In his "Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind," he wrote, "In the midst of so much philosophy, humanity, and civilization, and of such sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness".
No matter what we do, machines will be the veil through which we know -- and I mean 'know' in the grand ontological sense of forming the very substrate of our awareness of self, of other, of community, beauty, the sublime, pleasure, desire, morality and indeed mortality.
Presumably this can be reconciled with Kant's earlier claim that the sublime is the most appropriate symbol of morality by observing that while the experience of beauty makes the freedom of the will palpable to us, it is only the mixed experience of the sublime that brings home to feeling that this freedom must often be exercised in the face of resistance offered by our own inclinations.
But Kant actually analyzes three main forms of aesthetic experience the experience of beauty, paradigmatically natural beauty; the experience of the sublime, again paradigmatically of sublimity in nature; and the experience of fine art and each of these forms of aesthetic experience ultimately reveals distinctive connections to morality.
In a 1959 essay on "The Sublime and the Good," Iris Murdoch writes: "Art and morality are, with certain provisos, one.
A more common view, however, is to see judgments of beauty not as grounded in morality, but rather, along with judgments of the sublime, as contributing to an account of moral feeling, and hence of how morality is possible for human beings (for a clear statement of the contrast between these views, see the introduction to Guyer 1993).
The second link is Kant's claim that the aesthetic experience of the dynamical sublime is nothing other than a feeling of the power of our own practical reason to accept the pure principle of morality and to act in accordance with it in spite of all the threats or inducements to do otherwise that nature might place in our way.
