ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how speculations on sublimity prompt anxieties about the self, the nature of the divine, and the ethics of nobility. It argues that the sublime affirms the ascendancy of the rational over the real: the mind of man, that is, is greater than anything that might be discovered in nature. The chapter also shows how writers in the Romantic tradition developed a related, albeit qualified, emphasis on the sublime as an affirmation of the autonomous and unified self. It looks closely at how Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, as well as associated late Victorian and modernist writers. The chapter highlights fault lines within the Kantian tradition by laying stress on the fictive nature of the unified self, on the impossibility of transcendence, and on the irreducibility of material differences.
