Beautiful And Sublime:Kant’s Double Definitions And Its Significances

Apart from Plato, Immanuel Kant is also a great philosopher who genuinely explores the two concepts in a profound way:beauty and sublime. Through the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant laid a sound foundation for modern aesthetics. His exploration of the two concepts can be viewed as two research periods:pre-critical period and critical period. During the two periods, Kant produced his magnum opus, first Observation on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) and then The Critique of Judgment. However, Chinese scholars have placed more emphasis on the latter than the former in the past decades, making their understanding of the two concepts unilateral. In order to comprehend Kant’s two concepts and other related aesthetic ideas properly, the thesis analyzes Kant’s dual definitions of beautiful and sublime in a comparative perspective. From the viewpoints of value philosophy and knowledge theory, the author argues both the practical value definition and the knowledge theoretical construction of the two concepts, demonstrating their aesthetic implications.