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Contrary to the expectation of the educated reader, it is not in the Analytik of the Sublime, but in the Analytik of the Beautiful that Longin’s influence on Kant can be discerned. The role of Burke’s reading is easier to identify: Kant finds in it the guiding thread of a systematic opposition of the sublime and the beautiful and of their necessary definition in relation to each other. The question of monism or aesthetic dualism then becomes central and connects with Kant’s question of the place of human reason. What is the purpose of evolution? And does the human species reach“the final end of its moral destination” when“art, having reached its perfection, becomes nature again”, according to the striking formula of Mutmasslicher Anfang der Menschengeschichte (VIII, 117-118, Pléiade, II, p. 513)?