Abstract

: In §25 of the third Critique Kant points to a convergence of the beautiful and the sublime. According to Kant, when we judge something to be sublime, we judge it to be absolutely great. The role of magnitude in these judgements is not restricted to the physical dimensions of the object but extends to all its properties: as Kant says in §25, in the Analytic of the Sublime, we call even the beauty of an object great or small. The preceding Analytic of the Beautiful provides, however, no means for quantifying free beauty. Can the beauty of an object therefore be so great that it tips over into the sublime? The “sublimely beautiful” seems an oxymoron by Kant’s account, since he associates the sublime with formlessness and beauty with form. An analysis of the different senses in which Kant employs the notion of “form” in the Critique of Judgement – among others, the goodwill of phenomena towards being known, the beauty of mere appearance (Latin: formositas) and, notoriously, charmless structurality – should permit a better appreciation of this difficulty. The essay concludes with a discussion of aesthetic ideas (Analytic of the Beautiful) and ideas of reason (Analytic of the Sublime), detecting a convergence in the aesthetic idea that the beautiful form of an object can be said to convey of the pure (unrealised) knowability of the world (the harmony of the faculties as the condition – and nothing more – of cognition in general).