3 AM interviews Julian Young.

3:AM: Does Heidegger’s ‘magic realism’ capture the sublime better than idealism?

JY: ‘Magic realism’ is my riff on the ‘plural realism’ that, in my view correctly, Bert Dreyfus attributes to Heidegger. I think the thought behind your question is correct. The idealism of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a duality of ‘appearance’ and a delimited, finite (albeit unknown) ‘thing in itself’. But as Kant himself correctly observes in the later Critique of Judgment, the essence of the sublime is the infinite. In all its forms—the natural numbers, the night sky—the infinite is sublime because it makes us feel ‘small’: it ‘awes’ us. Plural realism allows for the sublime because it holds that our mode of rendering reality intelligible captures just one aspect of an infinitely aspected reality. As Heidegger puts it, borrowing the image from Rilke, concealed behind the lighted side of the moon is its dark side, a dark side of (a point not captured by the image) unfathomable magnitude.