Chaos and Form, Imagination and Ethics. Observations on the Chapter “Snow” in Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain”

The present article examines the transformations of imagination between Kantian philosophy and the chapter “Snow” from Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain.” The winter landscape does not only represent the boundless space of the sublime but also inevitably points to the question of the exhaustion of imagination after the decline of Romanticism. How is it possible for imagination to survive the end of the era of geniuses? In Thomas Mann’s writings, it is power, which acts beyond the collapse of the senses and the fear of death. In the space where the sublime envelops the body and the senses disintegrate their functions, Hans’s dream-world, in which beauty and form reconfigure in a second order of sublimity, reflects both the sharp relief of the magic mountain and the Kantian architectonic of reason.