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.

B. On the Dynamically Sublime of Nature

§ 28. On nature as a might

Might is a capacity that surpasses great obstacles. This same thing is called a dominion when it also surpasses the resistance of something that itself possesses might. Nature, regarded in aesthetic judgment as a might over us that yet wields no dominion, is dynamically sublime.

If nature is to be judged by us as dynamically sublime, then it must be presented as inspiring fear (though the reverse does not hold, that every object inspiring fear is deemed sublime in our aesthetic judgment). For within aesthetic appraisal (which proceeds without a concept), superiority over obstacles can be gauged solely by the magnitude of the resistance. Now what we strive to withstand is an evil, and, should we find our powers unequal to it, it becomes an object of fear. Hence nature, for the aesthetic power of judgment, can pass as a might — and thus as dynamically sublime — only to the extent that it is looked upon as an object of fear.

One can, however, regard an object as fearful without being afraid of it, namely when we judge it in such a way that we merely think the case in which we might wish to offer it resistance, and that then all resistance would be utterly in vain. So the virtuous person fears God without being afraid of him, since he does not think of wishing to resist him and his commandments as any case worrisome on his part. But for every such case that he thinks not impossible in itself, he recognizes it as fearful.

Whoever is afraid can pass no judgment at all on the sublimity of nature, just as little as one taken up by inclination and appetite can judge of the beautiful. The former takes flight from the sight of any object that strikes dread into him; nor can any satisfaction be found in a terror meant in earnest. Hence the agreeableness arising from the cessation of a hardship is gladness. This, however, on account of deliverance from a danger, is a gladness accompanied by the resolve never to expose oneself to it again; indeed, one has no wish even to recall that sensation fondly, far from seeking out the occasion for it oneself.

Bold, overhanging crags that all but menace us, thunderclouds heaping themselves up in the heavens and rolling onward amid lightning and thunder, volcanoes in the whole of their destroying force, hurricanes that leave devastation behind them, the boundless ocean thrown into an uproar, the lofty cascade of a mighty river, and things of this kind — set against their might, these shrink our power of resistance to an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them grows all the more compelling the more frightful it is, so long as we ourselves stand secure; and we readily name such objects sublime, since they lift the soul's fortitude above its ordinary measure and let us uncover within us a power to resist of a wholly different order, one that emboldens us to pit ourselves against the apparent all-power of nature.

For just as, faced with the immeasurability of nature and the insufficiency of our own capacity, we found our own limitation when we sought a measure suited to the aesthetic estimation of its domain's magnitude, yet at the same time found, in our power of reason, a second, non-sensible standard that keeps that very infinitude beneath it as one unit, before which the whole of nature is small, and so found in our mind a superiority over nature itself even in its immeasurability: so likewise the irresistibility of its might, though it makes us, viewed as beings of nature, acknowledge our physical powerlessness, at the same time uncovers in us a capacity to judge ourselves independent of it, together with a superiority over nature upon which rests a self-preservation of a wholly different sort than the one that can be challenged and imperiled by the nature beyond us; and in all this the humanity in our person is left undegraded, even though the human being would be bound to succumb to that dominion. In this manner nature, in our aesthetic judgment, is deemed sublime not on the ground that it excites fear, but because it calls forth in us a power of our own (which is no part of nature), so that we treat as trifling the things we are anxious about (goods, health, and life), and thereby treat its might (to which, as regards these matters, we are certainly subject) as being nonetheless, for us and our personhood, no such dominion as would require us to bow beneath it whenever our supreme principles and their upholding or surrender were at stake. Nature, then, is styled sublime in this place solely because it elevates the imagination toward exhibiting those very cases in which the mind is able to make felt to itself the sublimity proper to its own vocation, a sublimity even above nature.

This self-esteem loses nothing by the fact that we must see ourselves in safety in order to feel this exhilarating satisfaction, and hence that, because the danger is not in earnest, the sublimity of our spiritual power might also (as it may seem) be just as little in earnest. For the satisfaction at issue here bears only upon the vocation of our capacity that comes to light in such a case, inasmuch as the disposition toward it resides in our nature; whereas the developing and exercising of it are left to us and laid upon us as our charge. And there is truth in this, however conscious the human being may be of his present actual impotence when he extends his reflection this far.

This principle does indeed look too far-fetched and over-refined, and thus too exorbitant for an aesthetic judgment; and yet the study of the human being demonstrates the reverse, and reveals that it can lie at the base of the most commonplace assessments, however little one is always aware of it. For what, after all, is that which even to the savage counts as an object of the greatest admiration? A human being who is not startled, who is not afraid, and so does not give way before danger, yet at the same time sets to work vigorously with full deliberation. Even in the most highly civilized state this exceptional regard for the warrior endures; save that one demands besides that he should, together with it, exhibit every peaceful virtue — mildness, compassion, and even a becoming solicitude for his own person — and this precisely because it is here that the indomitability of his mind in the face of danger comes to be recognized. Hence one may dispute as much as one likes, in comparing the statesman with the general, over the superiority of the respect that the one deserves over the other; the aesthetic judgment decides for the latter. War itself, provided it is waged with order and a hallowed respect for the rights of citizens, carries something sublime within it, and renders the cast of mind of a people that wages it in such a fashion all the more sublime the greater the perils to which it stood exposed and beneath which it managed to bear itself bravely; whereas a protracted peace is wont to give the upper hand to the mere trading spirit, and with it low self-seeking, cowardice, and effeminacy, and to degrade a people's cast of mind.

It appears to militate against this analysis of the concept of the sublime, so far as the sublime is attributed to might, that we are wont to picture God — in the thunderstorm, in the tempest, in the earthquake, and the like — as presenting himself at once in wrath and in his sublimity, whereas the fancy of any ascendancy of our mind over these effects, and, so it appears, even over the designs of such a might, would be at one and the same time folly and sacrilege. In this case the frame of mind suited to the appearance of such an object seems to be, not any feeling of the sublimity belonging to our own nature, but rather submissiveness, despondency, and a sense of complete powerlessness — a disposition that is, moreover, ordinarily associated with the idea of that object whenever a natural event of this kind occurs. In religion generally, prostration, adoration with bowed head, with contrite, anxious gestures and voices, seems to be the only fitting conduct in the presence of the deity, which most peoples have therefore adopted and still observe. This disposition of mind, however, is in itself and of necessity very far from being tied to the idea of a religion's sublimity and of its object. That human being who is genuinely afraid, because he discovers within himself a ground for it — aware, that is, that through his blameworthy cast of mind he transgresses against a might whose will cannot be withstood and is at once just — stands in no way in that settledness of mind requisite for admiring the divine greatness, a thing that calls for a temper disposed to tranquil contemplation and for a wholly unconstrained judgment. It is solely then, once he becomes conscious of his own upright disposition pleasing to God, that those workings of might come to stir the idea of this being's sublimity in him — to the degree that he acknowledges within himself a loftiness of disposition answering to that being's will, and is by this means lifted above any fear of such workings of nature, which he does not take to be eruptions of its wrath. Humility, too — taken as an unsparing appraisal of one's own shortcomings, which, where the consciousness of good dispositions is present, might otherwise be readily glossed over as the frailty of human nature — is a sublime cast of mind: to subject oneself, of one's own accord, to the pain of self-reproach so as by degrees to root out the cause of it. In this way alone does religion inwardly distinguish itself from superstition, the latter of which grounds in the mind not reverence for the sublime, but fear and dread before the overpowering being to whose will the terrified human being sees himself subjected without, however, holding it in high esteem — from which of course nothing but ingratiation and flattery can spring, in place of a religion of good conduct of life.

Sublimity, accordingly, resides in no object of nature, but is contained in our mind alone, to the extent that we can grow conscious of standing superior to the nature within us, and by that very means to the nature outside us as well (insofar as it flows in upon us). Everything that arouses this feeling in us — to which belongs the might of nature that calls forth our powers — is then called (though improperly) sublime; and only under the presupposition of this idea within us, and in relation to it, can we ascend to the idea of the sublimity belonging to that being which works within us a heartfelt respect not merely through its might, as displayed in nature, but still more through the capacity, laid within us, to judge that might without fear and to think of our vocation as sublime above it.

§ 29. On the modality of the judgment on the sublime of nature

There are countless objects of beautiful nature regarding which we may straightaway require of everyone an agreement of judgment with our own and, without going much astray, may also expect it; but with our judgment about the sublime in nature we cannot so easily count on gaining acceptance from others. For to be capable of rendering a judgment upon this excellence in natural objects, there seems to be needed a culture far greater in degree — one belonging not solely to the aesthetic power of judgment but likewise to the cognitive faculties on which it rests.

For the mind to be tuned to the feeling of the sublime, it must be receptive to ideas; for what is forbidding to sensibility — though at the same time alluring — consists precisely in nature's incommensurability with those ideas, and thus arises only on the presupposition of them together with an exertion of the imagination that handles nature as a schema for them: since this is a force that reason wields upon sensibility, merely so as to expand it in keeping with reason's proper territory (the practical) and to make it gaze out upon the infinite, which to sensibility yawns as an abyss. In fact, to anyone still crude, what we — schooled beforehand by culture — term sublime will, absent any cultivation of moral ideas, appear nothing more than forbidding. In the evidences of nature's dominion in its devastation, and in the great scale of its might, against which his own vanishes into nothing, he will see nothing but hardship, danger, and distress that would beset the person banished to such a place. Thus the good, and otherwise sensible, Savoyard peasant (as Mr. de Saussure recounts) unhesitatingly called all lovers of the glaciers fools. And who knows whether he would have been so entirely wrong, if that observer had taken on the dangers to which he exposed himself here merely, as most travelers are wont to do, out of a hobbyist's enthusiasm, or in order one day to be able to give affecting descriptions of them? But as it stood, his intention was the instruction of humankind; and the soul-uplifting sensation was one that the excellent man both had himself and instilled, as something over and above their purchase, in the readers of his travels.

But although the judging of nature's sublimity calls for culture (to a greater degree than the judging of the beautiful), it is nevertheless not for that reason something that culture originally brought forth, nor a mere convention established within society; its ground lies instead in human nature itself — specifically in what, along with sound understanding, may be expected and demanded of each person alike, that is, in the disposition toward a feeling for (practical) ideas, in a word, toward what is moral.

On this, now, is grounded the necessity of others' judgment about the sublime agreeing with our own — a necessity that we include within our own judgment at the same time. For just as we reproach with a want of taste anyone who stays indifferent when appraising a natural object we find beautiful, so of whoever remains unmoved before something our judgment pronounces sublime we declare that he possesses no feeling. Yet both we demand of every human being, and we likewise assume them present in him once he possesses some culture — with this one distinction: the first we require flatly of anyone at all, since in this the power of judgment ties the imagination purely to the understanding, taken as the faculty of concepts; the second, however, since therein the power of judgment relates the imagination to reason as the faculty of ideas, we require only on a subjective presupposition (one we nonetheless deem ourselves justified in expecting of anyone), namely the presupposition of moral feeling within the human being, and in this way we attach necessity to this aesthetic judgment too.

It is in this modality of aesthetic judgments — that is, in the necessity they presume to claim — that the critique of the power of judgment finds one of its chief moments. For it is just this that brings to light an a priori principle at work in them, raising them up out of empirical psychology — where they would otherwise stay buried, amid the feelings of enjoyment and pain (marked off merely by the vacuous label of a finer feeling) — in order to set them, and through them the power of judgment, within the class of those grounded upon principles a priori, and, as such, to carry them across into transcendental philosophy.

General remark on the exposition of the aesthetic reflecting judgments

As regards the feeling of pleasure, any object is to be reckoned as belonging to one among the agreeable, the beautiful, the sublime, and the good (absolutely) (iucundum, pulchrum, sublime, honestum).

The agreeable, as an incentive of the desires, is throughout of one and the same kind, no matter from where it comes and however specifically different the representation (of sense and of sensation, considered objectively) may be. Hence, in judging its influence upon the mind, what matters is only the multitude of charms (simultaneous and successive) and, as it were, only the mass of agreeable sensation; and this, accordingly, can be made intelligible through nothing other than quantity. Nor does it cultivate; it pertains solely to enjoyment. — The beautiful, on the other hand, calls for the representation of a certain quality in the object, one that admits of being made intelligible and brought under concepts (even though the aesthetic judgment does not in fact bring it there); and it cultivates us, since it teaches us at once to attend to purposiveness in the feeling of pleasure. — The sublime lies purely in the relation wherein the sensible within nature's representation is appraised as fit for a possible supersensible employment of it. — The absolutely good, when it is appraised subjectively according to the feeling it inspires (as the object of moral feeling)—namely, as the determinability of the subject's powers by the representation of an absolutely necessitating law—differs above all through the modality of a necessity that rests upon concepts a priori and that harbors within itself not a mere claim but likewise a command of assent binding on everyone; and of itself it pertains not to the aesthetic power of judgment but to the pure intellectual one, being ascribed, moreover, not in a merely reflecting judgment but in a determining one, and not to nature but to freedom. Yet the determinability of the subject by this idea—that of a subject able to feel within itself obstacles posed by sensibility, and at the same time, through surmounting them, a superiority over it as a modification of its state—that is to say, the moral feeling, stands nonetheless in such kinship with the aesthetic power of judgment and with its formal conditions that it can help to exhibit the lawfulness of an action done from duty as itself aesthetic, namely as sublime, or indeed as beautiful, without any loss to its purity: something that fails to happen were one to bring it into natural union with the feeling of the agreeable.

Should one extract the upshot of the exposition given thus far of the two kinds of aesthetic judgment, the following concise explanations would emerge from it:

Beautiful is what gives pleasure in the mere act of judging (hence not through the sensation of sense following a concept of the understanding). It follows of its own accord from this that it must please devoid of all interest whatsoever.

Sublime is that which, by its resistance to the interest of the senses, pleases without mediation.

The two of them, taken as explanations of an aesthetic judging that holds universally, point back to subjective grounds—on one side to those of sensibility, so far as it serves the contemplative understanding, on the other to those of sensibility so far as it works against itself yet in behalf of the ends of practical reason, both grounds being nevertheless combined in one and the same subject, and purposive with a view to the moral feeling. The beautiful makes us ready to cherish something—nature itself included—apart from any interest; the sublime, to prize it even in defiance of our (sensible) interest.

The sublime admits of the following description: it is an object (in nature) whose representation determines the mind to conceive nature's unattainability as a presentation of ideas.

If taken to the letter and viewed logically, ideas admit of no presentation. But once we enlarge our empirical faculty of representation (whether mathematically or dynamically) for the intuition of nature, reason unfailingly enters as the faculty of the independence of absolute totality, and gives rise to the mind's endeavor—vain though it is—to render the representation of the senses commensurate with that totality. This striving, together with the feeling that the idea stays out of the imagination's reach, is itself a presentation of how our mind is subjectively purposive when it puts the imagination to work for its supersensible vocation, and it obliges us to think nature itself, subjectively, taken as a whole, as a presentation of something supersensible, though we cannot render this presentation objectively.

For we soon become aware that nature in space and time entirely lacks the unconditioned, and hence also absolute magnitude, which is nevertheless demanded by the most common reason. Precisely thereby we are further reminded that our concern is only with a nature qua appearance, and that this nature must itself still be looked upon as no more than the presentation of a nature in itself (a nature that reason holds in the idea). This idea of the supersensible, though—one we cannot determine any further, so that we can accordingly not cognize nature as its presentation but only think it—is roused in us by an object whose aesthetic judging strains the imagination up to its boundary, be it of extension (mathematically) or of its might over the mind (dynamically), since it rests upon the feeling (the moral feeling) of a determination of the mind that wholly transgresses the province of the former, in view of which the representation of the object comes to be appraised as subjectively purposive.

Indeed, a feeling for the sublime of nature cannot well be thought without connecting with it a disposition of the mind similar to that for the moral; and although an immediate pleasure in nature's beauty likewise both presupposes and fosters a certain liberality in the manner of thought, that is, an independence of the satisfaction from mere enjoyment of the senses, freedom is thereby represented still more as in play than under a lawful business: which is the genuine character of the morality of the human being, where reason must do violence to sensibility, only that in the aesthetic judgment about the sublime this violence is represented as exercised by the imagination itself, functioning as an instrument of reason.

Hence, too, the satisfaction felt in nature's sublime is merely negative (whereas in the beautiful it is positive)—that is, a feeling that the imagination robs itself of its own freedom, in being purposively determined according to a law other than that of its empirical use. Thereby it acquires an extension and might that is greater than the one it sacrifices, but whose ground remains hidden from it, whereas it feels both the sacrifice, or the deprivation, and, along with it, the cause to which it is thereby made subject. The astonishment verging on fright, the dread and the holy shudder that grips the beholder before the spectacle of mountain masses climbing skyward, of deep gorges with their raging torrents, of deeply shaded solitudes that invite melancholy meditation, and so forth, is—so secure does he know himself to be—no genuine fear, but merely an endeavor to enter into it through the imagination, so as to feel the might of this very faculty, to bind the stirring of the mind thus aroused together with the mind's repose, and thereby to prevail over the nature within ourselves, and consequently over that outside us as well, so far as it is able to bear upon the feeling of our well-being. For the imagination, in keeping with the law of association, renders our contented condition physically dependent; the same power, however, in keeping with the principles of the schematism of the power of judgment (and hence so far as it stands subordinate to freedom), serves as a tool of reason and of its ideas, and as such as a might for asserting our independence in the face of nature's influences, for belittling as small what counts as great by the former standard, and so for situating the absolutely great only within the subject's own determination. This reflective act of the aesthetic power of judgment—the act of lifting itself to a commensurateness with reason (though without any determinate concept of the latter)—nonetheless exhibits the object itself as subjectively purposive by way of the objective incommensurateness of the imagination, at its utmost expansion, with reason (as the faculty of ideas).

One must here in general attend to what was recalled already above—namely, that the transcendental aesthetic of the power of judgment must treat exclusively of pure aesthetic judgments, and that no examples may accordingly be borrowed from those beautiful or sublime objects in nature which presuppose the concept of an end; for in that case there would be a purposiveness that is either teleological or grounded on mere sensations of an object (gratification or pain), and thus in the former case not aesthetic and in the latter not merely formal. Thus if one calls the sight of the starry heavens sublime, one must not lay at the ground of its judging concepts of worlds inhabited by rational beings, and then the shining points with which we behold the space over our heads filled up, as their suns moving in orbits arranged very purposively for them, but rather merely as one sees it, as a vast vault that encompasses everything; and merely under this representation must we place the sublimity that a pure aesthetic judgment ascribes to this object. Likewise the sight of the ocean, not as we, enriched with all sorts of knowledge (which, however, is not contained in the immediate intuition), think it; say as a vast realm of aquatic creatures, as the great treasury of water for the vapors that impregnate the air with clouds for the benefit of the lands, or also as an element that indeed separates parts of the world from one another yet nonetheless makes possible the greatest community among them: for that yields nothing but teleological judgments; rather one must, merely as the poets do, according to what the sight of it shows—say, when it is contemplated at rest, as a clear mirror of water bounded only by the sky, but, when it is turbulent, as an abyss threatening to swallow up everything—nevertheless be able to find the ocean sublime. Precisely the same is to be said of the sublime and beautiful as found in the human figure, in whose case we must not, as determining grounds of the judgment, revert to concepts of the ends for which all its members are there, nor allow the agreement with them to enter into our (then no longer pure) aesthetic judgment—even though the fact that they do not conflict with those ends is, to be sure, a necessary condition of aesthetic satisfaction as well. Aesthetic purposiveness consists in the lawfulness of the power of judgment as it stands in its freedom. The satisfaction taken in the object hangs upon the relation in which we would place the imagination: only that, of itself, it must keep the mind engaged in a free occupation. If instead something else—whether a sensation of sense or a concept of the understanding—settles the judgment, then, lawful though it be, it is not the verdict of a free power of judgment.

Hence, whenever one talks of intellectual beauty or of intellectual sublimity, first, these expressions are not fully accurate, since what is at issue are aesthetic modes of representation that would not be encountered in us at all were we mere pure intelligences (or transposed ourselves in thought into that quality); second, although the two of them, being objects of an intellectual (moral) satisfaction, are indeed compatible with the aesthetic so far as they rest upon no interest, they are nonetheless once again hard to reconcile with it, because they are meant to produce an interest which, supposing the presentation is to accord with the satisfaction in aesthetic judging, could in the latter come about in no other way than through an interest of sense that one connects with it in the presentation, whereby, however, the intellectual purposiveness suffers damage and is rendered impure.

The moral law, in the might it wields within us over any and all incentives of the mind preceding it, is what constitutes the object of a pure, unconditioned intellectual satisfaction; and since this might properly renders itself aesthetically recognizable only by way of sacrifices (a deprivation, albeit one on behalf of inner freedom, which on the other hand discloses in us an unfathomable depth of this supersensible faculty, whose consequences reach out into the unsurveyable), the satisfaction, viewed from the aesthetic side (in reference to sensibility), is negative—that is, opposed to this interest—yet viewed from the intellectual side, positive and joined with an interest. It follows from this that the intellectual good, which is purposive in itself (the morally good), when judged aesthetically, must be represented less as beautiful than rather as sublime, in such a way that it awakens the feeling of respect (which disdains charm) more than that of love and familiar affection; for human nature does not fall into accord with that good on its own, but only through the violence that reason inflicts upon sensibility. Conversely, whatever we name sublime in the nature outside us, or likewise within us (e.g., certain affects), comes to be represented—and thereby to grow interesting—solely as a might of the mind to lift itself above certain obstacles of sensibility through moral principles.

I will dwell a little on the latter. The idea of the good conjoined with affect goes by the name of enthusiasm. Such a condition of the mind appears to be sublime, to such a degree that people commonly claim: apart from it nothing great can be brought about. But now every affect⁹ is blind—either in choosing its end, or, when the end has indeed been furnished by reason, in carrying it out; for it is that movement of the mind which renders the mind unable to conduct a free deliberation of principles so as to determine itself thereby. Thus it can in no way merit a satisfaction of reason. Aesthetically, nonetheless, enthusiasm is sublime, because it is a straining of the powers through ideas that give the mind a momentum which acts far more powerfully and enduringly than the impulse through representations of sense. But (which seems strange) even absence of affect (Apatheia, Phlegma in significatu bono) in a mind that emphatically pursues its unalterable principles is sublime, and indeed in a far more excellent way, because it at the same time has the satisfaction of pure reason on its side. A mind of this kind alone is called noble: an expression that is afterward applied also to things, e.g., buildings, a garment, a style of writing, bodily bearing, and the like, when these arouse not so much astonishment (affect in the representation of novelty that exceeds expectation) as admiration (an astonishment that does not cease with the loss of novelty), which happens when ideas, in their presentation, accord unintentionally and without art with aesthetic satisfaction.

Every affect of the brave sort (namely the sort that rouses the awareness of our powers to surmount any resistance whatever (animi strenui)) is aesthetically sublime, e.g., anger, even despair (namely the indignant sort, though not the despondent one). But the affect of the melting kind (which makes the very striving to resist an object of displeasure (animum languidum)) has nothing noble about it, though it can be counted as belonging to the beautiful in the manner of sensing. Hence the emotions that can grow strong enough to become affects are also very diverse. There are courageous emotions, there are tender ones. The latter, when they rise to the level of affect, are worth nothing at all; the inclination to them is called sentimentality. A commiserating pain that refuses to be comforted, or into which—when it bears on invented ills—we knowingly let ourselves be drawn, right up to the deception of fancy that treats them as though they were real, both proves and produces a tender yet at the same time feeble soul, one that displays a beautiful side and may indeed be termed fanciful, though not so much as enthusiastic. Novels, maudlin stage-plays, vapid moral maxims that trifle with dispositions (falsely, to be sure) called noble, but that in truth leave the heart shriveled and unfeeling toward the stern precept of duty, and render it devoid of every reverence for humanity's dignity in our own person and for the right of human beings (which is quite a different thing from their happiness) and, generally, of all steadfast principles; even a sermon on religion that commends a groveling, base soliciting of favor and fawning, one that surrenders every reliance on one's own capacity to resist the evil in us, in place of the vigorous determination to put to the test those powers that, for all our frailty, still remain to us for mastering the inclinations; the false humility that sets, in self-contempt, in a whimpering and dissembled repentance, and in a merely suffering cast of mind, the one way in which alone one might come to please the supreme being—all of these are not even consonant with what might be reckoned to beauty, far less with what might be reckoned to the sublimity of the mind's cast.

But even stormy agitations of the mind—be they bound up, under the name of edification, with ideas of religion, or, as belonging merely to culture, with ideas that carry a social interest—can, however greatly they may strain the imagination, in no way lay claim to the honor of a sublime presentation, unless they leave behind a frame of mind that bears, if only indirectly, upon the awareness of one's strength and resolve toward that which brings with it a pure intellectual purposiveness (the supersensible). For otherwise all these emotions amount to nothing but motion, which one is happy to have for the sake of one's health. The pleasant weariness that ensues upon such a jostling through the play of the affects is a relishing of well-being springing from the restored equilibrium of the manifold vital forces within us—an enjoyment that in the end comes down to just the same as the one the voluptuaries of the Orient find so cozy when they have their body, so to speak, kneaded through and through and let all their muscles and joints be gently pressed and flexed; save that there the moving principle lies for the most part within us, while here it lies wholly outside us. Thus one person or another now fancies himself edified by a sermon in which nothing whatever is built up (no system of good maxims), another bettered by a tragedy, though he is merely pleased at boredom fortunately chased away. The sublime, accordingly, must at all times bear a relation to the way of thinking, that is, to maxims that secure for the intellectual and for the ideas of reason a supremacy over sensibility.

There is no cause to fear that the feeling of the sublime stands to lose through such a detached mode of presentation, one that turns wholly negative in regard to the sensible; for the imagination, though beyond the sensible it lights on nothing it can cling to, yet feels itself unbounded precisely by this doing-away with its own barriers: and that setting-apart is therefore a presentation of the infinite, which precisely on that account can never be anything other than a bare negative presentation, and yet enlarges the soul. There is perhaps no passage more sublime in the Jews' book of law than this commandment: You shall make yourself no graven image, nor any likeness at all, whether of what is in heaven, or on the earth, or beneath the earth, and so on. This commandment by itself is able to account for the enthusiasm that the Jewish people, during its civilized era, felt toward its religion whenever it set itself alongside other nations, or for the pride that Mohammedanism instills. The very same holds also of the representation of the moral law and of the predisposition to morality within us. It is a wholly erroneous apprehension that, were one to strip it of all that might commend it to the senses, it would then bring with it none other than a cold, lifeless assent, and no stirring force or emotion whatever. The truth is exactly the opposite; for there, where the senses now behold nothing further before them while the unmistakable and inextinguishable idea of morality yet persists, it would be needful rather to temper the impetus of an unbounded imagination, lest it climb as high as enthusiasm, than, out of a fear that these ideas want force, to seek aid on their behalf in pictures and childish apparatus. Hence governments too have gladly permitted religion to be amply furnished with the latter accessories, and have thus sought to relieve the subject of the trouble, but at the same time also of the capacity, of extending his powers of soul beyond the limits that one arbitrarily sets for him and by means of which one can more easily handle him as merely passive.

This pure, soul-elevating, merely negative presentation of morality, on the contrary, carries no danger of fanaticism, which is a delusion of craving to see something past every bound of sensibility, that is, to dream in accordance with principles (to rave with reason), to will it; and that, precisely because with the former the presentation remains merely negative. For the inscrutability of the idea of freedom cuts off entirely every avenue to positive presentation: the moral law, on the other hand, is of itself sufficient in us and determining from the outset, so much so that it does not so much as allow us to cast about for a determining ground lying outside it. If enthusiasm is to be compared with madness, then fanaticism is to be compared with derangement, of which the latter is the least compatible of all with the sublime, because it is broodingly ridiculous. In enthusiasm, as an affect, the imagination is unbridled; in fanaticism, as a deep-rooted, brooding passion, it is ruleless. The former is a passing accident that occasionally befalls even the healthiest understanding; the second 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 whose laws alone are known to us, while we cannot reach, through intuition, the supersensible faculty within ourselves in which the ground of this legislation resides.

It remains to be observed that, even though the satisfaction in the beautiful, no less than that in the sublime, is not merely marked off recognizably from the other aesthetic judgings by universal communicability, but through this very property also gains an interest with regard to society (within which it admits of being communicated), the separation from all society is nevertheless likewise looked upon as something sublime, provided it rests on ideas that see past all sensible interest. To suffice for oneself, and thus to stand in no need of society, yet without being unsociable—that is, without fleeing it—is something that draws near to the sublime, as does every raising of oneself above needs. To flee one's fellow human beings, on the other hand, from misanthropy, because one bears them enmity, or from anthropophobia (shyness of humankind), because one dreads them as enemies, is in part ugly, in part contemptible. Nonetheless there is a (very improperly so-called) misanthropy, the predisposition to which tends to settle with age in the mind of many a right-thinking person, one who, as regards benevolence, is philanthropic enough, but who through a long, sad experience has been drawn far away from satisfaction in human beings: to which the leaning toward seclusion bears witness, or the fanciful longing for a remote country seat, or else (in young persons) the fancied bliss of passing one's lifetime with a small family upon some isle of which the rest of the world knows nothing, a wish that the novel-writers and poets of Robinsonades know so well how to turn to account. Falsehood, ingratitude, injustice, the childish character of those ends that we ourselves deem weighty and grand—ends in whose pursuit human beings do one another every imaginable harm—stand so at odds with the idea of what they might be were they willing, and run so counter to the keen wish to see them improved, that, so as not to hate them, seeing that one cannot love them, the surrender of all the joys of society seems only a slight sacrifice. This sadness—not over the evils that fate imposes upon other human beings (of which sympathy is the cause), but over those that they inflict upon themselves (which rests on antipathy in principles)—is, because it rests on ideas, sublime, whereas the former can likewise count only as beautiful. — The equally ingenious and thorough Saussure says, in the description of his Alpine journeys, of Bonhomme, one of the Savoyard mountains: »There prevails there a certain insipid sadness.« He was therefore acquainted, after all, with an interesting sadness that the sight of a wasteland inspires—into which human beings might well wish to transport themselves in order to hear or learn nothing further of the world—which then need not be so entirely inhospitable as to offer human beings only a most toilsome sojourn. — I offer this observation solely with the aim of calling to mind that affliction as well (not a downcast sadness) may be numbered among the vigorous affects, when it is grounded in moral ideas; whereas, if it rests on sympathy and as such is likewise lovable, it belongs merely among the melting affects: so as thereby to draw notice to the frame of mind that is sublime in the former case alone.

One may now set the transcendental exposition of aesthetic judgments just carried through alongside the physiological one, as a Burke and many sharp-witted men among us have elaborated it, so as to see where a purely empirical exposition of what is sublime and beautiful would lead. Burke¹⁰, who merits being named the most eminent author in this manner of treatment, arrives by this route (p. 223 of his work) at the following: »that the feeling of the sublime is founded upon the impulse toward self-preservation and upon fear, that is, upon a pain which, since it does not reach the point of a real disruption of the bodily parts, brings forth movements that—inasmuch as they purge the finer or coarser vessels of perilous and troublesome obstructions—are able to arouse agreeable sensations, not pleasure indeed, but a species of gratifying shudder, a certain repose that is blended with terror.« The beautiful, which he grounds on love (from which, however, he wants desire to be kept separate), he traces (pp. 251–252) »to the slackening, relaxation, and enfeeblement of the fibers of the body, and hence a softening, dissolution, exhaustion, a sinking away, a dying away, a melting away with pleasure.« And now he confirms this manner of explanation not only through cases in which the imagination in connection with the understanding, but even in connection with sensation of sense, can arouse in us the feeling of the beautiful as well as of the sublime. — As psychological observations, these dissections of the phenomena of our mind are exceedingly fine and provide rich material for the most favored investigations of empirical anthropology. Nor is it to be denied that all representations within us, be they objectively nothing but sensible or else wholly intellectual, can yet subjectively be tied to gratification or pain, however unnoticeable each may be (for they collectively affect the feeling of life, and none among them, so far as it constitutes a modification of the subject, is capable of being indifferent); indeed, that, as Epicurus contended, gratification and pain are at bottom always corporeal in the end, whether they set out from imagining or even from representations of the understanding: for life, deprived of the feeling of the bodily organ, would be nothing but a consciousness of one's own existence, and no feeling of faring well or ill, that is, of the furtherance or checking of the vital forces; for the mind, taken by itself alone, is wholly life (the life-principle itself), and obstacles or furtherances have to be sought beyond it and yet within the human being himself, and hence in the union with his body.

But if one places the satisfaction in the object entirely and wholly in the fact that it gratifies through charm or through emotion, then one may also not expect any other person to agree with the aesthetic judgment that we pass; for about this each rightly consults only his own private sense. But then all censorship of taste also entirely ceases; unless one were to make the example that others give through the accidental agreement of their judgments into a command of approval for us—a principle against which we would nevertheless presumably resist and appeal to the natural right of subjecting the judgment that rests on the immediate feeling of one's own well-being to one's own sense and not to that of others.

If, then, the judgment of taste must of necessity hold not as egoistic, but, by its inner nature—that is, on its own account, and not on account of the examples of their taste that others put forward—as pluralistic, once one accords it the standing of a judgment that may at once require everyone to fall in with it: then there must lie at its ground some principle a priori (whether objective or subjective), one at which no ferreting out of empirical laws of the mind's changes can ever arrive: for such laws only let it be known how judging occurs, but do not prescribe how one ought to judge, and this, moreover, in such a manner that the prescription is unconditioned—which is just what the judgments of taste presuppose, in that they would have the satisfaction bound up immediately with a representation. The empirical exposition of aesthetic judgments may therefore always be what makes the start, so as to furnish the material for a loftier inquiry; a transcendental treatment of this faculty is nonetheless possible and belongs essentially to the critique of taste. For unless it had principles a priori, it could not possibly sit in judgment over the judgments of others and pass verdicts of approval or rejection upon them with even a semblance of right.

What remains, of all that pertains to the analytic of the aesthetic power of judgment, comprises first and foremost the

Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments

§ 30. The deduction of aesthetic judgments concerning nature's objects must be directed not at what we call sublime in nature, but solely at the beautiful

The claim that an aesthetic judgment makes to universal validity for every subject, being a judgment that has to be grounded on some principle a priori, stands in need of a deduction (that is, a legitimation of its pretension), one that has to be supplied beyond the mere exposition of that judgment — namely, whenever it concerns a satisfaction or displeasure in the object's form. The judgments of taste passed upon nature's beauty are precisely such judgments. For the purposiveness then, even so, has its ground in the object and in its shape, granted that it does not point to that object's relation to other objects by way of concepts (with a view to a cognitive judgment); instead it merely concerns the apprehension of this form, insofar as that form, within the mind, proves commensurate with the faculty both of concepts and of their presentation (this latter being one and the same as the faculty of apprehension), taken quite generally. With regard to nature's beauty, accordingly, one can likewise pose a variety of questions bearing on the cause of this purposiveness of its forms: for instance, how one is to account for nature's having scattered beauty so prodigally on every side, even upon the ocean floor, which the human eye — the sole thing for which such beauty is after all purposive — but seldom reaches, and so forth.

The sublime in nature, however — if we pronounce a pure aesthetic judgment upon it, one not blended with concepts of perfection understood as objective purposiveness, since were that the case the judgment would instead be teleological — may be taken as altogether formless or shapeless and yet as something in which a pure satisfaction is found, and may display a subjective purposiveness belonging to the given representation; and so the question now presents itself: whether, for an aesthetic judgment of this sort, over and above the exposition of what gets thought within it, one may further demand a deduction of its claim to some (subjective) principle a priori.

The answer to this runs as follows: that the sublime in nature bears that name only in a loose sense, and that strictly it must be attributed merely to the manner of thinking, or rather to the foundation for it lying in human nature. The apprehension of an object that is otherwise formless and devoid of purposiveness does no more than provide the occasion for becoming conscious of this — an object that in this fashion gets employed subjectively and purposively, yet is not judged as such an object in its own right and for the sake of its form (as it were, species finalis accepta, non data). Our exposition of the judgments upon the sublime in nature was thus at the same time their deduction. For once we had taken apart how the power of judgment reflects within such judgments, we came upon in them a purposive relationship among the cognitive powers — one that has to be laid a priori at the basis of the faculty of ends (the will) and is on that account itself purposive a priori: a relationship that thereupon immediately carries with it the deduction, that is, the vindication of such a judgment's claim to a universally necessary validity.

We shall accordingly have merely to look for the deduction of judgments of taste, that is, of the judgments concerning the beauty of natural things, and in this way discharge the task set for the aesthetic power of judgment in its entirety.

§ 31. On the method of the deduction of judgments of taste

A deduction—that is, the warranting of the lawfulness—of a kind of judgment becomes requisite only where that judgment stakes a claim to necessity; and this holds too whenever it calls for subjective universality, in other words the concurrence of everyone: although it remains, all the while, no cognitive judgment but only one concerning the pleasure or displeasure taken in a given object, that is, the pretension to a subjective purposiveness that shall hold without exception for each person, a purposiveness meant to rest on no concepts of the matter, since it is a judgment of taste.

For, in the latter of these cases, what lies before us is no cognitive judgment at all—not a theoretical one, which takes as its ground the concept of a nature as such by way of the understanding, nor a (pure) practical one, which posits as its ground the idea of freedom as given a priori through reason; and hence, as regards its validity a priori, we have to vindicate neither a judgment that sets forth what some thing is, nor the demand that, in order to produce it, I ought to perform something: and so, for the power of judgment in general, it will merely be the universal validity of a singular judgment—one that voices the subjective purposiveness belonging to an empirical representation of an object's form—which has to be exhibited, so as to explain how it may be possible that something should please simply in the appraising of it (apart from sensation of the senses or concept), and how, just as the appraisal of an object on behalf of a cognition in general is governed by universal rules, so too the satisfaction felt by each individual may be held forth as a rule for everyone besides.

Now, supposing that this universal validity is to rest not upon a gathering of votes and an inquiring around among others as to their way of sensing, but as it were upon an autonomy belonging to the subject that passes judgment on the feeling of pleasure (within the given representation)—that is, upon its very own taste—while nevertheless not being derivable from concepts either: then a judgment of this kind—as the judgment of taste indeed is—carries a twofold peculiarity, and a logical one at that: namely, first, a universal validity a priori that is yet not a logical universality proceeding by concepts, but rather the universality proper to a singular judgment; second, a necessity (one that must in every instance rest on grounds a priori) which all the same hinges on no grounds of proof a priori by whose representation the assent that the judgment of taste requires of everyone might be extorted.

The unraveling of these logical peculiarities—those wherein a judgment of taste sets itself apart from every cognitive judgment—will of itself be enough for the deduction of this peculiar faculty, so long as we here, to begin with, leave aside the whole of its content, that is, the feeling of pleasure, and set the aesthetic form side by side merely with the form that objective judgments take, as logic lays it down. We therefore wish first of all to bring these characteristic properties of taste before the mind, illustrated by examples .

§ 32. First peculiarity of the judgment of taste

In determining its object as regards satisfaction (as beauty), the judgment of taste lays claim to everyone's assent, just as if it were objective.

To say: this flower is beautiful amounts to nothing more than ascribing to it its own claim upon everyone's satisfaction. Through the agreeableness of its scent it has no claims whatever. This scent delights the one, while to the other it makes the head swim. What, then, could one surmise from this, other than that beauty must be taken to be a property of the flower itself, one that does not conform to the diversity of minds and of so many senses, but to which these must conform if they wish to pass judgment upon it? And yet this is not how matters stand. For the judgment of taste consists precisely in this, that it calls a thing beautiful only according to that constitution by which the thing accommodates itself to our manner of taking it in.

Moreover, of every judgment that is meant to prove the subject's taste it is required that the subject judge on its own, without needing to grope its way through experience among the judgments of others and to inform itself beforehand of their satisfaction or dissatisfaction in the same object, and hence that it pronounce its judgment not as imitation, on the grounds that a thing does, as it happens, really please universally, but rather a priori. Yet one might expect that an a priori judgment would have to include a concept of the object for the cognition of which it supplies the principle; the judgment of taste, however, rests on no concepts whatsoever and is nowhere cognition at all, but merely an aesthetic judgment.

For that reason a young poet is not to be turned from his conviction that his poem is beautiful, neither by the public's judgment nor by that of his friends; and if he does grant them a hearing, it happens not because his estimate of the matter has now changed, but because — even supposing (at least as concerns him) that the whole public were of a false taste — he still, in his hunger for applause, finds cause to conform himself to the common delusion (even against his own judgment). Only later, once his power of judgment has been sharpened further through practice, does he freely depart from his earlier judgment; just as he also handles those of his judgments that rest wholly upon reason. Taste lays claim to autonomy alone. Were one to let the judgments of others serve as the determining ground of one's own, that would be heteronomy.

That one rightly extols the works of the ancients as models and calls their authors classical, like a certain nobility among writers who by their precedent give laws to the people, seems to point to sources of taste that are a posteriori and to refute its autonomy in every subject. Yet with equal justice one could say that the ancient mathematicians, who even now pass for models — scarcely to be dispensed with — of the utmost thoroughness and elegance in the synthetic method, no less gave proof of an imitative reason on our side and of its inability to generate, out of itself, rigorous proofs endowed with the greatest intuition by means of the construction of concepts. No employment of our powers, however free it might be — and this holds even of reason, which is obliged to derive all its judgments a priori from one common source — would keep clear of faulty attempts, if every subject had always to begin wholly from the raw endowment of its native temper and no others had gone before it with their own; and that precedence was aimed not at turning those who come after into mere imitators, but rather, by the way they proceeded, at putting others onto the trail, so that these might search out the principles in their own selves and thereby follow their own, and often better, course. Even in religion, where surely each one must take the rule of his conduct from himself, since he also remains answerable for it and cannot shift the blame for his transgressions onto others as teachers or predecessors, still nothing is ever achieved by general precepts, whether one has received them from priests or philosophers or drawn them from oneself, so much as by an example of virtue or holiness, which, set forth in history, neither renders dispensable the autonomy of virtue drawn from the proper and original idea of morality (a priori), nor transforms it into a mechanism of imitation. Following after, which relates to a precedent, and not imitation, is the correct expression for every influence that the products of an exemplary author can have upon others; which signifies no more than this: to draw from the same sources from which that author himself drew, and to learn from one's predecessor merely the manner of conducting oneself therein. Yet of all our faculties and talents it is taste, above all, that — since its judgment admits of no determination by concepts or rules — has the greatest need of examples of whatever, in the onward march of culture, has held its place longest in approval, lest it should soon lapse back into coarseness and sink to the rawness of those first attempts.

§ 33. Second peculiarity of the judgment of taste

The judgment of taste cannot be settled by any grounds of proof whatever, as though it were merely something subjective.

Should someone judge a building, a prospect, or a poem to be without beauty, then, in the first place, he refuses to let a hundred voices, however loudly they all extol it, press their approval inwardly upon him. He may indeed pretend that it pleases him too, so as not to be taken for someone lacking taste; he may even fall to doubting whether his taste has been adequately formed through familiarity with a large enough range of objects of some given sort (much as a person who thinks he can make out something far off as a forest, while everyone else takes it for a town, comes to distrust the judgment of his own eyes). This much, however, he grasps quite clearly: that the applause of others furnishes no proof holding good for the estimation of beauty; that at most they may look and take note in his stead, and that whatever a crowd has seen in one and the same manner can, for him who supposes he has seen it differently, count as a sufficient ground of proof toward a theoretical and therefore logical [judgment], yet that what has given others pleasure is never able to furnish the basis of an aesthetic judgment. The unfavorable judgment others pass on us may, to be sure, quite justifiably give us pause about our own, though it can never bring us to see it as mistaken. Hence there is no empirical ground of proof by which to compel a judgment of taste from anyone.

Secondly, still less can a proof a priori according to determinate rules determine the judgment about beauty. Suppose someone recites his poem to me, or brings me along to a drama that, in the end, simply refuses to sit well with my taste: he is welcome to summon Batteux or Lessing, or critics of taste older and more celebrated still, along with every rule these have set up, as proof that his poem is beautiful; and even should particular passages, the very ones that displease me, chime perfectly with rules of beauty (in the shape there laid down and generally recognized): I stop up my ears, refuse to hear any reasons or subtle reasoning, and will sooner suppose those critics' rules to be false, or at least inapplicable to the case at hand, than let my judgment be fixed by grounds of proof a priori , seeing that what is at issue is to be a judgment of taste, not one of understanding or of reason.

This appears to be one of the principal reasons why the name of taste, of all names, has been fastened upon this aesthetic capacity for judging. For a person may list off for me every ingredient in a dish and observe of each that each of them is otherwise agreeable to me, and may over and above this rightly praise the wholesomeness of this fare; yet I stay deaf to all such grounds, I put the dish to the test of my own tongue and palate: and it is on that basis (not on universal principles) that I pass my judgment.

Indeed, a judgment of taste is invariably rendered, in each instance, as a singular judgment concerning the object. By setting the object, in respect of its pleasing quality, alongside the judgment of others, the understanding is able to arrive at a universal judgment: for instance, all tulips are beautiful; that, however, is then no judgment of taste but a logical one, which makes the bearing of an object upon taste into a predicate belonging to things of a certain kind as such; whereas what alone constitutes the judgment of taste is that through which I find a single given tulip beautiful, that is, find my satisfaction in it to be universally valid. Its peculiarity, however, consists in this: that, even though it has merely subjective validity, it nonetheless lays claim to all subjects just as thoroughly as could ever be the case if it were an objective judgment resting on grounds of cognition and capable of being enforced through a proof.

§ 34. No objective principle of taste is possible

By a principle of taste one would mean a fundamental proposition on whose condition the concept of an object might be brought under it, so that one could then, by inference, arrive at the result that the object is beautiful. But this is flatly impossible. For it is directly in the representation of the object that that I must feel the pleasure, and no grounds of proof can talk me into having it. Thus although critics, as Hume remarks, can reason more plausibly than cooks, they nonetheless share one and the same fate with them. The determining ground of their judgment cannot be looked for in the strength of proofs, but only in the reflecting that the subject carries out upon its own state (of pleasure or displeasure), with all prescriptions and rules set aside.

But that about which critics can and nevertheless should reason, in such a way that it serves toward the correction and extension of our judgments of taste, is not to lay out the determining ground of this kind of aesthetic judgment in a universally usable formula, which is impossible; rather it is to conduct an inquiry into the cognitive faculties and their business in these judgments, and to set forth in examples the reciprocal subjective purposiveness, of which it was shown above that its form in a given representation is the beauty of that representation's object. Thus the critique of taste is, in itself, merely subjective as regards the representation whereby an object comes to be given to us: that is, it is the art or the science of subsuming under rules the mutual bearing that understanding and imagination have on each other within the given representation (leaving aside any prior sensation or concept), and thus their agreement or disagreement, and of determining them as regards their conditions. It is art when it shows this only through examples; it is science when it traces the possibility of any such judging back to the very nature of these faculties, taken as faculties of cognition as such. It is with the latter, as a transcendental critique, with which alone we are here concerned throughout. It is to develop the subjective principle of taste, and to justify it, as a principle a priori of the power of judgment. Criticism practiced as an art merely seeks to bring to bear, on the judging of its objects, the physiological (here psychological), and hence empirical, rules by which taste in fact operates (without pausing to consider how they are possible), and it passes critical judgment on the products of fine art; just as the former passes judgment on the faculty itself by which they are judged.

§ 35. The principle of taste is the subjective principle of the power of judgment as such

What distinguishes the judgment of taste from the logical judgment is this: the latter places a representation under concepts of the object, whereas the former brings it under no concept whatever, for otherwise the necessary universal assent it demands would admit of being forced by proofs. Nevertheless, it is like the logical judgment in professing a universality and necessity—though not one drawn from concepts of the object, and therefore only a subjective one. Now because what makes up a judgment's content (all that pertains to cognition of the object) is its concepts, whereas the judgment of taste cannot be settled by any concept, this latter rests solely upon that subjective formal condition which any judgment whatever requires. Underlying every judgment as its subjective condition is the very faculty of judging, or the power of judgment. Brought to bear on a representation by which an object is given, this power calls for two representational faculties to be in agreement: the imagination (which supplies the intuition together with the assembling of its manifold) and the understanding (which supplies the concept whereby the unity of that assembling is represented). Here, because no concept of the object serves as the judgment's basis, the judgment can amount only to placing the imagination itself—with a representation whereby an object is given—beneath the condition that understanding as such arrives from intuition at concepts. That is to say: since the imagination's freedom lies precisely in its schematizing apart from any concept, a judgment of taste has to rest upon the bare sensation of imagination in its freedom and understanding with its lawfulness reciprocally quickening one another—thus on a feeling which allows the object to be judged according to the purposiveness of the representation (through which an object is given) in regard to the furthering of the cognitive powers in their free play; and a principle of subsumption is what taste, being a subjective power of judgment, harbors—though not one of intuitions under concepts but rather of the faculty of intuitions or presentations (that is, the imagination) under the faculty of concepts (in other words, the understanding), so far as the first of these in its freedom accords with the second in its lawfulness.

To track down this legitimating ground through a deduction of the judgments of taste, nothing can guide us but the formal peculiarities belonging to judgments of this sort—that is, taken merely so far as their logical form comes under consideration.

§ 36. On the task of a deduction of judgments of taste

With the perception of an object, the concept of an object in general — of which that perception contains the empirical predicates — can be immediately combined into a cognitive judgment, and thereby a judgment of experience be produced. Underlying this there now are concepts a priori of the synthetic unity belonging to the manifold of intuition, concepts through which that manifold gets thought as an object's determination; and these concepts — the categories — demand a deduction, which was in fact furnished in the Critique of Pure Reason as well, and by means of which the task could then be resolved: How are synthetic cognitive judgments a priori possible? This task, then, bore upon the a priori principles of the pure understanding and its theoretical judgments.

Yet a perception, too, may have immediately combined with it a feeling of pleasure (or displeasure) and a satisfaction, which attends the object's representation and takes the place of a predicate for it, so that an aesthetic judgment — one that is not a cognitive judgment — thereby arises. In the case of such a judgment — provided it is no mere judgment of sensation but rather a formal judgment of reflection, which requires of everyone this satisfaction as necessary — there must lie at the basis something serving as a principle a priori, something that may perhaps be merely subjective (in case an objective one should prove impossible for judgments of that sort), yet that, even so, stands in need of a deduction, in order that it be grasped how an aesthetic judgment can lay claim to necessity. On this now rests the task with which we are now occupied: How are judgments of taste possible? This task, accordingly, bears upon the principles a priori of the pure power of judgment as they hold in aesthetic judgments — that is, in judgments of the kind where it is not merely charged (as it is in the theoretical ones) with subsuming things beneath objective concepts of the understanding while standing under a law, but where it is, for itself and subjectively, at once the object and the law.

One may also present this task in the following way: How is there possible a judgment that, drawing solely upon one's own feeling of pleasure in an object and setting aside any concept of it, would appraise this pleasure a priori — that is, without needing to await the concurrence of anyone else — as something pertaining to the representation of that same object in every other subject?

It is easy to see that judgments of taste are synthetic, for they reach past the object's concept and even past its intuition, appending to that intuition, as a predicate, something that is not even cognition — namely, a feeling of pleasure (or displeasure). But that they are nonetheless — although the predicate here, namely the own pleasure that the representation carries with it, is empirical — judgments a priori as regards the required assent of everyone , or wish to be taken for such, this too is already contained in the very terms of their claim; and so this task of the critique of the power of judgment falls under transcendental philosophy's general problem: How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?

§ 37. What is actually asserted a priori of an object in a judgment of taste?

The fact that the representation of an object stands in immediate connection with a pleasure is something that can be noticed only inwardly, and, if one meant to point to nothing beyond this, it would furnish no more than an empirical judgment. For there is no representation with which I could combine a priori a determinate feeling (of pleasure or displeasure), save where some principle determining the will a priori underlies it in reason; and in that case the pleasure (in moral feeling) follows from that principle, yet precisely on that account admits of no comparison whatever with the pleasure of taste, since it requires a determinate concept of a law: the latter, by contrast, is meant to attach itself immediately to the bare act of judging, in advance of any concept. For this reason, too, every judgment of taste is a singular judgment, since it ties its predicate of satisfaction not to a concept but to a single empirical representation that has been given.

Hence what a judgment of taste represents a priori—as a rule holding universally for the power of judgment and valid for everyone—is not the pleasure itself, but the universal validity of this pleasure, which the mind apprehends as bound up with the bare appraising of an object. This is an empirical judgment: that I perceive and judge an object as accompanied by pleasure. This, however, is a judgment a priori: that I regard it as beautiful, which is to say, that I am entitled to require of everyone that same satisfaction as something necessary.