Death and Transfiguration: Kant, Schopenhauer and Heidegger on the Sublime1

Abstract

The feeling of the sublime is, says Kant, the bitter‐sweet combination of fear and utter security that one experiences in the face of, for instance, the night sky or the raging torrent. Fear of what? Fear of – this, I suggest, was Kant's seminal insight – death. But how can these feelings co‐exist? Surely the one cancels the other out? Schopenhauer's great insight, I argue, was that the explanation of the sublime requires a division of the personality into two – a threatened self and an unthreatened one. The feeling of “being safe whatever happens” comes from a primary identification with the individual‐transcending self. The trouble, however, with Schopenhauer's account is that, based as it is on his version of idealism, it represents the entire world of nature as being absorbed into the content of the transcendent subject's consciousness. This makes the feeling of the sublime a kind of egoism, a contraction of the vastness of nature into the content of “my” consciousness. And this gets things precisely wrong, I suggest, since the feeling of the sublime is, in truth, an “oceanic” feeling, an expansion of the self into the vastness of being. What this shows, I conclude, is that to understand the sublime we actually need not idealism but a kind of realism; specifically, Heidegger's, as I call it, “magic” realism.