Kant as Propagator: Reflections on Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime

Abstract

Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime is often mined (especially, these days, for damning sexual and racial stereotypes) but rarely singled out for careful study.1 The short book was completed in 1763, when Kant, hardly forty, and already a successful philosophic and scientific author, was enjoying his first years as an instructor at the University of K6nigsberg, where he was, by all accounts, a lively and popular teacher. Raised by a poor but honest father and a pious mother to whom he seems to have been especially devoted, Kant had recently returned from a series of tutoring posts that had introduced him to the ways of fashionable society. Indeed, to one cultivated mistressusing 'mistress' in its old fashioned sense-we owe the earliest extant portrait of Kant, set down in what might almost be called the bloom of youth. K6nigsberg, then under Russian occupation, was itself enjoying a social and moral awakening from the dourer habits of Prussian pietism. Dashing Russian officers mingled socially with both local aristocrats and newly prosperous businessmen. Middle