Reflections on Burke, Kant, and Solitude and the Sublime

Abstract

This essay reviews Edmund Burke's and Immanuel Kant's views on the sublime as the author had earlier addressed them in Solitude and the Sublime. Her reflections focus on the importance of the rise of interest in aesthetics as a distinctive kind of experience in the eighteenth century and the Romantic era, on how aesthetic experience (in Kant's view) sits in relation to pure reason and practical reason, on the importance of aesthetic experience in recruiting first-person testimony, and on the importance of aesthetic discussions for emphasizing, first, the necessity that aesthetic experience be a response to an actual concrete object (in the beautiful) and, second, the significance of the mathematical sublime in showing human representational capacities themselves as objects of aesthetic experience.