AESTHETICS claim that everyone ought to so This is only possible if we are all in possession of a common sensibility (Gemeinsinn)—a sensibility which, since it is normative, cannot derive from experience but must be transcendental Kant begins his ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ with a distinction between two kinds of sublimity, which he calls (not very happily) the mathematical and the dynamical In each case the sublime object is vast, great, overwhelming; but in the mathematical case what is overwhelmed is our perception and in the dynamical case what is overwhelmed is our power Whatever is mathematically sublime is too great to be taken in by any of our senses; it awakens in us the feeling of a faculty above sense which reaches out towards infinity Whatever is dynamically sublime is something to which any resistance on our part would be vain, but which yet allows us to remain without fear in a state of security Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like—these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might But the sight of them is the more attractive, the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in security; and we willingly call these objects sublime, because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height and discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature (M 100–1) Nature can be both beautiful and sublime, but art can only be beautiful What, then, is the relation between beauty in nature and beauty in art? Kant’s answer is subtle On the one hand, nature is beautiful because it looks like art On the other hand, if we are to admire a beautiful work of art, we must be conscious that it is artificial and not natural Yet, Kant tells us, ‘the purposiveness in its form must seem to be as free from all constraint of arbitrary rules as if it were a product of mere nature’ (M 149) For the judgement of beautiful art taste is needed; for its production what is needed is genius The production of beauty is the purpose of art, but artificial beauty is not a beautiful thing, but a beautiful representation of a thing Beautiful art can indeed present as beautiful things that in nature are ugly or repellent There are three kinds of beautiful arts, each with their beautiful products There are the arts of speech, namely rhetoric and poetry 253