Outline what Kant understands by the sublime and the beautiful and Essay

Outline what Kant understands by the sublime and the beautiful and evaluate their usefulness for understanding the aesthetic - Essay Example In this regard, Immanuel Kant, one of the greatest (if not the greatest) modern philosophers has provided a guide with which humanity may be able to understand and explicate visions and experience of beauty in the human world. This paper intends to present an outline of Kant’s understanding of the sublime and the beautiful. And then, the author will determine and evaluate the usefulness of Kant’s discussion of the sublime and the beautiful for understanding the aesthetic experience. In lieu with this, the paper will have the following structure: first part will be the introduction where the intention and structure of the paper is presented. The second part will be a discussion Kant’s concept of beauty. The third part will be on Kant’s concept of the sublime and fourth part will be the evaluation of Kant’s discussion on the beautiful and the sublime. In the end, it is the hope of the author that the understanding gained from this exposition helps in creating a vision of a world that is authentically responsive to the presentations and representations of what it means to be a human person. Kant’s discussion of the beautiful starts with the claim that the judgement of taste is disinterested, â€Å"Taste is the faculty of judging an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful.†1 This implies that judgment of taste is impartial of any feelings or emotions since â€Å"We must not be in the least prejudiced in favour of the existence of the things, but be quite indifferent in this respect, in order to play the judge in things of taste.†2 This is the first condition of beauty.3 The second condition is that the pleasure from the disinterested satisfaction should be a universal voice bereft of any personal satisfactions or