On the Verge of Sublimity

Immanuel Kant’s remarks on music in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) are often read as a revealing fault line within Enlightenment debates regarding reason and sensation. Kant’s aesthetic theory famously defends the autonomy and universal communicability of judgments of beauty. But his hierarchy of the arts places music near the bottom, characterizing it as fleeting, affective, and largely devoid of conceptual content. This judgment reflects broader Enlightenment ideals about the senses and the body, which privilege arts aligned with language and ideas over those grounded in immediate pleasure. Yet Kant’s dismissal of music has become increasingly problematic when read against twenty-first‑century music scholarship, which emphasizes that, as European music developed in the nineteenth century, its cognitive complexity, social meaning, and capacity for nonconceptual knowledge also eclipsed its former association with affect. Examining Kant’s view on music therefore offers not only insight into his aesthetic system but also a lens through which to assess the historical limits of Enlightenment rationalism itself.

In his Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant distinguishes among the genres of what he called the schöne Künste (fine arts) by giving them a ranking: Literature takes first place, as “it expands the heart by setting the imagination free; and within the limits of a given concept, among the unlimited variety of possible forms that harmonize with it, presents the one that combines its representation with a wealth of thoughts to which no use of language is fully adequate, and is thus elevated to the level of ideas.”¹ Kant then initially puts music in second place, as it supposedly comes closest to poetry and combines with poetry naturally. However, Kant proceeds to revise this ranking by putting music in the last place of the fine arts, behind poetry, painting, and sculpture.² The pictorial arts assume music’s place in second, since they are more lasting than the art of sound. Kant suggests that the pictorial arts begin with an aesthetic idea and provide sensible form to it, whereas music starts with a play of sensations, whereafter an aesthetic idea is found to match one’s sensation or affect.³ In other words, music lacks conceptually and metaphysically describable contents: “For although it [music] speaks through pure sensations without concepts, and thus does not, like poetry, leave something behind to think about . . . [music] is admittedly more enjoyment than culture and has, judged by reason, less value than any of the other fine arts.”⁴

To fully understand Kant’s stance on the hierarchy of the fine arts, we must first consider how “aesthetics” came to be defined in the Enlightenment, and only then examine Kant’s theory of aesthetic value and experience. Aesthetics, as coined by Alexander Baumgarten, comprised a science of sensible cognition. This is a low but structured form of knowledge, one that is distinct from pure logic and reason. By Kant’s time, aesthetics had become a central arena for Enlightenment debates, in particular regarding 1) the role of reason versus sensation; 2) whether judgments of taste could claim universal validity; and 3) how art contributes to moral and intellectual cultivation. Kant offers answers to all three of these debates and in doing so proposes four distinct modes of judgment and satisfaction when it comes to aesthetic experience: 1) the beautiful (das Schöne); 2) the agreeable (das Angenehme); 3) the good (das Gute); and 4) the sublime (das Erhabene). In what follows, we will be using the beautiful as a baseline for all aesthetic judgment, and by contrasting the different modes in relation to each other, we will gain insight into where music belongs on the spectrum of Enlightenment aesthetics.

To Kant, the experience of beauty is a representational mental state with four characteristics: disinterested pleasure; purposiveness without purpose; the free play of imagination and understanding; and the claim to universal agreement. Let us start by explaining the concept of “interest.” For Kant, concept is a rather technical term. Consider the following: Individual X has an interest in object Y’s being some state F, if and only if Y’s being F is conducive to X accomplishing his/her goals or relevant to X’s obligations. In other words, an individual is only interested in an object when the object retains qualities that assist the individual in achieving objectives; since beauty does not contribute to a person’s wellness in that regard, the experience of it is largely disinterested. And since the experience of beauty is largely disinterested, that must imply that we have no stake in an artwork’s inherent beauty; its beauty may give us some pleasure, but in the end, any lack thereof would likely not result in any detrimental effects. Kant describes this as follows: “It is readily seen that to say that [an object] is beautiful and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I make of this representation in myself, not how I depend on the existence of the object. One must not be in the least biased in favor of the existence of the thing, but must be entirely indifferent in this respect in order to play the judge in matters of taste.”⁵ For example, a person has an interest in the subway system because it can take them from point A to point B at an affordable price and provide cover in bad weather; by contrast, they would have a disinterested relationship with a beautiful, vibrant sunset over the horizon. One admires the colors and shape of the light for their own sake, as one does not have a practical desire to take hold of the sunset or use it for personal gain.

According to Kant, the experience of beauty only requires aesthetic appreciation and sentiment, and is distinctly unable to evoke any sort of rational thinking within the person experiencing said beauty. “In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful,” he writes, “we do not relate the representation by means of understanding to the object for cognition, but rather relate it by means of the imagination (perhaps combined with the understanding) to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure. The judgment of taste is therefore not a cognitive judgment, hence not a logical one, but is rather aesthetic, by which is understood one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective.”⁶ However, the absence of the faculty of understanding within the experience of beauty does not necessarily make the experience nonpurposive. Indeed, Kant offers two ways in which aesthetic experiences may be purposive:   

1. Judgment of the good; represents things as conducive to one’s ends, and, therefore, as fit for practical purposes
2. Judgment of perception; grounded in perceptual experience, which represents things as members of kinds, and, therefore, as fit for theoretical purposes

These two types of judgment make the experience of beauty generally purposive. Even so, in an age that privileged rational, concept-based judgment, the absence of cognition in the experience of beauty would seem to disqualify it from being purposeful, hence Kant’s idea of aesthetic experience being purposive without purpose.

This idea relates closely to the next representational mental state of aesthetic experience: what Kant refers to as the free play of imagination and understanding. Kant argues that aesthetic experience may not relate specifically to concepts of rational cognition, but that it nevertheless does involve the faculty of understanding; this faculty is engaged in “free” and “harmonious” play with the faculty of sensibility. In a regular case of judgment of pure perception, sensibility and understanding work together to produce a cohesive perceptual experience; according to Kant, in purely perceptual experiences, one faculty would eventually have to yield to the other. In the case of beauty, no determinate concept is present, and yet, we are still able to produce a subjective understanding of the artwork in question. This lack of a fixed logical understanding breaks the boundaries of the rules of logic and gives us the freedom to interpret patterns, forms, relations, etc., resulting in a free play of ideas mixed with our immediate perceptual appreciation of an artwork. This free play brings with it a pleasurable experience since it engages both faculties, but neither is restrained by the other; it is what Kant considers to be the root cause of aesthetic pleasure.

Recall Kant’s view of aesthetic judgment as being purely subjective; despite this, he also argues that the experience of beauty entails a normative expectation of universal agreement, i.e., an expectation that everyone encountering a given object ought to have the same experience. Kant argued that that expectation is reasonable, since aesthetic experience is made possible by universally possessed faculties (sensibility and understanding) and capacities (for pleasure) and is independent of any individual’s personal goals (since it encompasses disinterested pleasure). It is how we might perceive that identical experience of beauty that gives aesthetic judgment its subjectivity.

Having gained an understanding of Kant’s theory of experiencing beauty, we can now move to defining the other modes of aesthetic judgment. The agreeable, while retaining characteristics which elicit aesthetic feelings, is radically different from the beautiful. Kant classifies the agreeable as that which pleases in mere sensation. While it is technically a form of aesthetic judgment because it is based on feeling, it is deemed inferior to the beautiful in light of a few key differences:

1. Agreeable experiences are always interested. Unlike the “disinterested” pleasure taken in the beautiful, the agreeable is always bound up with desire or inclination. Examples would be the pleasantly sweet taste of chocolate, or the comforting plushness of a leather couch; rarely is this interested pleasure ever related to a monumental piece of art. Kant explains “interested” pleasure in light of its ability to produce immediate sensory pleasure. He writes, “Now that my judgment about an object by which I declare it agreeable expresses an interest in it is already clear from the fact that through sensation it excites a desire for objects of the same sort, hence the satisfaction presupposes not the mere judgment about it but the relation of its existence to my state insofar as it is affected by such an object. Hence one says of the agreeable not merely that it pleases but that it gratifies. It is not mere approval that I give it, rather inclination is thereby aroused.”⁷

2. Agreeable experiences are merely subjective, with no ground for universal agreement. The judgment “This is agreeable” only applies to the individual. Kant notes that what is agreeable to one person may not be to another (“to each his own”), unlike the universal validity claimed by judgments of beauty. To illustrate, he gives us a vivid example: “The green color of the meadows belongs to objective sensation, as perception of an object of sense; but its agreeableness belongs to subjective sensation, through which no object is represented, i.e., to feeling, through which the object is considered as an object of satisfaction (which is not a cognition of it).”⁸

3. Agreeable experiences are not reflective. They do not bother with the faculty of understanding and rely on sensations alone to transmit pleasure. Moreover, the agreeable does not involve the “free play” of the cognitive faculties (imagination and understanding) that occurs when contemplating beauty. Instead, it is a passive, immediate sensation that rarely, if ever, troubles higher-level cognitive functions. Kant criticizes the human tendency to crave temporary sensory pleasures rather than rational ones. He states, “those who are always intent only on enjoyment (for this is the word that signifies intensity of gratification) gladly put themselves above all judging.”⁹

Kant distinguishes fine art (which is beautiful) from agreeable art, which aims merely at enjoyment and amusement. Recall the fact that, for Kant, music belongs at the very bottom of the hierarchy of fine arts. This means that it teeters on the edge of being relegated to a merely agreeable art form.

An experience or an object can only be considered “good” if we can use said object or experience for our individual gain. As Kant puts it, “We call something good for something (the useful) that pleases only as a means; however, another thing is called good in itself that pleases for itself. Both always involve the concept of an end, hence the relation of reason to (at least possible) willing, and consequently a satisfaction in the existence of an object.”¹⁰ It should be clear by now that the pleasure gained from experiencing something “good” is an interested pleasure of the highest order; in effect, this special form of pleasure results in a completely subjective experience, according to which an individual develops their own assessment of the “good” object through reason alone so that they can pinpoint the qualities provided by the object and the faculty of pleasure it satisfies. Kant argues the following to directly contrast the good with the beautiful: “In order to find something good, I must always know what sort of thing the object is supposed to be, i.e., I must have a concept of it. I do not need that in order to find beauty in something. Flowers, free designs, lines aimlessly intertwined in each other under the name of foliage, signify nothing, do not depend on any determinate concept, and yet please.”¹¹ In the quoted passage, Kant may seem to suggest that the good and the agreeable are nearly identical; however, he clarifies that that is not the case by using a rather delicious example. He writes, “Even in the most common speech the agreeable is distinguished from the good. Of a dish that stimulates the taste through spices . . . one may say . . . that it is agreeable and yet at the same time concede that it is not good; because while it immediately appeals to the senses, considered mediately, i.e., by reason, which looks beyond to the consequences, it displeases.”¹² In other words, the taste of the various spices may be immediately agreeable, but the health benefit or detriment it provides will take time to settle in.

Perhaps the most interesting and special aesthetic experience is that of the sublime. It also comprises four distinct representational mental states, similar to those of the beautiful but with some differences. A sublime experience denotes: negative pleasure; purposiveness and contra-purposiveness; “violence” to the forms of sensibility that thereby calls upon the ideas of reason; and the claim to universal agreement. A negatively pleasant experience is pleasant because it represents the subject as possessing a faculty that can sufficiently grasp the immeasurable largeness of the world, and it is negative because it represents the subject as possessing a faculty that was forced to try performing a task it could not perform, i.e., grasping said immeasurable largeness. Purposiveness implies a subject processing and organizing raw unstructured percepts (we could think of them as sensory data) into bundles and unities that are fit for the concepts of the understanding, bundles and unities that would be then used to make sense of the world and everything within it. However, the sublime presents the world as something that is contra-purposive, where it is far too grand for our perceptual capabilities to fully comprehend, yet it is now our mind that is purposive, meaning that it is perfectly fit for grasping the world in its immeasurable largeness, thanks to our faculty of reason. Kant gives us an example of contra-purposiveness in nature and how we may grasp it: “In general [the sublime in nature] indicates nothing purposive in nature itself, but only in the possible use of its intuitions to make palpable in ourselves a purposiveness that is entirely independent of nature.”¹³ According to Kant, this contra-purposiveness in nature would do “violence” to our sense of imagination, but it is this violence that makes the experience more sublime. The reason is that this violence reveals the inadequacy of our sensible faculties (imagination and sensibility in general) while simultaneously awakening something higher in us: the ideas of reason and our supersensible vocation. The stages of experiencing the sublime are as follows: 

1. The imagination tries (and fails) to comprehend the vast or formless object as a unified whole in one intuition. This failure produces a displeasure, which is Kant’s proposed idea of contra-purposiveness.
2. Precisely because sensibility is overwhelmed and “violated,” the mind is forced to abandon sensibility and turn to ideas of reason (i.e., the idea of absolute totality or infinity, which sensibility can never adequately grasp).
3. The very inadequacy of the imagination “provokes and calls to mind” these ideas of reason.¹⁴ What cannot be contained in any sensible form concerns only supersensible ideas, and the violence makes that gap palpable.

It may seem by now that the experiences of the beautiful and the sublime are entirely different, but one mental state does overlap between the two: Both experiences relate to Kant’s notion of “disinterested pleasure.” Neither depends on sensation like the agreeable does, and both require reflective judgment to claim universal validity based on subjective purposiveness.

The mental states above are applicable to what Kant considers two types of sublimity: the mathematical sublime and the dynamical sublime. The mathematical sublime is a mental state that represents the subject’s mind as both incapable of processing and organizing the immeasurable largeness of the world by the forms of sensibility (source of displeasure) but nevertheless capable of grasping the immeasurable largeness of the world by the ideas of reason (source of pleasure). Kant writes: “We call sublime that which is absolutely great . . . that is sublime in comparison with which everything else is small. . . . Nothing that can be an object of the senses is, considered on this footing, to be called sublime. But just because there is in our imagination a striving to advance to the infinite, while in our reason there lies a claim to absolute totality . . . the very inadequacy of our faculty for estimating the magnitude of the things of the sensible world awakens the feeling of a supersensible faculty in us.”¹⁵ The experience of the dynamical sublime is a mental state that represents the subject as both powerless in the face of the immeasurable causal capacities of the world/nature (a source of displeasure) while remaining morally powerful and independent to claim superiority over the mightiness of nature (a source of pleasure). Kant suggests: “Nature considered in aesthetic judgment as a power that has no dominion over us is dynamically sublime. . . . We gladly call these objects sublime because they elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level, and allow us to discover within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another kind. . . . Nature is here called sublime merely because it raises the imagination to the point of presenting those cases in which the mind can make palpable to itself the sublimity of its own vocation even over nature.”¹⁶ In the cases of both the mathematical and the dynamical sublime, it is reason and human nature that are ultimately sublime, and not the object or imagination. In other words, the sublime must engage the individual on a cognitive level; the beautiful does not engage with the individual in a similar fashion.¹⁷

Having understood the sublime in its complete definition, we can finally answer why music cannot belong in this category of aesthetic experience in the Kantian sense: It lacks stable objecthood; it engages with the body and mind too immediately; it does not represent ideas that require deeper rational thinking. Unlike mountains, architecture, or poetry, music during the Enlightenment was not regarded as presenting an enduring object that the imagination can fail to comprehend. Sound is fleeting and disappears as soon as it arises, leaving no stable form against which reason can measure its own superiority. This transience precludes the kind of cognitive confrontation required for the sublime, as eighteenth‑century aesthetics viewed strong sensory pleasure with suspicion. Kant believed that music acts directly on the nervous system, stimulating it to produce pleasure or excitement without sufficient mediation by reflective judgment. Because the sublime depends on displeasure followed by rational reflection, music is disqualified given its immediate affective force. Lastly, the ideas of reason commonly associated with sublimity, like infinity, freedom, and moral law, cannot be sensibly processed and can only be formed via the mind. Since instrumental music does not clearly present concepts or ideas, Kant concludes that it cannot reliably make the turn from sensory pleasure to rational self-awareness that defines the sublime.

Kant’s Critique of Judgment represented the high point of Enlightenment aesthetic philosophy as well as its historical end point. Yet the influence of this work cannot be overstated. Later philosophers who wished to theorize the experience of art had to do so by confronting Kant’s aesthetics. Opponents to Kant’s take on music appeared soon after the Critique of Judgment was published. The main, and most immediate critique of Kant’s aesthetic account came from Hegel, and later from Theodor Adorno, who expanded on Hegel’s initial objection; they argue that Kant’s theory of beauty and sublimity remains too subjective. Adorno, a twentieth-century philosopher who also studied composition, was the most important philosopher who defended music while engaging with Kantian aesthetic theory. Adorno insists, using fiery language, that artworks themselves contain an amount of extra-aesthetic cognitive content, which, if not present, would lessen the value of aesthetic experiences to a considerable degree. He writes, “The tendency to perceive art either in extra-aesthetic or pre-aesthetic fashion, which to this day is undiminished by an obviously failed education, is not only a barbaric residue or a danger of regressive consciousness. Something in art calls for this response. Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived. Only when art’s other is sensed as a primary layer in the experience of art does it become possible to sublimate this layer, to dissolve the thematic bonds, without the autonomy of the artwork becoming a matter of indifference.”¹⁸ In Adorno’s philosophy of art, true aesthetic experience is dialectical, as it must engage both the artwork’s autonomy (its self-contained, formal qualities) and its heteronomy (its entanglement with the “other,” i.e., social reality, suffering, history, and non-art elements). Art is not a pure, self-sufficient sphere (as in some formalist or Kantian “disinterested” aesthetics). It carries within it traces of the empirical world, social contradictions, suffering, and historical violence. Art “remembers” or sediments the non-artistic (art’s “other”). This brings us to Adorno’s main point: Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived. Focusing only on form, harmony, beauty, style, or internal coherence in a detached, contemplative way (the classic Kantian or modernist-formalist approach) misses what makes art truly art.

Adorno took the first step toward this new understanding of aesthetic appreciation; since then, the understanding of music as a chiefly affective art has evolved significantly. As concrete proof of Adorno’s point, music has become rather entangled with worldly aspects (social issues, politics, etc.); it is almost impossible to examine a modern piece of music without taking its heteronomy into consideration. This is a rather notable difference from Kant’s time, as music served mainly as background pleasure during the Enlightenment. The levels of meaning and cognition that music is able to offer are also much expanded, as meaning is no longer equated solely with mere conceptual or linguistic representation. Music is widely understood nowadays as capable of non‑propositional cognition, like conveying complex forms of understanding through temporality, structure, anticipation, and memory. This undermines Kant’s claim that music lacks cognitive depth. Modern aesthetic thinkers also embrace affect and embodiment rather than treating them as obstacles to reflection. Experiences of sonic immersion, intensity, and even physical overwhelm, which have become desirable in contemporary music cultures, are often described precisely as sublime. What Kant saw as disqualifying (music’s bodily impact) is now frequently central to its philosophical value. Since the Romantic era, music has also seemed to gain the ability to be “negatively pleasurable.” Perhaps the most famous example of this in classical music is Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, whose premiere was so controversial that a fight broke out in the audience. Nevertheless, said piece remains an example of a modern classic, and it is indeed considered a sublime piece of art by many.

In the end, while Kant’s Critique of Judgment established a sophisticated groundwork for understanding aesthetic satisfaction by distinguishing among the disinterested pleasures of the beautiful, the immediate gratification of the agreeable, the instrumental value of the good, and the overwhelming cognitive confrontation of the sublime, his placement of music near the bottom of the fine-arts hierarchy reflects the historical and philosophical limits of his time. What Kant heard as an art of sensation, which pleases the senses but does not elevate the mind, would transcend those mimetic boundaries. The rise of the category of “absolute” music in the nineteenth century allowed music to exist for its own sake; it no longer had to trouble itself with imitating human emotions, assuming the capacity to achieve genuine sublimity and intellectual depth. Today, music routinely engages both affect and cognition, embodiment and reflection, and heteronomy and autonomy in ways that challenge Kant’s Enlightenment Era suspicions. Far from being a mere agreeable diversion or simply inferior to poetry and painting, music reveals the productive limits of Kantian rationalism itself. By tracing how music has evolved beyond the mimetic constraints of Kant’s age, we gain not only a clearer view of his aesthetic hierarchy but also a sharper understanding of how art continues to outpace the philosophical systems meant to describe it.

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge University Press, 2000), § 53, 196. Quoted in Christel Fricke, “Kant,” in Music in German Philosophy: An Introduction, ed. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and Oliver Fürbeth, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 37.↗
2. Kant, Critique, § 53, 199–200, 37.↗
3. See Robert R. Clewis, The Origins of Kant’s Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2023), ch. 5.↗
4. Kant, Critique, § 53, 198–99, 37.↗
5. Kant, § 2, 5:205.↗
6. Kant, § 1, 5:203↗
7. Kant, § 3, 5:207.↗
8. Kant, § 3, 5:206.↗
9. Kant, § 3, 5:207.↗
10. Kant, § 4, 5:207.↗
11. Kant, § 4, 5:207.↗
12. Kant, § 4, 5:208.↗
13. Kant, § 23, 5:246.↗
14. Kant, § 23, 5:246.↗
15. Kant, § 25, 5:248–50.↗
16. Kant, § 28, 5:260–62.↗
17. See Clewis, Origins of Kant’s Aesthetics, part 3 (“Negative and Positive States”).↗
18. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Rolf Tiedeman and Gretel Adorno, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Continuum, 2002; repr. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 6.↗