Fatal Imagination: “Loreley” and the Sirens’ Song in View of Kant’s Aesthetics

Heine’s poem Loreley describes an addiction to a beauty experience that ends in death. In this article, I examine this poem according to the principles of aesthetic experience, raised by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgment. According to these principles, the ontological status of the experience of beauty transcends that of instrumental-purposeful reality to the point of being a “play” (Spiel; according to Schiller: Schein, illusion), which is autonomous in relation to the circumstances of life in reality. This experience also involves neutralizing the interests of the subject who experiences it, suspending his (extra-aesthetic) interests directed at the reality that ostensibly generates the experience of beauty. On the basis of the principles of Kant’s conception of beauty – though not according to his direct or explicit reference – I would argue that according to the “ideal type” of the experience of beauty as a powerful emotional experience, it conquers the entire being of the subject who experiences it, and when, and due to the fact that it completely gains control of him, it suspends his interests in actual reality to the point of abandoning life itself. In this respect, I would like to argue that Heine’s Loreley and, of course, the description of the sirens’ song in the twelfth book of Homer’s Odyssey constitute an exemplary model for aesthetic experience and for understanding its uniqueness as an antithesis to the reality of actual life.