ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the figures of the subject and the object of sublime experience as they appear in Immanuel Kant's account. Kant, like his predecessor Edmund Burke, maintains a distinction between the beautiful and the sublime as two kinds of aesthetic pleasure: the former linked to harmony and joy, and the latter to an awe and a fear that bordered on the painful. While Kant's discussion of the mathematically sublime invokes and repeats the tension between Imagination and Reason in the form of a tension within the former between apprehension and comprehension, his presentation of the dynamically sublime is more complex. Kant tells that the experience of the sublime reveals the destination of a faculty that is inherent in human nature. Kant makes a distinction between objects of nature that presuppose the concept of purpose and the kind of purposiveness operative in the sublime.
