§ 12. The judgment of taste rests on grounds a priori

It is utterly impossible to make out a priori the linkage between a feeling of pleasure or displeasure, taken as an effect, and any representation (sensation or concept) serving as its cause; for such a thing would be a causal relation that, among objects of experience, can at all times be known only a posteriori and through experience itself . It is true that in the Critique of Practical Reason we did indeed derive the feeling of respect (as a particular and distinctive modification of this feeling, one that will not quite square either with the pleasure or the displeasure that we obtain from empirical objects) a priori from universal ethical concepts. Yet in that context we could also step beyond the limits of experience and call forth a causality grounded in a supersensible constitution of the subject — the causality, namely, of freedom. Yet even there we did not, properly speaking, derive this feeling from the idea of the ethical as its cause; rather, only the determination of the will was derived from it. The mental state, however, of a will determined by whatever means is already in itself a feeling of pleasure, indeed one and the same with it, and so does not issue from it as an effect: this last would need to be supposed only were the concept of the ethical, taken as a good, to run ahead of the will's determination by the law; since in that case the pleasure joined to that concept would be drawn from it, as a mere cognition, in vain.

Now with the pleasure in the aesthetic judgment the case stands in a similar way: only that here it is merely contemplative, and brings about no interest in the object, whereas in the moral judgment it is practical. That awareness of the merely formal purposiveness at work in the play of the subject's cognitive powers , upon a representation whereby some object is given, simply is the pleasure itself; for within an aesthetic judgment it comprises a ground that determines the subject's activity as regards the enlivening of those very cognitive powers — hence an inner causality (one that is purposive) bearing upon cognition in general, yet without being confined to any determinate cognition, and consequently a mere form of the subjective purposiveness of a representation. This pleasure is likewise in no way practical, neither in the manner of that stemming from the pathological ground of agreeableness, nor of that stemming from the intellectual ground of the good as represented. It does, however, carry a causality within itself, namely that of preserving the state of the representation itself and the engagement of the cognitive powers without any further aim. We dwell upon the beholding of the beautiful, because this beholding reinforces and reproduces itself: which is analogous to (though yet not the same as) that lingering in which a charm in the representation of the object repeatedly rouses the attention, while the mind remains passive.

§ 13. The pure judgment of taste is independent of charm and emotion

Any interest whatever spoils the judgment of taste, robbing it of its impartiality, most especially when, in contrast to the interest of reason , it fails to place purposiveness before the feeling of pleasure and instead founds that purposiveness on the feeling; and this second alternative invariably occurs whenever an aesthetic judgment is passed on something to the degree that the thing pleases or pains. Hence judgments affected in this way can lay either no claim at all to universally valid satisfaction, or so much less of one as there are sensations of the kind just described among the determining grounds of taste. A taste still remains barbaric in every instance where it requires charms and emotions to be mixed into the satisfaction, indeed where it goes so far as to make these the standard of its approval.

Meanwhile charms are frequently not only reckoned to beauty (which properly should have to do with the form alone) as contributing to the universal aesthetic satisfaction, but are indeed proclaimed to be beauties in themselves, the matter of the satisfaction thus being presented as its form: a misunderstanding which, like many another that still has some truth lying at its root, can be dispelled by defining these concepts with care.

A judgment of taste on which neither charm nor emotion exerts any influence (although these can indeed be combined with the satisfaction in the beautiful), one whose determining ground is thus solely the purposiveness of the form, is a pure judgment of taste.

§ 14. Elucidation by examples

Aesthetic judgments can, just like theoretical (logical) ones, be divided into empirical and pure. The former are those that assert the agreeableness or disagreeableness, the latter those that assert the beauty of an object or of the way in which it is represented; the former are judgments of sense (material aesthetic judgments), while the latter (as formal ones) are alone properly judgments of taste.

A judgment of taste, accordingly, counts as pure only to the extent that its determining ground has no merely empirical satisfaction blended into it. This, however, always happens whenever charm or emotion has a share in the judgment through which something is to be declared beautiful.

Now once again various objections come forward that ultimately make it appear as though charm were not merely a necessary ingredient of beauty, but were even sufficient on its own for a thing to be called beautiful. Most people pronounce a mere color—say the green of a grassy plot—or a mere tone (to be distinguished from sound and noise), like that of a violin, to be beautiful in its own right; and yet both appear to rest merely upon the matter of the representations, that is, upon nothing but sensation, and would on that account merit being termed no more than agreeable . One will nevertheless observe at the same time that color-sensations no less than tone-sensations regard themselves as warranted in passing for beautiful only to the degree that each is pure—a specification that bears already on the form, and moreover the sole feature of such representations that admits of certain and universal communication: for the qualitative character of the sensations cannot be presupposed as concordant in every subject, nor can it readily be granted that the agreeableness of one color above another, or of the tone of one musical instrument above that of a different one, is appraised alike by all.

Suppose, with Euler, that the colors are simultaneous beats (pulsus) of the ether succeeding one another, as tones are of the air made to vibrate in sound, and—what matters most—that the mind apprehends not only, by way of sense, their effect upon the enlivening of the organ, but also, by way of reflection, the orderly play of the impressions (and thus the form in the combining of diverse representations) (something I do not in the least doubt): then color and tone would be, not bare sensations, but would already constitute a formal determination of a manifold's unity among them, and could accordingly be reckoned as beauties in their own right.

The purity of a simple mode of sensation, however, signifies that no alien sensation troubles or breaks in upon its uniformity, and such purity pertains to the form alone: for here one may leave out of account the quality of that mode of sensation (whether, and which, color it presents, or whether, and which, tone). For this reason every simple color, provided it is pure, passes for beautiful, whereas the mixed ones lack this distinction: exactly because, not being simple, they leave us without any measure for deciding whether to call them pure or impure.

As for the beauty attributed to an object because of its form, in respect of which people fancy that charm might actually enhance it, this is a widespread mistake, and one gravely damaging to taste that is genuine, incorruptible, and thorough; even though charms may, to be sure, be joined to the beauty besides, so as to interest the mind, through the object's representation, beyond the dry satisfaction, and thereby to commend taste together with its cultivation, above all while it is still raw and untrained. They do, however, genuinely detract from the judgment of taste once they attract notice to themselves as grounds for appraising the beauty. For it is so far from being the case that they contribute to it, that rather, as strangers, they must be admitted only with indulgence, and only insofar as they do not disturb that beautiful form, when taste is still weak and unpracticed.

In painting, in sculpture, indeed throughout all the plastic arts, in architecture and in gardening, so far as these count as fine arts, it is the drawing that is essential, wherein not that which delights in sensation, but merely that which is pleasing through its form, constitutes the ground of every arrangement directed at taste. The colors that light up the sketch fall under charm; while they can, for sensation, quicken the object in itself, they cannot render it beautiful and worthy of intuition: on the contrary, whatever the beautiful form demands mostly confines them very severely, and even in cases where charm is permitted, it is by that form alone that they are ennobled.

All form belonging to the objects of the senses (those of the outer, and, mediately, those of the inner as well) is either shape or play; and in the latter case it is either a play of shapes (in space: mimicry and the dance) or a mere play of sensations (in time). The charm of the colors, or of the pleasant tones of the instrument, may indeed be superadded, yet it is the drawing in the first case and the composition in the second that make up the genuine object of a pure judgment of taste; and if the purity of the colors and of the tones alike, or even their variety and their contrast, seems to add to the beauty, this does not mean that, being agreeable on their own, they supply thereby a kind of like-natured supplement to the satisfaction in the form, but rather that they only make this latter more exactly, more definitely, and more fully intuitable, and besides enliven the representation by their charm, in that they awaken and hold attention upon the object itself.

Even what one calls decorations (Parerga), that is, whatever does not belong internally to the whole representation of the object as a constituent part, but only externally as an addition, and which enlarges the satisfaction of taste, still does this too only through its form: as with the frames of paintings, or the drapery on statues, or the colonnades around magnificent buildings. But should the decoration not consist in the beautiful form itself—should it, like a gilt frame, be attached merely so as to commend the painting to approval by means of its charm—then it goes by the name of adornment and does injury to genuine beauty.

Emotion—a sensation in which agreeableness comes about solely through a momentary checking, and the more forceful surge of the vital force that thereupon follows—has no place whatever in beauty. Sublimity, on the other hand—the feeling of emotion being bound up with it—calls for a criterion of appraisal other than the one taste lays down as its foundation; and so a pure judgment of taste possesses, for its determining ground, neither a charm nor an emotion—in short, no sensation of any kind—as the matter of the aesthetic judgment.

§ 15. The judgment of taste is entirely independent of the concept of perfection

Objective purposiveness is something we can cognize solely through the manifold's relation to some determinate end, and thus solely by way of a concept. This by itself already makes clear: that the beautiful—whose judging has as its basis a purposiveness that is merely formal, that is, a purposiveness devoid of any end—stands wholly apart from the representation of the good, since this latter presupposes a purposiveness that is objective, that is, the object's relation to some determinate end.

Objective purposiveness comes in two forms: the external kind, that is, usefulness, and the internal kind, that is, an object's perfection. That the satisfaction whereby we pronounce an object beautiful cannot be founded upon any representation of its usefulness is sufficiently evident from the two foregoing sections: for were it otherwise, the satisfaction would then not be an immediate one taken in the object, and it is immediacy of just this kind that forms the indispensable condition of any judgment about beauty. An internal objective purposiveness, however—that is, perfection—already lies nearer to the predicate of beauty, and for that reason renowned philosophers have even equated it with beauty, albeit under the proviso when it is confusedly conceived . For a critique of taste, it is a matter of the utmost importance to settle whether beauty too may genuinely be reduced to the concept of perfection.

To judge an objective purposiveness we invariably need the concept of an end, and—supposing this purposiveness is meant to be internal rather than external [usefulness]—the concept of an inner end that would hold the ground of the object's inner possibility. Since an end as such is precisely that whose concept may be taken for the very ground on which the object's own possibility rests: so too, if one is to picture an objective purposiveness in a given thing, there must come first the concept of what kind of thing it is intended to be; and the accord of the manifold within that thing with this concept (which lays down the rule for combining the manifold in it) makes up the qualitative perfection of a thing. Wholly different from this is quantitative perfection, namely the completeness that any thing possesses within its own kind—a bare concept of quantity (of allness), one in which what the thing is to be is already presupposed as settled beforehand, so that the only question is whether everything demanded for it is actually there in it. The formal aspect in the representation of a thing—that is, the agreement of the manifold into a unity (with what that unity is to be left undetermined)—discloses of itself no objective purposiveness whatsoever: for once abstraction is made from this unity taken as an end (what the thing is to be), there is left over nothing beyond the subjective purposiveness belonging to the representations in the mind of the one who beholds them, a purposiveness that does indeed betoken a certain purposiveness of the representational state within the subject, and within that state an ease it feels in taking up a given form into the imagination, yet that points to no perfection of any object, the object being thought here by means of no concept of an end. So, for instance, should I chance upon a patch of turf in the woods, ringed about by trees standing in a circle, and yet form for myself no end there—say, that the spot might be used for country dancing—then not the slightest concept of perfection is furnished by the bare form alone. But to form for oneself a formal objective purposiveness that has no end—that is, the naked form of a perfection (stripped of all matter and of any concept of that toward which the harmonizing is directed, even were this nothing more than the idea of a conformity to law in general)—is a downright contradiction.

Now the judgment of taste is an aesthetic judgment, that is, one resting upon subjective grounds, whose determining ground can be no concept at all, and therefore not the concept of a determinate end. Hence beauty, as a formal subjective purposiveness, in no way brings to mind any perfection of the object under the guise of an allegedly formal, yet for all that objective, purposiveness; and the difference between the concept of the beautiful and that of the good—as though the two were set apart merely by logical form, the former a confused and the latter a distinct concept of perfection while otherwise agreeing in content and origin—amounts to nothing: for on that supposition no specific difference would separate them, and a judgment of taste would count as a cognitive judgment just as fully as the judgment whereby a thing is pronounced good, much as the common man, when he calls deceit wrong, grounds his judgment on confused, and the philosopher his on distinct, yet both at bottom on one and the same principles of reason. Yet I have already remarked that an aesthetic judgment is one of a kind and delivers no cognition at all (not even a confused one) of the object: the latter coming about only through a logical judgment, whereas an aesthetic judgment instead refers the representation through which an object is given entirely to the subject and calls attention to no property of the object, but solely to the purposive form in the determination of the powers of representation that busy themselves with that object. It is for just this reason, too, that the judgment is termed aesthetic: because what determines it is no concept but rather the feeling (belonging to the inner sense) of that harmony in the play of the mental powers, so far as such harmony admits only of being felt. Were one, on the other hand, to give the name aesthetic to confused concepts and to the objective judgment that rests upon them, one would be positing an understanding that judges by way of the senses, or else a sense that pictured its objects through concepts—each of which is a contradiction in itself. The power that deals in concepts, be they confused or distinct, is the understanding; and although the judgment of taste, as an aesthetic judgment, does call upon the understanding too (as every judgment does), it draws on it not as the power to cognize an object, but as the power to determine the judgment together with its representation (apart from any concept) according to the bearing this has upon the subject and the subject's inner feeling—and this only so far as such a judgment is possible under a universal rule.

§ 16. The judgment of taste by which an object is declared beautiful under the condition of a determinate concept is not pure

Beauty is of two kinds: free beauty (pulchritudo vaga), and beauty that is merely dependent (pulchritudo adhaerens). The former does not presuppose any concept of what the object ought to be; the second presupposes such a concept, together with the object's perfection as measured against it. The varieties of the former are termed (self-subsisting) beauties belonging to this or that thing; the other sort, since it clings to a concept (conditioned beauty), is attributed to objects that stand under the concept of a special end.

Flowers are free beauties of nature. Hardly anyone besides a botanist knows what sort of thing a flower is meant to be; and even he, who discerns in it the plant's organ of fructification, takes no account of this natural end when he judges it by taste. Hence no perfection of any kind, no inner purposiveness to which the composition of the manifold might refer, is laid at the ground of this judgment. Birds of many kinds (the parrot, the hummingbird, the bird of paradise), together with numerous shellfish of the sea, are beauties on their own, ones that pertain to no object fixed by concepts as regards its end, but rather please freely and for themselves. In the same way the drawings à la grecque, the foliage used for framing or upon paper hangings, and the like, mean nothing on their own account: they exhibit nothing at all, present no object falling under a fixed concept, and count as free beauties. To the very same class one may likewise reckon what in music goes by the name of fantasias (without a theme), indeed the whole of music unaccompanied by any text.

When we appraise a free beauty (according to its mere form alone), the judgment of taste is pure. Here one presupposes no concept of some end that the manifold would have to serve in the given object, and which the object is accordingly supposed to present—an end through which the freedom of the imagination, playing as it were in its contemplation of the shape, would merely be curtailed.

The beauty of a human being, however (and within this kind that of a man, of a woman, or of a child), the beauty likewise of a horse or of a building (be it church, palace, arsenal, or garden-house), presupposes a concept of the end which lays down what the thing ought to be, and hence a concept of its perfection, so that it is nothing but adherent beauty. Just as, then, joining the agreeable (of sensation) to beauty—which strictly speaking has to do only with the form—stood in the way of the purity of the judgment of taste, so too joining the good (namely, the good that the manifold has for the thing itself, in view of its end) to beauty impairs that same purity.

One could apply to a building much that pleases immediately in intuition, if only it were not meant to be a church; one could adorn a figure with every kind of flourish and with light though regular strokes—as the New Zealanders do in their tattooing—provided only it were not a human being; and this human being could have far finer features and a more pleasing, gentler outline of facial structure, if only he were not meant to represent a man, or even a warlike one.

Now the satisfaction taken in the manifold within a thing with reference to the inner end that settles its possibility is a satisfaction resting upon a concept; the satisfaction in beauty, by contrast, is one that requires no concept, being bound up immediately with the representation whereby the object is given (rather than that whereby it is thought). If, then, in respect of the latter the judgment of taste is made dependent on, and thereby limited by, the end that lies in the former, taken as a judgment of reason, it ceases to be a free and pure judgment of taste.

Admittedly, through this linkage of the aesthetic satisfaction with the intellectual one, taste does gain something, in that it becomes fixed—and although it is not universal, still rules can be laid down for it as regards certain objects determined in a purposive manner. Yet these are then not rules of taste either, but only rules for harmonizing taste with reason, that is, the beautiful with the good, whereby the former is rendered serviceable as an instrument of the intention regarding the latter, so as to place that frame of mind which maintains itself and possesses subjective universal validity beneath the way of thinking that can be secured only through toilsome resolve yet holds objectively universal validity. Strictly, however, perfection is not enhanced by beauty, nor beauty by perfection; rather, since it is unavoidable that, when we compare the representation whereby a given object comes to us with the object (in view of what it ought to be) through a concept, we hold it together at once with the sensation in the subject, the entire faculty of the power of representation is enhanced whenever the two states of mind harmonize.

A judgment of taste concerning an object that has a determinate inner end would be pure only in the case where the one judging either possessed no concept of that end or set it aside in his judging. But in that case this person, although he would be pronouncing a correct judgment of taste in appraising the object as a free beauty, would still be reproached by the other—who takes the beauty in it to be merely a dependent quality (attending to the object's end)—and charged with a false taste, even though each judges rightly after his own fashion: the one by what lies before his senses, the other by what he holds in thought. Through this differentiation many a quarrel among the arbiters of taste concerning beauty can be resolved, by pointing out to them that the one adheres to free beauty while the other adheres to dependent beauty, the former delivering a pure and the second an applied judgment of taste.

§ 17. On the ideal of beauty

No objective rule of taste can exist that would fix through concepts what counts as beautiful. For any judgment arising from this source is aesthetic; that is to say, what determines it is the subject's feeling and not some concept of an object. To hunt for a principle of taste that would deliver, through determinate concepts, the universal criterion of the beautiful is labor spent in vain, since the thing sought is at once impossible and self-contradictory in itself. The universal communicability of the sensation (of satisfaction or dissatisfaction)—and indeed a communicability that comes about without any concept—together with the unanimity, so far as it may be reached, of every age and people with respect to this feeling when certain objects are represented: this is the empirical criterion, feeble though it be and hardly enough to warrant a conjecture, of the descent of a taste thus attested by examples from that deeply concealed basis, shared by all humankind, of unanimity in their appraisal of the forms whereby objects are given to them.

This is why we treat certain products of taste as exemplary: not in the sense that taste might be picked up by copying what others do. For taste has to be a power proper to oneself; and someone who copies a model does display dexterity to the extent that he succeeds, but he displays taste only to the extent that he is able to appraise that model on his own.⁶ What follows from this, though, is that the supreme model—the archetype of taste—amounts to a mere idea, one that each person has to generate within himself, and by reference to which he is to appraise whatever is an object of taste, whatever serves as an instance of judging by taste, and indeed the very taste of anyone at all. Idea, strictly speaking, denotes a concept of reason, whereas ideal denotes the representation of a single being taken as commensurate with an idea. For this reason that archetype of taste—resting, to be sure, upon the indeterminate idea reason holds of a maximum, yet admitting of representation not by way of concepts but solely in a particular presentation—is more aptly termed the ideal of the beautiful, something we endeavor to produce in ourselves even while we do not actually possess it. It can, however, be nothing more than an ideal of the imagination, and this precisely because its ground lies not in concepts but in presentation; and the power of presentation is nothing other than the imagination. — By what route, then, do we reach an ideal of beauty of this sort? A priori or empirically? And equally: which sort of the beautiful admits of an ideal at all?

To begin with, it is worth observing that the beauty for which one would seek an ideal cannot be a vague one, but must be a beauty rendered fixed through a concept of objective purposiveness, and hence one that pertains not to the object of an entirely pure judgment of taste but to that of a judgment of taste which is in part intellectualized . That is to say: in whatever type of grounds of judging an ideal is supposed to occur, there must lie at its foundation some idea of reason governed by determinate concepts, an idea that settles a priori the end on which the object's inner possibility depends. One cannot so much as conceive an ideal of beautiful flowers, of a handsome piece of furniture, or of a beautiful vista. But no ideal can be represented even of a beauty that hangs upon determinate ends—for instance, a beautiful dwelling-house, or a beautiful tree, or a beautiful garden, and the like; presumably because such ends are not pinned down and made determinate enough by their concept, so that the purposiveness turns out to be nearly as unconstrained as with vague beauty. The sole thing that carries the end of its own existence within itself is the human being—who is able to set his own ends by means of reason, or, in cases where he must take them from outer perception, is still able to bring them into connection with essential and universal ends and then to judge aesthetically how they harmonize with these: this human being, accordingly, is the one object in all the world capable of an ideal of beauty, precisely as humanity in his person, considered as an intelligence, is the one thing capable of the ideal of perfection.

Two ingredients, however, are required for this: first, the aesthetic normal idea, a singular intuition (belonging to the imagination) that supplies the measure by which he is judged as a thing that falls under a particular animal species; second, the idea of reason, which takes the ends of humanity—so far as these cannot be given a sensible representation—as the principle by which his shape is judged, a shape through which, as the effect of those ends in appearance, they are made manifest. For the shape of an animal belonging to a particular species the normal idea has to draw its elements from experience; but that highest purposiveness in how the shape is put together—the purposiveness that could serve as the general measure for aesthetically judging every single member of the species, the image that lay, so to speak, intentionally at the root of nature's craft, matched only by the species in its entirety and by no member taken in isolation—resides, all the same, solely in the idea of the one doing the judging, an idea that nonetheless, together with its proportions, can be presented fully in concreto, as an aesthetic idea, in an exemplary image. So as to render somewhat intelligible how all this comes about (for who can wrest from nature the entirety of her secret?), we shall try our hand at a psychological explanation.

It deserves notice that, by some means altogether beyond our comprehension, the imagination is able not merely to summon up, as occasion demands and even after a long lapse of time, the signs that stand for concepts; but also to reconstruct the image and shape of an object out of a number—past all telling—of objects of assorted sorts, or indeed of a single sort; and further, once the mind is bent on comparisons, in all likelihood really (though not with enough clarity to reach consciousness) to let one image settle, as it were, over another, and by the coincidence of many of the same sort to extract a middle figure that answers to all of them as a shared standard. Suppose a person has laid eyes on a thousand fully grown men. If he now sets out to judge the normal size that is to be estimated by comparison, then—so I would suggest—the imagination drops a large quantity of the images (perhaps that whole thousand) one upon the next; and, if I may here borrow the analogy of an optical projection, within that region where the greater part of them coincide, inside the outline where the spot glows with the most densely applied color, the average size becomes recognizable, standing, in height as much as in breadth, at an equal remove from the utmost boundaries of the tallest and the shortest builds; and this is the build of a beautiful man. (The very same result could be reached mechanically, were one to measure all thousand of them, add up their heights on their own and their widths (and depths) on their own, and then divide the total by a thousand. The imagination, however, accomplishes exactly this by way of a dynamic effect that springs from the repeated taking-in of such shapes upon the organ of the inner sense.) If in like fashion one now seeks the average head for this average man, and for that head the average nose, and so on, then this shape underlies the normal idea of the beautiful man in whatever country the comparison is undertaken; and thus, under these empirical conditions, a Negro must necessarily form a normal idea of bodily beauty different from a white person's, the Chinese one different from the European's. Things would proceed in just the same way with the model for a handsome horse or hound (of some particular breed). — This normal idea is not something abstracted from proportions gathered out of experience and treated as determinate rules, rather, it is only in light of it that rules for judging first come to be possible. It is that image for the whole species which hovers amid all the individual intuitions—diverse in manifold ways—of separate persons, the image nature placed beneath her offspring in this same species as their archetype, though one she appears to have realized completely in no single specimen. In no way is it the complete archetype of beauty for this species; it is merely the form that makes up the indispensable precondition of all beauty, and so no more than correctness in presenting the species. It amounts, as people termed Polyclitus's renowned Doryphorus, to the rule (for just this office Myron's cow could likewise serve within its own kind). On this very account it can also harbor nothing that is specifically characteristic, since otherwise it would fail to be a normal idea for the species. What its presentation pleases by is not beauty at all, but simply the fact that it runs afoul of none of the conditions on which alone something of this species is able to be beautiful. Such a presentation is no more than academically proper.⁷

Still to be set apart from the normal idea of the beautiful is its ideal, which—on the grounds already brought forward—one is entitled to look for only in the human figure. In that figure the ideal comes down to the outward showing of the moral, and lacking this the object would give no pleasure that is universal and, over and above that, positive (and not just the negative pleasure of a presentation that keeps to the rules). The perceptible showing of moral ideas that inwardly rule the human being can, to be sure, be drawn only from experience; but to render their bond with everything that our reason ties to the morally good under the idea of the supreme purposiveness—goodness of soul, or purity, or strength, or serenity, and the like—as if visibly, in a bodily manifestation (as the outward effect of the inner), calls for pure ideas of reason joined to a mighty power of imagination in whoever would so much as judge them, and still more in whoever would present them. That such an ideal of beauty is correct is borne out by the following: it lets no charm of sense insinuate itself into the satisfaction taken in its object, and yet it makes room for a great interest in that object; which then goes to show that appraisal by such a yardstick can never be purely aesthetic, and that appraisal by an ideal of beauty is not a bare judgment of taste.

Definition of the beautiful drawn from this third moment.

Beauty is a thing's form of purposiveness, insofar as that form is registered upon the object without the representation of an end.⁸

Fourth Moment of the judgment of taste, according to the modality of the satisfaction in the object

§ 18. What the modality of a judgment of taste is

Of any representation whatever I can say at least this much: that it is possible for it, as cognition, to carry a pleasure along with it. Concerning what I term agreeable, I assert that it actually does arouse pleasure within me. The beautiful, however, we conceive as standing in a necessary connection with satisfaction. This necessity, however, is of a peculiar kind: not a theoretical objective necessity, under which it would be cognized a priori that this satisfaction will be felt by everyone in the object that I call beautiful; nor a practical one, where this satisfaction, by way of concepts of a pure will of reason that serves freely acting beings as a rule, follows from an objective law as its necessary result and means nothing other than that one absolutely ought (without any further aim) to act in a certain way. Rather, the necessity that is thought in an aesthetic judgment can be termed only exemplary — that is, a necessity of the assent of everyone to a judgment regarded as an instance of a universal rule that cannot be stated. Because an aesthetic judgment is neither objective nor a judgment of cognition, this necessity admits of no derivation from determinate concepts, and so it is not apodictic. Far less can it be inferred from the generality of experience (that is, from some complete accord among people's judgments regarding the beauty of a given object). For, quite apart from the fact that experience could hardly muster instances enough to serve here, no concept of the necessity of such judgments is capable of resting on empirical judgments.

§ 19. The subjective necessity that we ascribe to the judgment of taste is conditioned

Assent is what the judgment of taste asks of everyone; and anyone who pronounces something beautiful wills that everyone should grant the object in question their approval and likewise pronounce it beautiful. Hence the ought in the aesthetic judgment is, even in view of all the data required for the judging, still pronounced only conditionally. One woos every other person's assent because one holds a ground for it shared by all; and on that assent one might well reckon, were one but always certain that the case were rightly subsumed beneath that ground, taken as the rule of approval.

§ 20. The condition of the necessity that a judgment of taste asserts is the idea of a common sense

Had judgments of taste (as judgments of cognition do) a determinate objective principle, then anyone who pronounced them by following the latter would claim unconditional necessity for his judgment. If, on the other hand, they rested on no principle whatever, as is the case with the taste belonging simply to sensation, the very thought of any necessity in them would never so much as arise. A subjective principle they must accordingly possess — one that settles by feeling alone, and not by any concept, and yet universally valid, whatever pleases or displeases. But a principle of this kind admits of being taken only for a common sense, one essentially distinct from that common understanding which now and then also goes by the name of common sense (sensus communis): for this latter judges never through feeling, but invariably through concepts, even if usually through such as amount to no more than obscurely represented principles.

It is therefore solely upon the assumption that a common sense exists (whereby we intend no outward sense, but rather what results when our cognitive powers are set in free interplay), solely upon the assumption, I say, of such a common sense that a judgment of taste can be pronounced.

§ 21. Whether one can, with good ground, presuppose a common sense

Cognitions and judgments, along with the conviction attending them, have to be capable of universal communication; for were it otherwise, no correspondence with the object would belong to them: one and all, they would amount to nothing but a subjective interplay of the representational powers, exactly as skepticism demands. Yet if cognitions are to be communicable, then the condition of the mind must likewise be capable of universal communication — that is, the attunement of the cognitive powers to a cognition as such, and indeed just that proportion which befits a representation (through which an object is given to us) so that a cognition may be produced from it: for in the absence of this, which is the subjective condition of coming to know, the cognition could never issue forth as its effect. And this in fact does happen every time, when a given object, by means of the senses, sets the imagination into activity for the composing of the manifold, and this in turn sets the understanding into activity for the unity of that manifold in concepts. But this attunement of the cognitive powers has a different proportion according to the diversity of the objects that are given. Yet there must nonetheless be one in which this inner relation for the enlivening (of the one power by the other) is the most conducive for both powers of the mind with a view to cognition (of given objects) in general; and this attunement cannot be determined otherwise than through feeling (not according to concepts). Now, seeing that this attunement must of itself be universally communicable, and consequently the feeling of it too (given some representation), whereas the universal communicability of a feeling for its part presupposes a common sense: the latter may then with good reason be assumed — not, indeed, by grounding oneself on observations drawn from psychology, but as the necessary condition under which our cognition attains universal communicability, a presupposition required by every logic and by every non-skeptical principle of cognitions.

§ 22. The necessity of the universal agreement that a judgment of taste entails is a subjective necessity which, where a common sense is presupposed, is represented as objective

Whenever we pronounce a thing to be beautiful, we grant to no one the right to be of a different mind; yet without thereby grounding our judgment upon concepts, but solely upon our feeling: which we accordingly take as our basis not as a private feeling but as one held in common. Now, to this end, this common sense cannot be founded upon experience; for it seeks to authorize judgments that contain an ought: it does not say that each person will agree with our judgment, but rather that each ought to fall into accord with it. Common sense, therefore—the sense from whose judgment I here offer my judgment of taste by way of example, and on whose account I ascribe exemplary validity to that judgment—is a mere ideal norm; presupposing it, one could with right make a judgment that agreed with it, and the satisfaction in an object expressed in that judgment, into a rule for everyone: since the principle, subjective though it is, would nevertheless, taken for subjectively universal (an idea necessary to everyone), be entitled, so far as concerns unanimity among different judging subjects, to demand universal assent in the manner of an objective principle; provided one were only certain of having subsumed under it correctly.

We really do presuppose this indeterminate norm of a common sense: the proof lies in our presumption to pass judgments of taste. Whether a common sense of this kind actually exists as a constitutive principle rendering experience possible, or whether a yet higher principle of reason turns it for us into a merely regulative one, whose task would be first of all to bring forth a common sense in us for higher purposes; whether taste is accordingly an original and natural faculty, or only the idea of an artificial one that has still to be acquired, so that a judgment of taste, with its claim to a universal assent, would in fact be only a demand made by reason to bring forth such unanimity in the way of sensing, and the ought—the objective necessity, namely, of everyone's feeling flowing together with each person's particular feeling—would mean no more than the possibility of reaching accord in this respect, and the judgment of taste would supply merely one example of how this principle is applied: all this we neither wish nor are yet able to investigate here; for the present we have only to resolve into its elements the faculty of taste, and at last to unite these in the idea of a common sense.

The beautiful, explained by inference from the fourth moment.

Beautiful is that which, without a concept, is cognized to be the object of a necessary satisfaction.

General observation on the first section of the Analytic

Gathering together the upshot of the dissections above, one finds that everything reduces to the concept of taste: to wit, that taste amounts to a power of judging an object with reference to the free lawfulness of the imagination. Now if, in the judgment of taste, the imagination must be regarded in its freedom, then it is assumed, first of all, to be not reproductive, as when it stands under the laws of association, but rather productive and self-active (as the author of chosen forms of possible intuitions); and even though, in taking up a given object of sense, it is tied to a determinate form of that object and to this extent enjoys no free play (as it does in poetic invention), one can still readily grasp how the object might hand it just such a form as holds a composition of the manifold of the kind that the imagination, if left to its own freedom, would sketch in agreement with the lawfulness of the understanding as such. Yet for the imagination to be free and at the same time lawful of its own accord, i.e. to carry an autonomy about with it, is contradictory. It is the understanding, and it alone, that supplies the law. Should the imagination, however, be constrained to operate by some determinate law, then what it produces is, in point of form, fixed by concepts as to how it should turn out; but then the satisfaction, as was shown above, is not satisfaction in the beautiful but in the good (in perfection, or at best in merely formal perfection), and the judgment ceases to be one of taste. Hence a lawfulness without any law, together with a merely subjective agreement of the imagination with the understanding that lacks an objective one — the objective sort obtaining where the representation is tied to a determinate concept of an object — is the only thing that can hold together with the free lawfulness of the understanding (which has likewise been styled purposiveness without an end) and with what is distinctive in a judgment of taste.

Geometrically regular figures — a circular figure, a square, a cube, and the like — are, to be sure, routinely adduced by critics of taste as the plainest and least questionable instances of beauty; and yet the very ground on which they count as regular is that one can picture them in no other way than as bare presentations of a determinate concept which lays down the rule for that figure (the rule apart from which it would not be possible at all). One of these two judgments must therefore be in error: either that of the critics, who confer beauty on the figures in question, or our own, which takes purposiveness without a concept to be indispensable to beauty.

Hardly anyone will find a person of taste to be required in order to take greater satisfaction in a circular figure than in a scrawled contour, or greater in a four-sided figure with equal sides and equal corners than in one that is skewed, of unequal sides, and as it were stunted; for this demands nothing beyond ordinary understanding and no taste of any kind. Wherever some aim is discerned — say, to estimate the size of a public square, or to make graspable the proportion of the parts among themselves and to the whole in some subdivision — there regular figures, and indeed those of the simplest sort, become necessary; and the satisfaction does not settle directly upon the sight of the figure but upon its serviceability for aims of every possible kind. A room whose walls meet at oblique angles, a garden laid out in such a fashion, indeed any breach of symmetry — whether in the figure of animals (say, being one-eyed), or of edifices, or of beds of flowers — gives displeasure, because it runs counter to purpose, not merely in practice, with a view to some determinate use of these things, but also for judging them with respect to aims of every possible kind; and this is precisely what does not hold in the judgment of taste, which, so long as it is pure, links satisfaction or displeasure immediately to the sheer contemplation of the object, with no regard to use or to any end whatever.

That regularity which conducts us toward an object's concept is, to be sure, the condition we cannot dispense with (conditio sine qua non) if the object is to be gathered into a single representation and the manifold within its form is to be fixed. This fixing is an end in regard to cognition, and, related to cognition, it is at all times conjoined with satisfaction (the sort that attends the achievement of any aim, even a merely problematic one). In that case, however, what we have is merely our endorsement of the solution that meets a task, not a free and indeterminately purposive occupation of the mental powers with what we name beautiful, wherein the understanding waits upon the imagination rather than the imagination upon the understanding.

In a thing that owes its possibility solely to a purpose — a building, or even an animal — the regularity residing in symmetry has to express that unity of intuition which attends the concept of the end, and forms a part of cognition. But where the sole aim is to keep up a free play of the representational powers (though always on the proviso that the understanding take no offense in the process) — in pleasure gardens, in the ornamenting of rooms, in tasteful utensils of every sort, and suchlike — regularity, wherever it gives notice of itself as compulsion, is shunned as far as can be; and this is why the English taste in gardens, and the baroque taste in furnishings, drive the imagination's freedom well toward the brink of the grotesque, and, in this divorce from every compulsion of rule, establish the very case in which taste can exhibit its utmost perfection in the designs of the imagination.

Everything stiffly regular (whatever comes near to mathematical regularity) carries within it what is repugnant to taste: that it grants no protracted occupation to its contemplation, but rather, so far as it does not expressly have cognition, or some determinate practical end, for its aim, breeds tedium. What the imagination can play with unbidden and purposively, by contrast, strikes us as forever new, and one never tires of beholding it. Marsden, in his account of Sumatra, offers the observation that nature's free beauties there surround the onlooker on every side and for that reason have little that still attracts him: a pepper garden, on the other hand, where the stakes round which this plant climbs form avenues in parallel rows between them, held great charm for him when he chanced on it deep within a forest; and from this he infers that a wild beauty, ruleless in appearance, gratifies only the person who, sated with the regular kind, welcomes it by way of variety. Yet he need only have tried the experiment of lingering a whole day at his pepper garden to realize that, once regularity has set the understanding into the disposition toward order that it requires on all sides, the object entertains him no further but instead lays a wearisome compulsion on the imagination; whereas the nature there, lavish in its variety to the pitch of exuberance and bound by no compulsion of contrived rules, could furnish his taste with nourishment that never fails. — Even birdsong, which we are unable to bring under any rule of music, seems to hold more freedom, and on that account more for taste, than even a human song performed in strict conformity with every rule of the musical art: for one wearies far more quickly of the latter once it is repeated frequently and at length. But here we are presumably trading our fellow-feeling in the gaiety of a small, much-loved little creature for the beauty of its song, which, once a human being reproduces it with full exactness (as now and then occurs with the warbling of the nightingale), seems to our ear altogether devoid of taste.

Beautiful objects, further, are to be kept distinct from beautiful prospects onto objects (which, owing to their remoteness, can often no longer be made out with any clarity). With the latter, taste seems to fasten not so much on what the imagination apprehends in this field, but rather on what it is thereby prompted to invent, i.e. on the very reveries in which the mind occupies itself, all the while being kept continually astir by the manifold on which the eye lights; much as in the sight of the ever-changing shapes of a hearth-fire or of a purling stream, neither of which counts as a beauty, though each holds an allure for the imagination in that it keeps its free play going.

Second Book. 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 this, that both please for their own sake. A further point of agreement is that each of them presupposes no judgment of sense, and likewise none that determines logically, but rather a judgment of reflection: the satisfaction, accordingly, hangs neither upon a sensation, in the manner of the agreeable, nor upon any determinate concept, in the manner of the satisfaction in the good, and yet it is still brought into relation with concepts, however indeterminate these may be; thus it attaches to the bare presentation, or to the faculty for it, and by this attachment the faculty of presentation, that is, the imagination, comes to be viewed, in the presence of a given intuition, as harmonizing with the understanding's or reason's faculty of concepts, and as promoting the latter. Hence both kinds of judgment are singular judgments that nevertheless announce themselves as universally valid with respect to every subject, even though their claim reaches only as far as the feeling of pleasure, and to no cognition of the object.

Yet there are also notable differences between the two that strike the eye. Natural beauty has to do with the form of the object, a form consisting in its limitation; the sublime, on the other hand, may be met with even in an object without form, so far as unboundedness is represented either in it or through its prompting, and a totality of that unboundedness is yet added in thought: whence the beautiful appears to be taken for the presentation of an understanding's concept that is indeterminate, while the sublime is taken for that of such a concept of reason. Accordingly the satisfaction is in the one case connected with the representation of quality, but in the other with that of quantity. In its very kind, moreover, this latter satisfaction stands quite far apart from the former: for the one (the beautiful) carries with it, straightaway, a feeling that life is furthered, and thus goes together with charms and with an imagination at play; the other, however (the feeling of the sublime), is a pleasure springing up only in a roundabout way, in that it comes about through the feeling of a momentary checking of the vital forces followed at once by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger, so that, as a stirring of the mind, it seems to be no play but rather earnestness in how the imagination is engaged. For this reason, too, it cannot be reconciled with charms, and, inasmuch as the object does not merely attract the mind but by turns repels it over and over, the satisfaction in the sublime holds within it not positive pleasure so much as admiration or respect, and thus earns the name of a negative pleasure.

The weightiest and inmost difference, however, that sets the sublime apart from the beautiful is presumably this: that if, as is proper, we take into consideration here at the outset only the sublime as it appears in objects of nature (the sublime of art being always held within the conditions of its agreement with nature), then the beauty of nature (the self-subsistent sort) carries within its own form a purposiveness, by which the object seems, as it were, marked out in advance to suit our power of judgment, and hence amounts on its own to an object of satisfaction; whereas whatever stirs in us, with no need of subtle reasoning, the feeling of the sublime through mere apprehension may well look, in respect of its form, ill-adapted in purpose to our power of judgment, unsuited to our faculty of presentation, and violent, so to speak, toward the imagination, and yet is judged only the more sublime on that account.

From this, however, one sees at once that we express ourselves incorrectly on the whole when we call some object of nature sublime, even though we may with full correctness term very many of them beautiful; for how can that which is apprehended in itself as contrary to purpose be designated by an expression of approval? Nothing more can be asserted than that the object is fit for presenting a sublimity such as may be found within the mind; for the properly sublime can be housed in no sensible form whatever, and pertains solely to ideas of reason: these, though no presentation befitting them is possible, are stirred up and summoned into the mind by this very unfittingness, which does admit of being presented in sensible fashion. So the broad ocean, whipped into rage by storms, cannot be termed sublime. The look of it is ghastly; and the mind must beforehand have been stocked with ideas of many sorts if such an intuition is to tune it toward a feeling that is sublime in its own right, since the mind is thereby spurred to forsake sensibility and to busy itself with ideas harboring a higher purposiveness.

Self-subsistent natural beauty reveals to us a technique of nature that presents it as a system governed by laws whose principle we do not encounter anywhere in our whole faculty of understanding, namely the principle of a purposiveness relative to the use of the power of judgment with respect to appearances, so that these must be judged as belonging not merely to nature under its aimless mechanism, but also to an analogy with art. It thus does not really extend our cognition of natural objects, to be sure, yet it does extend our concept of nature, namely from that of a mere mechanism to the concept of the very same nature as art: which invites deep investigations into the possibility of a form of this kind. Yet in whatever we tend to call sublime within nature there lies so entirely nothing that would point toward particular objective principles and toward natural forms conforming to them, that nature instead, amid its chaos or amid its wildest and most unruly disorder and devastation, so long as magnitude and might come into view, is what most arouses the ideas of the sublime. We gather from this that the concept of the sublime in nature falls far short, both in importance and in the wealth of its consequences, of the concept of the beautiful in nature; and that it points to nothing purposive within nature itself, but solely within the possible use of the intuitions we have of it, in order to render felt in us a purposiveness altogether independent of nature. As for the beautiful in nature, we have to look for a ground beyond ourselves, whereas for the sublime we look merely inside ourselves and in the way of thinking that brings sublimity into the representation of the former; this is a highly needful preliminary observation, one that severs the ideas of the sublime entirely from any purposiveness ascribed to nature, and reduces the theory of the sublime to a mere appendix to the aesthetic appraisal of the purposiveness of nature, seeing that by this no particular form is represented in nature, while what gets developed is merely a purposive employment which the imagination makes of its own representation.

§ 24. On the division of an investigation of the feeling of the sublime

As concerns how the moments of the aesthetic judging of objects fall to be divided in their bearing on the feeling of the sublime, the analytic is able to run its course according to the same principle as was followed in the dissection of judgments of taste. For the satisfaction in the sublime, precisely like that in the beautiful, is a verdict of the aesthetic reflecting power of judgment, and as such it must exhibit itself as universally valid as regards quantity, as devoid of interest as regards quality, as subjective purposiveness as regards relation, and, as regards modality, must present the latter as necessary. Herein, then, the method will not diverge from that of the previous section: unless indeed one were to count it for something that we began, in the former case, where the aesthetic judgment had to do with the form of the object, by examining quality; but that here, in the case of the formlessness that can pertain to what we name sublime, we will make our beginning with quantity, the first among the moments of the aesthetic judgment on the sublime: the ground for this, however, is to be gathered from the preceding §.

But the analysis of the sublime requires a division which that of the beautiful can do without, namely one into the mathematically-sublime and into the dynamically-sublime.

For inasmuch as the feeling of the sublime has for its character a movement of the mind joined to the judging of the object, while taste for the beautiful presupposes and maintains the mind in calm contemplation; and inasmuch as this movement is nonetheless meant to be judged as subjectively purposive (the sublime, after all, pleases): it is by the imagination brought into relation either with the faculty of cognition or with the faculty of desire, though in either relation the purposiveness of the given representation is to be judged merely with regard to these faculties (without end or interest): whereupon the object receives the first as a mathematical and the second as a dynamical attunement of the imagination, and is therefore represented as sublime in the said twofold fashion.

A. On the mathematically sublime

§ 25. Nominal definition of the sublime

That which is absolutely great is what we call sublime. Yet being great and being a magnitude are entirely distinct concepts (magnitudo and quantitas). Likewise, to simply (simpliciter) say that something is great is quite another matter than saying that it is absolutely great (absolute, non comparative magnum). This last is what is great beyond all comparison. — But what is the expression really getting at when it says that a thing is great, or small, or middling? What gets designated by it is no pure concept of the understanding; even less an intuition of the senses; and equally little a concept of reason, for it brings along with it no principle of cognition at all. It has to be, then, a concept proper to the power of judgment, or one derived from such a concept, and must set beneath it, as its ground, a subjective purposiveness belonging to the representation with respect to the power of judgment. That a thing amounts to a magnitude (quantum) can be discerned from the object on its own, apart from any comparison with others: namely, whenever a plurality of what is homogeneous together makes up a single unit. How great it is, however, always requires something else, which is likewise a magnitude, to serve as its measure. Since, however, in appraising magnitude what matters is not only the plurality (number) but likewise the greatness of the unit (the measure), while the greatness of that unit once more calls for some further thing to serve as a measure by which it might be compared: we come to see that every determination of magnitude in appearances can yield no absolute concept of a magnitude at all, but on each occasion only a concept of comparison.

Now if I say simply that something is great, it appears that I have no comparison in mind at all, at least none with any objective measure, since by this it is in no way settled how large the object may be. Yet even though the scale of comparison is only subjective, the judgment none the less lays claim to universal agreement; the judgments "the man is beautiful" and "he is tall" do not confine themselves merely to the subject who judges, but, like theoretical judgments, require the agreement of everyone.

But because a judgment through which a thing is designated outright as great does not merely intend to say that the object has a magnitude, but ascribes this magnitude to it at the same time by preference over many others of like kind — without, though, specifying that preference in any determinate way — there is indeed laid at its foundation a standard that one assumes may be accepted as one and the same for every person, a standard useful for no logical (mathematically determined) estimation of magnitude, but serviceable solely for an aesthetic one, being a measure that rests as its ground merely subjectively upon the judgment reflecting about magnitude. For the rest it may be empirical — such as the middling size of the human beings known to us, of animals of a certain kind, of trees, houses, mountains, and the like; or else a measure given a priori, one that, on account of the shortcomings of the subject doing the judging, is held to subjective conditions for its exhibition in concreto: thus, in practical affairs, the greatness of some particular virtue, or of the public freedom and justice within a country; or, in theoretical affairs, how great the correctness or incorrectness of an observation or measurement that has been made may be, and the like.

What is noteworthy here is this: that although we take no interest at all in the object — that is, its existence leaves us indifferent — the sheer magnitude of it, even where it is looked upon as formless, is still able to bring with it a satisfaction communicable to all, and thereby holds within it the consciousness of a subjective purposiveness in how we put our cognitive faculties to use; yet this is not a satisfaction taken in the object, as happens with the beautiful (given that the thing may lack form), a case in which the reflecting power of judgment discovers itself purposively disposed toward cognition as such, but rather a satisfaction taken in the imagination's own enlargement of itself.

Whenever we (under the qualification mentioned above) declare of an object outright that it is great, what we pass is no mathematically determining judgment, but a mere judgment of reflection upon the representation of that object, a representation subjectively purposive for a certain use of our powers of cognition in the appraisal of magnitude; and we thereupon always join to the representation a kind of respect, just as, with what we plainly name small, a kind of contempt. For the rest, the judging of things as great or small applies to everything whatsoever, even to all the qualities they possess; which is why we speak even of beauty as great or small: the reason for this being that whatever we may, following the prescription of the power of judgment, present in intuition (and thus represent aesthetically) is, without exception, appearance, and consequently a quantum as well.

But when we name a thing not merely great, but great in an unqualified, absolute way, in every regard (past all comparison) — that is, sublime — one quickly grasps this: that for it we allow no fitting standard to be looked for anywhere outside the thing, but only inside it. It is a magnitude equal to nothing beyond its own self. It follows from this, then, that the sublime is to be looked for not among the things of nature but only within our ideas; yet in which of these it may lie must be reserved for the deduction.

The explanation given above may also be put thus: Sublime is that in comparison with which everything else is small. Here it is readily seen: that nothing can be given in nature, however great we may judge it to be, which, viewed in a different relation, could not be diminished to the point of the infinitely small; and, conversely, nothing so small that, set beside yet smaller standards, it could not, for our imagination, be magnified up to the size of a world. Telescopes have placed in our hands abundant matter for making the former remark, microscopes for the latter. Nothing, then, capable of being an object of the senses is, regarded on this footing, to be called sublime. But for just this reason — that our imagination harbors an endeavor to press onward into the infinite, whereas our reason puts forward a demand for absolute totality as for a genuinely real idea — that very unfitness of our capacity for appraising the magnitude of the things of the world of sense becomes, with regard to this idea, the awakening of the feeling of a supersensible capacity within us; and it is the use which the power of judgment naturally makes of certain objects on behalf of the latter (feeling), and not the object of sense, that is absolutely great, while against it every other use is small. Hence it is the mental attunement produced by a certain representation occupying the reflecting power of judgment, and not the object, that deserves to be called sublime.

We may accordingly append to the foregoing formulas for the explanation of the sublime this further one: Sublime is that of which the very ability to think it proves a power of the mind exceeding every measure of sense.

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

Estimating magnitude through numerical concepts (or, in algebra, through their signs) proceeds mathematically, whereas estimating it in bare intuition — by what the eye can gauge — proceeds aesthetically. Now it is true that we arrive at determinate concepts of how large a thing is only by means of numbers (or, failing that, by approximations formed from numerical series that run on to infinity), and the unit of these is the measure; to that degree, every logical estimating of magnitude is mathematical. Yet since we are obliged all the same to take the magnitude of the measure as already known, then, were this too to be estimated only through numbers — whose unit would in turn have to be some further measure, and hence estimated mathematically — we should never reach a first, foundational measure, and therefore never gain any determinate concept of a given magnitude. So the magnitude of the foundational measure has to be estimated in one way only: by grasping it directly in an intuition and putting it to use, via the imagination, for presenting numerical concepts — which is to say that in the last analysis every appraisal of the magnitude of natural objects is aesthetic (determined, that is, subjectively and not objectively).

Now while the mathematical estimating of magnitude admits of no greatest (numbers being potent without limit), the aesthetic estimating of magnitude does admit of a greatest; and my claim about it is this: that once it is judged as an absolute measure, than which the subject doing the judging can hold none greater to be subjectively possible, it brings the idea of the sublime along with it and awakens that stirring of feeling which no mathematical appraisal of magnitudes by numbers is able to produce (save so far as that aesthetic foundational measure is kept alive and active in the imagination throughout): for the mathematical kind exhibits only relative magnitude, arrived at by comparison with others of like sort, whereas the aesthetic kind exhibits magnitude outright, as far as the mind is able to take it up in a single intuition.

Taking a quantum up into the imagination in intuition, so that it may serve as a measure or as a unit for estimating magnitude by numbers, calls for two operations of this power: apprehension (apprehensio) and comprehension (comprehensio aesthetica). Apprehension poses no problem, since it can run on to infinity; comprehension, however, grows harder the further apprehension pushes ahead, and quickly attains its ceiling — the aesthetically largest foundational measure for estimating magnitude. For once apprehension has gone far enough that the earliest-apprehended part-representations of sense-intuition are already beginning to die away in the imagination as it moves on to apprehend still more, then it is losing on the one side just what it gathers on the other, and comprehension meets with a greatest past which it cannot advance.

This lets us account for something Savary notes in his reports from Egypt: that to feel the full stirring that the pyramids' magnitude produces, one must neither draw very near to them nor stand too far off. For in the latter case the apprehended parts (the stones stacked one on another) are pictured only dimly, and their representation works no effect upon the subject's aesthetic judgment. In the former case, though, the eye requires a stretch of time to carry the apprehension through from the base up to the summit; and here the earlier parts keep partly dying away before the imagination has taken in the later ones, so that comprehension never comes out complete. — The very same account can equally serve to explain the consternation, or sort of embarrassment, that (so the story goes) takes hold of a visitor stepping for the first time into the church of Saint Peter in Rome. For at work here is a feeling that one's imagination falls short of the idea of a whole when it comes to presenting it — a point at which the imagination hits its ceiling and, straining to push past it, collapses back into itself, yet is thereby set into a moving kind of satisfaction.

I shall for now bring forward nothing about why this satisfaction comes about — a satisfaction linked to a representation from which one would look for it least of all, namely one that makes us aware of the unsuitability, and thus the subjective unpurposiveness, of the representation for the power of judgment as it estimates magnitude; I note only that, if the aesthetic judgment is to be pure (with no teleological one, as a judgment of reason, intermixed) and is to furnish an example fully fitted to a critique of the aesthetic power of judgment, then one has to point to the sublime not in works of art (say, buildings, columns, and the like), where a human end fixes the form as well as the size, nor in things of nature whose very concept carries a determinate end within it (say, animals whose natural function is known), but in nature untamed (and even there only so far as it holds in itself no charm, and no stirring born of real danger), purely so far as it comprises magnitude. For in a representation of this kind nature holds nothing that could count as monstrous (nor as splendid or as ghastly); the magnitude taken up may have swelled as far as you please, provided only that the imagination can still gather it into a whole. Monstrous is what we call an object when by its sheer magnitude it undoes the very end that makes up its concept. Colossal, by contrast, is the name for the bare presentation of a concept that is well-nigh too vast for any presentation at all (verging on the relatively monstrous): for the aim of presenting a concept is here made harder by the fact that the object's intuition all but exceeds our power of apprehension. — A pure judgment upon the sublime, however, must take no end of the object whatever as its determining ground, if it is meant to be aesthetic and unmixed with any judgment of understanding or of reason.

Since anything meant to please the merely reflecting power of judgment apart from interest must carry within its representation a subjective purposiveness — one universally valid as such — and yet here, unlike with the beautiful, the judging rests on no purposiveness of the object's form, the question presents itself: just what is this subjective purposiveness? and how does it come to be laid down as a norm, such that in the bare estimating of magnitude — indeed the sort pushed clear to the point where our power of imagination proves unequal to presenting the concept of a magnitude — it can supply a ground for universally valid satisfaction?

In the assembling that the representation of magnitude demands, the imagination presses on to infinity all on its own, with nothing to check it; but the understanding steers it by way of numerical concepts, for which the imagination has to hand over the schema: and while this procedure, insofar as it belongs to the logical estimating of magnitude, does carry something objectively purposive under the concept of an end (as any measuring does), it carries nothing that would be purposive and pleasing for the aesthetic power of judgment. Nor is there anything in this deliberate purposiveness that would compel one to drive the magnitude of the measure — and with it the comprehension of a manifold into one intuition — up to the very limit of the imagination's power and as far as its presentations can ever stretch. For in the understanding's estimating of magnitudes (arithmetic) one comes just as far whether the comprehension of units is carried to the number 10 (in the decadic scheme) or only to 4 (in the tetradic); the further production of magnitude, whether in assembling or, where the quantum is given in intuition, in apprehending, gets done merely progressively (not comprehensively) on some adopted principle of progression. In this mathematical estimating of magnitude the understanding is just as well served and satisfied whether the imagination selects for its unit a magnitude graspable at a glance — say a foot or a rod — or selects a German mile, or even an earth's diameter, of which apprehension is indeed feasible but not comprehension into a single intuition of the imagination (not by the comprehensio aesthetica, though quite well by the comprehensio logica into a numerical concept). In either case the logical estimating of magnitude runs on to infinity unimpeded.

But now the mind gives ear within itself to reason's voice, which for every given magnitude — even those that, though never able to be apprehended in full, are still (in sensory representation) judged as given in full — insists on totality, hence calls for comprehension into one intuition and for the presentation of all the members of a numerical series that grows step by step, and which exempts not even the infinite (space and time already elapsed) from this demand, making it unavoidable instead to think that infinite (in the judgment of ordinary reason) as wholly (in respect of its totality) given.

The infinite, though, is large in an unqualified way (not just by comparison). Set beside it, everything else (of that same class of magnitudes) turns out small. But the chief point — that we are able to think it even so much as a whole — bespeaks a power of the mind that outreaches every scale the senses provide. For that would demand a comprehension yielding a scale, as unit, that stood to the infinite in some determinate ratio statable in numbers: and that is impossible. Yet to be able so much as to think the given infinite, and to do so free of contradiction, demands within the human mind a power supersensible in its own right. For only by way of this power, and of its idea of a noumenon — a noumenon that grants no intuition of itself and yet is set down as the substrate beneath our intuition of the world as sheer appearance — does the infinite of the sensible world come, in the pure intellectual estimating of magnitude, to be drawn wholly beneath a single concept, although it can never be thought out fully in the mathematical kind by numerical concepts. Indeed, the sheer capacity to conceive the infinite of supersensible intuition as given (within its intelligible substrate) outreaches every scale that sensibility affords and is, past all comparison, greater even than the capacity for mathematical estimating; not, admittedly, in a theoretical regard on behalf of our cognitive power, but still as an expansion of the mind, which feels itself equal to overstepping the bounds of sensibility in another regard — the practical one.

Nature, then, is sublime in those appearances of hers whose intuition brings with it the idea of her infinity. And this last can come about in no other way than through the failure of even our imagination's utmost effort at estimating an object's magnitude to prove adequate. Yet for mathematical estimating of magnitude the imagination is a match for any object, able to furnish an adequate measure for it, since the understanding's numerical concepts can, by progression, render any measure adequate to any given magnitude. It must be, then, the aesthetic estimating of magnitude in which one feels the effort at comprehension outrun the imagination's capacity to gather the progressive apprehension into one whole of intuition, and in which one at the same time perceives the inadequacy of this capacity — boundless as it is in its advance — for laying hold of a foundational measure fit, with the least outlay of understanding, for estimating magnitude, and for putting it to that use. Now nature's own unchanging foundational measure is her absolute whole, which for her as appearance amounts to infinity gathered together. Since this foundational measure is, however, a concept in conflict with itself — for an absolute totality of a progression that has no end is impossible — whatever magnitude in a natural object exhausts, to no purpose, the imagination's entire power of comprehension must lead the concept of nature onward to a supersensible substrate (which grounds both nature and, along with it, our own capacity to think), a substrate whose greatness outstrips every measure the senses supply, and which for that reason lets one judge as sublime not the object so much as the mind's own disposition while appraising it.

And so, just as the aesthetic power of judgment, in appraising the beautiful, refers the imagination in its free play to the understanding, so as to accord with the latter's concepts as such (leaving them undetermined): so, in appraising a thing as sublime, it refers that same faculty to reason, so as to accord subjectively with reason's ideas (no matter which), that is, to call up a cast of mind that answers to, and sits well with, the one that the sway of determinate ideas (practical ones) over feeling would induce.

One gathers from this as well that true sublimity must be looked for solely within the mind of the person judging, rather than in the natural object whose appraisal occasions this attunement of his. For who would ever call sublime the misshapen mountain masses heaped in wild disorder upon one another, together with their ice-pyramids, or the gloomy, storming sea, and so forth? But the mind feels itself uplifted in its own appraising when, letting itself go in contemplation of such things — heedless of their form — to the imagination and to a reason that, though bound up with it quite without any determinate end, merely enlarges it, it nonetheless finds the imagination's entire might unequal to that reason's ideas.

Instances of the mathematically sublime in nature, met with in bare intuition, are supplied by every case where what is set before the imagination is not so much a bigger numerical concept as a large unit to serve as measure (so as to shorten the numerical series). A tree we gauge by a man's height will at any rate afford a scale for a mountain; and should that mountain run to about a mile in height, it can serve as the unit for the number expressing the earth's diameter, so as to make the latter intuitable — the earth's diameter for the planetary system familiar to us, that system for the system of the Milky Way; and the boundless throng of such Milky-Way systems, going by the name of nebulae, which presumably make up yet another such system among themselves, leaves us no bound to look for here. Now, in appraising aesthetically a whole so immense, the sublime resides not so much in the numerical magnitude as in this: that with each advance we arrive at units greater still; and to this the systematic partitioning of the world's structure lends its aid, presenting to us everything great in nature as once more small, and, more properly, presenting our imagination in the whole of its boundlessness — and nature together with it — as vanishing away before the ideas of reason, whenever it is called upon to supply a presentation adequate to them.

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

Respect is the feeling that our capacity is inadequate for attaining an idea that is a law for us. The idea of combining any appearance whatever that might be given to us into the intuition of one whole is, however, an idea enjoined upon us by a law of reason, which acknowledges no determinate measure, valid for everyone and invariable, save the absolute whole. Yet our imagination, even when it strains to the utmost in carrying out the combining it is required to make — that of a given object into a whole of intuition, and thus toward the presentation of reason's idea — reveals its bounds and inadequacy, yet at the same time reveals its vocation to bring about accordance with that idea taken as a law. In nature, accordingly, the feeling of the sublime is respect for our own vocation, which we accord to an object of nature by way of a certain subreption (a confusing of things, whereby respect for the object stands in for the respect owed to the idea of humanity within us as subjects), the object making intuitable to us, as it were, the superiority that the rational vocation of our cognitive powers holds over the greatest capacity of sensibility.

So the feeling of the sublime is, on the one hand, a displeasure arising because the imagination, in its aesthetic estimation of magnitude, proves unequal to the estimation made through reason, and, on the other, a pleasure awakened alongside it out of the very concordance between this same judgment — the judgment of the greatest sensible power's inadequacy — and ideas of reason, insofar as the endeavor toward those ideas is, after all, a law for us. For it is a law for us (a law of reason), and part of our vocation, to reckon as small, in comparison with ideas of reason, everything that nature holds as an object of the senses that counts for us as great; and whatever stirs in us the feeling of this supersensible vocation is in harmony with that law. Now the imagination's greatest striving, in presenting the unity required for estimating magnitude, is a relation to something absolutely great, and therefore also a relation to the law of reason that bids us adopt this alone as the highest measure of magnitudes. Thus the inward perception that every sensible yardstick falls short of reason's estimation of magnitude is an accordance with reason's own laws, and a displeasure that stirs in us the feeling of our supersensible vocation, in keeping with which it is purposive — and hence a pleasure — to regard every sensible yardstick as inadequate to the ideas of reason.

In representing the sublime in nature the mind feels itself moved: whereas in the aesthetic judgment upon nature's beauty it rests in tranquil contemplation. Such movement, especially at its beginning, admits of comparison with a tremor — in other words, with a rapidly shifting repulsion and attraction exerted by the selfsame object. What exceeds the imagination's reach (the limit up to which it is driven in taking in the intuition) is, as it were, an abyss in which it is afraid of losing itself; and yet, for reason's idea of the supersensible, to bring forth such a striving of the imagination is not something excessive but rather something lawful: so that, by the very same measure in which it had repelled mere sensibility, it now draws one in once more. The judgment itself, however, remains here always merely aesthetic, because, without grounding itself on any determinate concept of the object, it represents the subjective interplay of the mental powers themselves (imagination and reason) as harmonious precisely through their contrast. For just as, in judging the beautiful, imagination and understanding through their concord bring forth a subjective purposiveness of the mental powers, so here imagination and reason bring it forth through their discord: namely, a feeling that we possess pure, self-standing reason, that is, a faculty of estimating magnitude whose excellence can be made intuitable by nothing save the inadequacy of that very power which, in presenting magnitudes (of sensible objects), is itself without bounds.

The measuring of a space (as apprehension) is at the same time a describing of it, and hence an objective motion within imagining, a progression; by contrast, the drawing-together of the multiplicity into unity — a unity not of thought but of intuition, namely of what has been successively apprehended, gathered into a single moment — is a regression, which annuls once again the temporal condition within the progression of the imagination and renders simultaneity intuitable. This regression, then (given that temporal succession is a condition of inner sense and of any intuition), amounts to a subjective motion of the imagination whereby the latter does violence to inner sense — violence bound to grow the more noticeable the greater the quantum that the imagination compresses into one intuition. The striving, then, to take up into one intuition a measure for magnitudes whose apprehension demands a perceptible span of time is a way of representing that, viewed subjectively, runs counter to purpose, yet objectively is requisite for estimating magnitude and so is purposive: whereby, all the same, this very violence inflicted on the subject by the imagination is deemed purposive for the entire vocation of the mind.

As for the quality of the feeling of the sublime, it consists in this: that it is a feeling of displeasure regarding the aesthetic faculty for judging an object, a displeasure that within that very judging is nonetheless represented as purposive; and this is possible because the subject's own incapacity uncovers the consciousness of an unlimited capacity belonging to that same subject, and the mind can pass aesthetic judgment on the latter only through the medium of the former.

In logical estimation of magnitude, it was recognized as objective that one can never, through the progression of measuring the things of the world of sense in time and space, arrive at absolute totality — objective, that is to say, an impossibility of thinking the infinite as given, rather than merely subjective, namely an inability to grasp it: for there no regard at all is paid to the degree of combining into an intuition as a measure, and everything hinges instead on a concept of number. In an aesthetic estimation of magnitude, by contrast, the numerical concept must drop away or be transformed, and only the imagination's comprehension into the unity of the measure (thus with avoidance of the concepts belonging to a law for the successive production of concepts of magnitude) is purposive for it. — Now when a magnitude comes close to the utmost of our power to combine it into one intuition, while the imagination is nonetheless called upon, through numerical magnitudes (in respect of which we know our power to be unbounded), toward an aesthetic combining into some larger unity, then we feel ourselves inwardly, as aesthetic beings, hemmed in by limits; and yet the displeasure — regarded in the light of the imagination's necessary expansion toward adequacy with that which, within our power of reason, knows no bounds, that is, with the idea of the absolute whole, and hence in the light of the unpurposiveness of the imagination's power — is all the same represented as purposive, after all, for ideas of reason and their arousal. Yet by this very means the aesthetic judgment itself becomes subjectively purposive for reason, as the wellspring of ideas — that is, for an intellectual combining in relation to which all aesthetic combining is small; and the object is received as sublime with a pleasure that becomes possible only through the mediation of a displeasure.