Kant's theory of the sublime and beautiful

I have read a little bit about Kant's theory of the sublime and beautiful. This theory is both intriguing and mind boggling all at the same time. It is based on humans theory of what is beautiful and what is seen as beautiful and how people see each other.


"  according to the order that make up the four sections of Kant's work, 1) distinct (nonhuman)
objects of the feeling of beauty and sublimity, 2) attributes of the beautiful
and sublime in human beings in general, 3) the distinction between the sublime
and beautiful in the relations of the sexes, and 4) the bearing of the feeling of
the beautiful and the sublime on characteristics of nations." -  http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30054209?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21103600842703

 The book he wrote has four different sections outlining four different sections of the theory, the first being the relation between nonhuman objects and the feelings of beauty and sublimity that rise. 

I have not read this chapter within the book so i am not sure of what he actually talks about in full as all i have read at this point is a bit about this book as a review from someone, therefore there isnt much detail about it and what he has written about. 

I am guessing that within section one he talks about how we - humans, see things and their view sometimes gets corrupt and they are not necessarily seeing the beauty of the nonhuman things that are surrounding them.


"He argued that human concepts and categories structure our view of the world and its law"
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"he argues that it is our faculty of judgment that enables us to have experience of beauty and grasp those experiences as part of an ordered, natural world with purpose"
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"Kant believes he can show that aesthetic judgment is not fundamentally different from ordinary theoretical cognition of nature, and he believes he can show that aesthetic judgment has a deep similarity to moral judgment. For these two reasons, Kant claims he can demonstrate that the physical and moral universes – and the philosophies and forms of thought that present them – are not only compatible, but unified. " - http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantaest/


"The initial issue is: what kind of judgment is it that results in our saying, for example, ‘That is a beautiful sunset’. Kant argues that such aesthetic judgments (or ‘judgments of taste’) must have four key distinguishing features. First, they are disinterested, meaning that we take pleasure in something because we judge it beautiful, rather than judging it beautiful because we find it pleasurable. The latter type of judgment would be more like a judgment of the ‘agreeable’, as when I say ‘I like doughnuts’.

Second and third, such judgments are both universal and necessary. This means roughly that it is an intrinsic part of the activity of such a judgment to expect others to agree with us. Although we may say ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, that is not how we act. Instead, we debate and argue about our aesthetic judgments – and especially about works of art -and we tend to believe that such debates and arguments can actually achieve something. Indeed, for many purposes, ‘beauty’ behaves as if it were a real property of an object, like its weight or chemical composition. But Kant insists that universality and necessity are in fact a product of features of the human mind (Kant calls these features ‘common sense’), and that there is no objective property of a thing that makes it beautiful.

Fourth, through aesthetic judgments, beautiful objects appear to be ‘purposive without purpose’ (sometimes translated as ‘final without end’). An object’s purpose is the concept according to which it was made (the concept of a vegetable soup in the mind of the cook, for example); an object is purposive if it appears to have such a purpose; if, in other words, it appears to have been made or designed. But it is part of the experience of beautiful objects, Kant argues, that they should affect us as if they had a purpose, although no particular purpose can be found." - http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantaest/

I can across this interesting and insightful explanation which goes a bit deeper into the theory which helped me to understand it a lot more. Kant's theory is about  people seeing the beauty within the world and how it affects each one person differently, it depends on their views of the world and how they see things, this in turn cant alter how they think about certain situations and objects.