WorkImmanuel Kant

Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime

Kant's early, best-liked book: an essayist's map of the sublime and the beautiful, charming and — in its pages on race and sex — now his most disputed.

by Immanuel Kant111 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen
First published: 1764(aged 40)
Original language: German

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Overview

Before the philosopher who would spend a decade in near-silence and then reset European thought, there was a witty essayist writing to be enjoyed. This slim book, published in Königsberg in 1764, sorts human feeling into two families — the sublime moves us, the beautiful charms us — and then applies the distinction to temperaments, to the sexes, and to whole nations. It is not the rigorous aesthetics Kant would build twenty-six years later; it is closer to a work of observation, drawing on the British writers on taste, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson and Burke, whose 1757 enquiry had split the sublime from the beautiful before him. Rousseau matters more. Kant was reading Emile in exactly these years, and the annotations he later crowded into his own interleaved copy record a mind being turned around by it — away from ranking people by cleverness, toward the dignity of the ordinary person. The book sold and was liked, and it kept Kant's name before a general readership he would soon abandon for eight hundred unreadable pages. Its fourth section is why it is still argued over. Sorting nations and races by their aesthetic character, Kant wrote sentences about non-European peoples and about women that his modern readers cannot set aside, and that now sit at the centre of the scholarship on whether the philosopher of universal human dignity also held a hierarchy of races.

Key concepts

What does Kant mean by the 'finer' feeling?

The finer feeling is our receptivity to beauty and sublimity — the gentler, more delicate emotions — as opposed to the coarse pleasures of appetite and gross gratification. This early book studies who possesses it and in what mixture, tracking it through temperaments, the sexes and nations. It observes the feeling in people; it does not, as the later aesthetics will, analyse the objects that arouse it.

How does the book tie temperaments to these feelings?

Kant pairs each of the old four temperaments with an aesthetic character. The melancholic has the truest feeling for the sublime; the sanguine is drawn to the beautiful; the choleric loves a showy splendour that only borrows sublimity; and the phlegmatic feels little of either. The scheme is playful sorting, not doctrine, and it shows the book working as observation rather than system.

What is 'true virtue' as opposed to virtue that only looks like it?

True or genuine virtue rests on a principle: a felt sense of the beauty and dignity of human nature, widening into a universal benevolence. Kindly impulses like good-naturedness, sympathy or love of honour merely resemble it — Kant calls these adopted virtues, beautiful and useful but not yet moral, because they follow feeling and circumstance rather than a settled ground.

What does Kant mean by calling woman 'the fair sex'?

He extends the sublime-beautiful split to the sexes: woman's understanding is 'beautiful,' man's 'deep' or noble, and he ranks their characters and virtues accordingly, tying each to charm or to principle. These pages, alongside the fourth section's sorting of races, are why the book is now disputed — sentences the philosopher of universal dignity's modern readers cannot set aside.

Why call this observation rather than a theory of beauty?

Because Kant writes here as an observer of human character, not a philosopher deducing what beauty is — he says he casts the eye more of an observer than of a philosopher. The witty essayist's map of feeling has none of the machinery of a critique. The rigorous grounding of taste arrives only twenty-six years later, in the third Critique.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Map of the Feelings

What separates the feeling that charms us from the feeling that awes us — and can such a sorting of temperaments, sexes and whole peoples survive once the observer's own prejudices are counted in?

Feeling sorts into two families, the young Kant proposes — the sublime that moves us and the beautiful that charms — and the observation runs outward from there to temperament, to the sexes, to the character of nations. It is the essayist's method, closer to Shaftesbury and Burke than to any system, and it won him a wide readership. The fourth section is why the book is still argued over: ranking non-European peoples and women by aesthetic character, it left sentences his modern readers set at the very centre of the dispute over Kant and race.

aesthetics
beauty
moral psychology
sublime
gender
national character
religion

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Within this work

passages held: 111
distinct concepts: 210
by passages held, corpus-wide: #482

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “beauty” and “sublime”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 81 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
beauty	sublime	15
aesthetics	sublime	14
aesthetics	beauty	11
aesthetics	gender	7
aesthetics	taste	5
beauty	national character	5
aesthetics	moral psychology	4
aesthetics	national character	4
beauty	moral psychology	4
beauty	taste	4
gender	moral psychology	4
moral psychology	sublime	4
national character	sublime	4
religion	sublime	4
aesthetics	religion	3
beauty	gender	3
gender	sublime	3
moral psychology	national character	3
sublime	taste	3
national character	religion	2
national character	taste	2
moral psychology	religion	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1764 Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (Untersuchung über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral)
Kant's runner-up entry in the Berlin Academy's prize contest, and the sharpest of the pre-critical essays: it already sets philosophy's method against mathematics', the problem the first Critique would finally resolve.
DE
1764 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen) you are here DE
1766 Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics (Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik)
The anonymous, ironic book of 1766 in which Kant's faith in speculative metaphysics visibly collapses — the clearing of the ground that the first Critique, fifteen years later, would build on.
DE
1781 The Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)
The book at the centre of everything after it: the first of the three Critiques, revised almost past recognition for its 1787 second edition, and the work the Prolegomena was written to explain.
DEEN
1783 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
Written to salvage the Critique of Pure Reason after its baffled reception, this shorter 1783 restatement runs the same argument in reverse, and became most readers' first encounter with Kant.
DEEN
1784 An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? (Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?)
The most quoted thing Kant wrote, and among the shortest: a 1784 magazine answer to a question a Berlin pastor had left hanging, and the defining slogan of the German Enlightenment.
DE
1784 Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht)
The essay where Kant first treats history as more than chronicle — nine propositions arguing it has a hidden rational shape; the seed of Perpetual Peace, and a device Hegel later took over.
DE
1785 Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten)
The short, deliberately preliminary book that isolates the categorical imperative before building anything on it; three years later the Critique of Practical Reason would give the same moral law its fuller grounding.
DEEN
1786 What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? (Was heißt: sich im Denken orientieren?)
An intervention in the pantheism controversy that split the German Enlightenment: written months after Mendelssohn's death, it stakes out a rational faith between dogmatic proof and Jacobi's leap.
DE
1788 The Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft)
The second of the three Critiques, and Kant's reply to those who doubted the Groundwork's freedom; it introduces the fact of reason and the postulates of God and immortality.
DEEN
1790 Critique of Judgement
The book the Romantics and the German Idealists built on: Kant's 1790 account of beauty and of purpose in nature, written to bridge the gulf that had opened between his first two Critiques.
DEEN
1793 Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft)
The book that got Kant ordered to stop writing on religion: four essays, from 1793, rebuilding Christian doctrine on reason and consigning revelation and clergy to what Kant called counterfeit service.
DE
1795 Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf)
The late essay whose plan for a league of free states reached the twentieth century intact; Kant, past seventy, wrote it as Prussia pulled out of the war against revolutionary France.
DE
1797 Introduction to the Doctrine of Right (Einleitung in die Rechtslehre)
The framing section of the Doctrine of Right, the legal half of Kant's 1797 Metaphysics of Morals; it defines a right through freedom alone and ties every right to a power to coerce.
DE
1797 The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics (Die Metaphysik der Sitten)
Long read as a mere appendix to the Groundwork, this ethical half of the 1797 Metaphysics of Morals is where Kant spells out the duties of virtue; later Kantians recovered it as his theory of character.
DEEN
1798 On the Power of the Mind to Master Its Morbid Feelings by Sheer Resolution (Von der Macht des Gemüts, durch den bloßen Vorsatz seiner krankhaften Gefühle Meister zu sein)
The third part of Kant's late Conflict of the Faculties (1798), written as a reply to the physician Hufeland — a philosopher's dietetics, and his most personal page on governing the body through the mind.
DE
1803 Lectures on Pedagogy (Über Pädagogik)
One of the last books to appear under Kant's name (1803), though his editor Rink built it from lecture notes; the fullest record of Kant on education, and of his debt to Rousseau.
DE

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