f this idea Kant solves the antinomy of the aesthetic judgment.
The thesis is: The judgment of taste is not based upon concepts; for
otherwise it would admit of controversy (would be determinable by proofs).
The antithesis is: It is based upon concepts; for otherwise we could not
contend about it (endeavor to obtain assent). The two principles are
reconcilable, for "concept" is understood differently in the two cases.
That which the thesis rightly seeks to exclude from the judgment of beauty
is the determinate concept of the understanding; that which the antithesis
with equal justice pronounces indispensable is the indeterminate concept,
the aesthetic Idea.

The freest play is afforded the imagination by poetry, the highest of
all arts, which, with rhetoric ("insidious," on account of its earnest
intention to deceive), forms the group termed arts of speech. To the class
of formative arts belong architecture, sculpture, and painting as the art
of design. A third group, the art of the beautiful play of sensations,
includes painting as the art of color, and music, which as a "fine" art is
placed immediately after poetry, as an "agreeable" art at the very foot of
the list, and as the play of tone in the vicinity of the entertaining play
of fortune [games of chance] and the witty play of thought. The explanation
of the comic (the ludicrous is based, according to Kant, on a sudden
transformation of strained expectation into nothing) lays great (indeed
exaggerated) weight on the resulting physiological phenomena, the
bodily shock which heightens vital feeling and favors health, and which
accompanies the alternating tension and relaxation of the mind.

Besides free and adherent beauty, there is still a third kind of aesthetic
effect, the Sublime. The beautiful pleases by its bounded form. But also
the boundless and formless can exert aesthetic effect: that which is great
beyond all comparison we judge sublime. Now this magnitude is either
extensive in space and time or intensive greatness of force or power;
accordingly there are two forms of the sublime. That phenomenon which mocks
the power of comprehension possessed by the human imagination or surpasses
every measure of our intuition, as the ocean and the starry heavens, is
mathematically sublime. That which overcomes all conceivable resistance,
as the terrible forces of nature, conflagrations, floods, earthquakes,
hurricanes, thunderstorms, is dynamically sublime or mighty. T