Kant on the Sublime: Mathematical and Dynamical

Following the Analytic of the Beautiful, Kant devotes a separate section of the Critique of Judgment to the sublime (das Erhabene), a category of aesthetic experience he treats as related to, yet importantly distinct from, beauty. Where the beautiful concerns an object's form and produces a pleasure through the harmonious free play of imagination and understanding, the sublime arises from formlessness or from what exceeds any determinate form altogether — objects (or rather, Kant insists, representations occasioned by objects) that are boundless or overwhelming, such as raging oceans, towering mountain ranges, erupting volcanoes, or the starry heavens contemplated as a whole. Kant divides the sublime into two species: the "mathematically sublime," occasioned by sheer magnitude or vastness that overwhelms the imagination's capacity for aesthetic "comprehension" (as opposed to endless "apprehension," which can in principle proceed indefinitely), and the "dynamically sublime," occasioned by nature's might or power as something that could threaten and overwhelm us physically, contemplated, crucially, from a position of safety.