Morality and sublimity have a complex relationship that can easily be misunderstood. On the one hand, Kant grounds sublimity on moral or rational ideas. The experience of the sublime thus presupposes these ideas; it reveals that the judging subject has practical freedom and a moral vocation, a calling to be moral. On the other hand, Kant also clearly wishes to preserve the distinctness of and difference between aesthetic and moral judging. Indeed, most interpreters of the Kantian sublime fall somewhere between two ends of a spectrum, both of which contain some element of truth. One side emphasizes the affinities between aesthetic and moral judging, while the other side focuses on their distinctness. Understanding the affinities and differences between Kantian morality and sublimity is necessary if we are to understand properly how and to what extent the sublime can reveal freedom and indirectly contribute to the realization of morality in the natural order.

This chapter reviews the well-known phenomenology of the moral feeling of respect and discusses how the moral feeling differs from sublimity (section 3.1.1). Respect has a positive–negative structure similar to that of the sublime, although there are important differences between the two feelings. Next, in examining how the (dynamical and the moral) sublime presuppose a capacity to be moral, I refer to Kant's deduction of the sublime in §30 as well as to the role of a moral predisposition as a presupposition of having an experience of the sublime (section 3.2).