much astonishment—an affect at the representation of something novel that exceeds expectation—as admiration, an astonishment that does not end when the novelty is lost. This occurs when ideas in their presentation agree with aesthetic satisfaction unintentionally and without artifice.

Every affect of the vigorous kind, one that awakens awareness of our power to overcome every resistance (animi strenui, of a vigorous spirit), is aesthetically sublime: anger, for example, and even despair—indignant, not despondent despair. But affect of the melting kind, which makes the very effort to resist an object of displeasure (animum languidum, a languid spirit), has nothing noble 273 about it, though it may be counted among beautiful dispositions. So the emotions that can grow strong enough to become affects are also very different. There are courageous emotions and tender ones. The latter, when they rise to affect, are entirely worthless; the tendency toward them is called sentimentality. A sympathetic grief that refuses comfort, or one we deliberately indulge over fictional evils until imagination deceives us into treating them as real, shows and produces a soft but also weak soul. It displays a beautiful side and may be called fanciful, but not even enthusiastic. Novels, tearful plays, A 123 and shallow moral instructions toy with so-called noble sentiments, though the name is false. In fact they make the heart slack and insensitive to duty's strict command, incapable of any respect for the dignity of humanity in our person and for human rights—which are something quite different from human happiness—and generally incapable of any firm principles. Even religious preaching that recommends crawling, base attempts to win favor and ingratiate oneself, giving up all trust in our own power to resist the evil within us, instead of the vigorous resolve to try the powers still left to us despite all our frailty in overcoming inclinations; and false humility that treats self-contempt, whining pretended remorse, and a merely passive state of mind as the only way to please the highest being: these are incompatible even with what could be counted as beauty of disposition, much less with its sublimity.

But turbulent emotions, too, cannot claim the honor of a sublime presentation, however much they strain imagination, unless they leave behind a state of mind that influences, even if only indirectly, our awareness of our strength and resolve for what involves pure intellectual purposiveness—the supersensible. This applies whether they are connected with religious ideas under the name of edification, or, as belonging merely to cultivation, with ideas involving a social interest. Otherwise all these emotions belong only to the exercise we welcome for our health. The agreeable fatigue that A 124 follows such a shaking through the play of affects is an enjoyment 274 of well-being arising from the restored balance of the various vital forces within us. Ultimately it amounts to the same thing as the enjoyment Eastern sensualists find so comfortable when they have their bodies kneaded, as it were, and all their muscles and joints gently pressed and bent. The only difference is that in the first case the moving principle is mostly within us, and in the second entirely outside us. Thus someone believes a sermon has built them up, though nothing—no system of good maxims—has been built within them; or that a tragedy has improved them, when they are merely pleased to have dispelled their boredom. So the sublime must always refer to our way of thinking: to maxims that give the intellectual and reason's ideas supremacy over sensibility.

We need not fear that the feeling of the sublime will lose anything through such an abstract presentation, which becomes entirely negative regarding the sensible. For although imagination finds nothing beyond the sensible to hold on to, this very removal of its limits also makes it feel unbounded. This abstraction is therefore a presentation of the infinite. For that very reason it can never be anything but a merely negative presentation, yet it still expands the soul. Perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish law book than the commandment: "You shall not make for yourself any image or any likeness, of anything in heaven, on earth, or under the earth," and so on. This commandment alone can explain the enthusiasm the Jewish people felt for their religion during their civilized period when comparing themselves with other peoples, or the pride Islam A 125 inspires. The same applies to the representation of the moral law and our predisposition to morality. It is an entirely mistaken worry that if we strip this representation of everything that could recommend it to the senses, it will bring only cold, lifeless approval, with no moving force or emotion. Exactly the opposite is true. Where the senses now see nothing before them, yet the unmistakable and indelible idea of morality remains, it would be more necessary to moderate the impetus of an unbounded imagination so that it does not rise to enthusiasm than, from fear that these ideas lack force, to seek help for them in images and childish apparatus. Governments 275 have therefore readily permitted religion to be richly supplied with this equipment. They have thereby tried to take away from subjects the trouble, but also the ability, of extending their spiritual powers beyond the limits arbitrarily set for them, by which they can be handled more easily as merely passive beings.

By contrast, this pure, uplifting, merely negative presentation of morality carries no danger of fanaticism: the delusion of wanting to see something beyond every limit of sensibility, that is, to dream according to principles, or rave with reason. This is precisely because the presentation is merely negative. For the inscrutability of the idea of freedom entirely blocks the way to every positive presentation. But the moral law is itself sufficient and originally determining within us, so that it does not even permit us to look for a determining ground outside it. If A 126 enthusiasm can be compared with delirium, fanaticism can be compared with delusional insanity. Of all states this latter is least compatible with the sublime, because it is broodingly ridiculous. In enthusiasm, as an affect, imagination is unbridled; in fanaticism, as a deep-rooted, brooding passion, it is lawless. The first is a passing accident that sometimes affects even the soundest understanding; the second is a disease that wrecks it.

Simplicity—purposiveness without artifice—is, as it were, nature's style in the sublime, and also the style of morality. Morality is a second, supersensible nature, of which we know only the laws. We cannot reach by intuition the supersensible power within us that contains the ground of this legislation.

We should also note that satisfaction in the beautiful, just like satisfaction in the sublime, is distinguished from other aesthetic judgments not only by its universal communicability. Through this quality it also acquires an interest in relation to society, in which it can be communicated. Yet separation from all society is also regarded as sublime when it rests on ideas that look beyond every sensory interest. Being sufficient to oneself, and therefore not needing society, without being unsociable—that is, without fleeing it—approaches the sublime, as does every rising above needs. By contrast, fleeing people from misanthropy, because we hate them, 276 or from anthropophobia, fear of people as enemies, is in the one case ugly and in the other contemptible. Yet there is a disposition, very improperly called misanthropy, that often develops A 127 with age in many well-intentioned people. It is philanthropic enough as regards benevolence, but long, sad experience has led it far away from liking people. Evidence of this is the tendency toward seclusion, the fanciful wish to spend one's life with a small family on a remote country estate, or, among young people, the dreamed-of happiness of an island unknown to the rest of the world. Novelists and writers of Robinson Crusoe stories know well how to exploit this wish. Falsehood, ingratitude, injustice, and the childishness of the ends we ourselves consider important and great, in pursuing which people inflict every imaginable evil on one another, contradict so sharply the idea of what people could be if they wished, and so oppose the lively wish to see them better, that giving up all social pleasures seems a small sacrifice to avoid hating those we cannot love. This sadness concerns not the evils fate brings upon other people—a sadness caused by sympathy—but those they inflict on themselves, and rests on opposition in principles. Because it rests on ideas, it is sublime, whereas the first kind can likewise count only as beautiful.—Saussure, as insightful as he is thorough, says of Bonhomme, one of the Savoyard mountains, in his account of his Alpine travels: "A certain tasteless sadness prevails there." So he also knew an interesting sadness, inspired by the sight of a wilderness to which people might wish to withdraw so as to hear A 128 and learn nothing more of the world. Yet it must not be so completely inhospitable that it offers only an extremely difficult place for human beings to live.—I make this remark only to remind us that grief, too, though not dejected sadness, can be counted among the vigorous affects when grounded in moral ideas. But when it is based on sympathy, and as such is also lovable, it belongs only to the melting affects. This draws attention to the state of mind, which is sublime only in the first case. 277

We can now compare the transcendental exposition of aesthetic judgments just completed with the physiological one developed by Burke and many perceptive thinkers among us, to see where a merely empirical exposition of the sublime and beautiful leads. Burke¹¹, who deserves to be named the leading author in this approach, concludes by this route, on page 223 of his work, "that the feeling of the sublime rests on the drive for self-preservation and on fear, that is, on a pain which, because it does not go as far as actually damaging the body's parts, produces movements that clear the finer or coarser vessels of dangerous and burdensome blockages. These movements can arouse agreeable sensations—not pleasure, but a kind of pleasing shudder, a certain calm mixed with A 129 terror." He bases the beautiful on love, though he wants desire distinguished from it, and traces it, on pages 251–252, "to the relaxation, release, and slackening of the body's fibers, and thus to a softening, dissolving, weakening, sinking, dying away, and melting in enjoyment." He then confirms this explanation not only through cases in which imagination, in connection with understanding, can arouse the feeling of the beautiful and sublime in us, but even through sensory sensation.—As psychological observations these analyses of our mental phenomena are excellent. They provide rich material for the most popular investigations of empirical anthropology. Nor can we deny that all representations in us, whether objectively merely sensible or entirely intellectual, can still be subjectively connected with pleasure or pain, however imperceptible either may be. For they all affect the feeling of life, and none, insofar as it modifies the subject, can be indifferent. We cannot even deny that, as Epicurus maintained, pleasure and pain are always ultimately bodily, whether they begin in imagination or even in representations of understanding. For without 278 feeling through the bodily organ, life would be merely awareness of its existence, not a feeling of well-being or distress, that is, of the promotion or inhibition of vital forces. The mind by itself is entirely life—the vital principle itself—so obstacles and aids must be sought outside it yet within the human being, and thus in the mind's connection with the body.

But if we place satisfaction in an object entirely A 130 in its giving enjoyment through charm or emotion, we must not expect anyone else to agree with the aesthetic judgment we make. On this matter everyone rightly consults only their private sense. But then all criticism of taste also ends completely, unless we make the example of other people's accidentally agreeing judgments into a command that we approve. We would presumably resist this principle and appeal to our natural right to subject a judgment based on the immediate feeling of our own well-being to our own sense, not to anyone else's.

So if a judgment of taste must be regarded not as egoistic but, by its inner nature, as necessarily pluralistic—on its own account, not because of the examples others give of their taste—and if we regard it as entitled to demand everyone's agreement, then some a priori principle, whether objective or subjective, must underlie it. We can never reach this principle by tracking down empirical laws of changes in the mind. Such laws show only how people judge, but do not command how they ought to judge, much less command this unconditionally. Judgments of taste presuppose such a command, since they insist that satisfaction be connected immediately with a representation. So an empirical exposition of aesthetic judgments may certainly begin the inquiry by supplying material for a higher investigation. Yet a transcendental discussion of this power is possible and essential to the critique of taste. A 131 For without a priori principles, taste could not possibly judge other people's judgments or pronounce approval or rejection of them with even a semblance of right.

The remaining material belonging to the analytic of aesthetic judgment begins with the following:

10 Affects are specifically different from passions. Affects relate only to feeling; passions belong to the faculty of desire and are inclinations that make any determination of choice through principles difficult or impossible. Affects are turbulent and unintentional; passions are lasting and deliberate. Thus indignation as anger is an affect, but as hatred, or desire for revenge, it is a passion. Passion can never in any relation be called sublime, because in affect the mind's freedom is indeed inhibited, but in passion it is abolished.

11 According to the German translation of his work: Philosophical Investigations into the Origin of Our Concepts of the Beautiful and Sublime. Riga, Hartknoch, 1773.