Observations on the Sense of the Beautiful and the Sublime

A new translation of Immanuel Kant’s 1764 Observations on the Sense of the Beautiful and the Sublime in modern American English with the original German in the back.

This is Volume II in the Complete Works of Immanuel Kant from Newcomb Livraria Press.

Immanuel Kant’s 1764 Observations on the Sense of the Beautiful and the Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen) is his entry into the philosophic field of Aesthetics and provides the framework of his theories on beauty which would be fully enumerated in his 1790 Critique of Judgement.

Kant distinguishes between the beautiful and the Sublime, which are further divided into Attached (mathematical) and Free (dynamic) Beauty.

The beautiful is playful and limited to certain forms, while the sublime is serious and limitless.

Beauty inhabits life; the sublime is beyond life.

This is a more nuanced, developed form of Edmund Burke’s popular theories on Aesthetics.