The Beautiful and the Sublime

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter takes the beautiful and the sublime as examples of unity between us and the material world. It starts with Immanuel Kant’s solution to the difficulty of explaining how there can be quarrels about our experience of sensory beauty, if it is a merely subjective pleasure. His solution requires reference to a supersensible being who is ‘behind’ our experience, and who has the purpose of our highest good, of which these experiences are a symbol. The chapter looks at two works by Beethoven, the first written just a few years after Kant’s Third Critique. The chapter distinguishes various senses of ‘sublime’ and urges that the Kantian sublime fits these pieces better than other senses that have been used to interpret them. The chapter ends with comparing Kantian and Pauline conceptions of freedom, and it relates the patristic tradition and Jonathan Edwards to the connection of beauty and the Spirit.