The entrance of “the poets” onto the scene of Kant's attempt to ground aesthetic reflexive judgments of the sublime as a transcendental principle – in his phrase “as the poets do it” (wie die Dichter es tun) – could hardly be more peculiar and more enigmatic. Paul de Man's reading of this moment in the Third Critique is no less enigmatic and, if anything, even more peculiar, not least of all because the vision of the ocean “as the poets do it” – “merely by what appears to the eye” (bloβ … nach dem, was der Augenschein zeigt – “merely according to what the appearance-to-the-eye shows,” to put it more “literally,” or “according to what meets the eye”) -is termed by him a “material vision” whose “materiality” is linked to what de Man calls Kant's “materialism” (or “formal materialism”): “The critique of the aesthetic,” he writes, “ends up, in Kant, in a formal materialism that runs counter to all values and characteristics associated with aesthetic experience, including the aesthetic experience of the beautiful and of the sublime as described by Kant and Hegel themselves” (AI 136). That it might be better not to assume anything about our understanding of de Man's difficult “materiality” and “materialism” is certainly confirmed by the way the term gets introduced in “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant.”