The Aesthetic Representation of the Supersensible: Reassessing the Space of the Sublime

Despite its early marginalization due to its perceived irrelevance to Kant’s epistemology, recent decades have witnessed renewed interest in his account of the sublime. Scholars have revisited its anthropological, moral, and metaphysical implications, emphasizing its potential to enrich Kant’s broader philosophical framework. This paper examines these interpretations, arguing that they effectively challenge the traditional view of the sublime as merely incidental to Kant’s theory of taste, thereby enriching our understanding of it. It also provides an overview of Kant’s account of the sublime, with particular emphasis on the issue of the genuinely sublime object: while the sublime is characterized by contradictory elements, it remains a positive experience that elevates the subject—a claim supported by a brief linguistic analysis of the term Erhabene.