From a course on architecture
Kant, the 18th century German philosopher, wrote three Critiques, on Reason, Morality, and Judgement, or Aesthetics. Here we consider the latter. Kant’s theory of aesthetics, still used today: our experience and judgement of beauty is resonant between intellectual understanding and emotional imagination. He says that the perception of aesthetics is particular and subjective for each person.
There are four possible aesthetic judgements: the agreeable, the beautiful, the sublime and the good.
The agreeable is purely sensory and subjective, based on personal inclination, such as “this dinner is good” or “this chair is soft”.
The beautiful and sublime are what he refers to as “subjective universals” - while the judgement is subjective, it is made with the belief that other people ought to agree, even if it is known that many will not. They are based on the concept of “good taste”. The difference between the two is that the beauty is in pleasure derived from grace, gradient, colour, and cause admiration, while the sublime inspires awe and and potentially terror. It evokes strong emotion of any form. For example, beauty might be used to describe a rose, while sublime might be used to describe a sea of icebergs.
Side note: the term ‘beautiful’ is often ambiguous. Sometimes it may refer to a personal, subjective experience, while more commonly, and as referred to above, it refers to a judgement based on ‘an aesthetically grounded logical judgement’, as Kant put it in his Critique of Judgement.
Finally, the good is an ethical judgement - the idea that something agrees with a moral law. It has an odd relationship to the agreeable - while on one hand, it is purely objective, in the idea that something is either moral or not, it is also subjective, in that people have differing ideas of morality, which of course provokes the question, what is the relation between personal and societal morality? Is there some universal morality, or, indeed, should there be?