Kant's Justified Dismissal of Artistic Sublimity

Abstract

One curious point in Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment is that, although the general exposition of Kant's aesthetic theory appears to be constructed on structurally parallel accounts of two basic aesthetic predicates, the beautiful and the sublime, in their possible applications to two basic sources of objects of aesthetic experience, nature and art, Kant almost entirely dismisses one of the combinations that would be expected from his dual treatment of aesthetics, namely artistic sublimity.1 It is a fairly common contention among the readers of the Critique that Kant, because of his morally oriented ambitions in aesthetics and the moral significance he attaches to nature rather than art, prioritizes nature over art and takes nature as the field of pure, paradigm cases in his analytics of the beautiful and of the sublime. However, the mentioned dismissal is still curious, since Kant devotes a considerable portion of the book, from §43 to §55, to account for art's place in his aesthetic theory and the application of judgments of beauty to works of art. What makes the absence of any account of artistic sublimity even more curious is that Kant never explicitly rules out its possibility. On the contrary, he seems to acknowledge that works of art can also be called sublime by giving examples from architecture and various genres of literature.