A Study Of Kant’s Sense Of The Beautiful And The Sublime In The Perspective Of Time And Space

In Kant’s aesthetic thought,the aesthetic concepts of the beautiful and the sublime have always been praised,but in Kant’s own various analyses of the beautiful and the sublime,the temporal and spatial elements are not clearly identified.We know that aesthetic activity,though different from perceptual activity,also shares the temporal and spatial elements of perceptual awareness,because aesthetic activity must first be based on perceptual awareness.So,do such temporal and spatial elements exist or not? What is the reason for Kant’s failure to specify it? This paper argues that not only does this element exist,but also that there are many contradictions and ambiguities in the "analysis of beauty" and the "analysis of the sublime" precisely because Kant himself abandoned the position of examining aesthetic activity in an a priori spatio-temporal form.The task of this paper is to revisit two important texts of Kant.On the observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime and other writings and Critique of the Power of Judgment,through the perspective of time and space in Kant’s "a priori theory of sensibility," to discover the contradictions and confusions in the texts and point out their causes,and to uncover the true spatio-temporal elements in Kant’s aesthetic sensibility.He then tries to apply it to the sense of the beautiful and the sublime,reorganizing Kant’s views on related issues and grounding them in a more solid "a priori theory of sensibility" that recognizes aesthetic activity as an important kind of knowledge.The main contribution of the thesis is thus to specify how space and time create the beautiful and the sublime in the imagination;to break with the traditional view that the sublime is superior to the beautiful,and to show that not only do they share the same spatio-temporal basis,but that the beautiful itself can reach a state similar to the sublime through certain conditions.