Sublimity, Rationality, Selflessness

Kant's theory of Sublimity elevates a minor recent intellectual curiosity to a perhaps unprecedented Philosophical status.  The curiosity, which intrigues Burke and others, is the compelling admixture of pleasure with pain involved in sublime experiences, an apparent defiance of Hedonistic Psychology.  Kant's Transcendental solution analyzes such experiences as consisting in painful self-belittlement serving as a prelude to self-elevation, i. e. the belittlement of the empirical self en route to the discovery of the Rational self.  This analysis is philosophically worthy for Kant, since it entails the systematic linking of Imagination and Reason, and of Beauty and Sublimity.  However, accordingly, this concept of Sublimity shares a weakness with that of Beauty that has been previously discussed--the lack of systematic resources for contending with the concept of Selflessness that can be extended from Schopenhauer's explanation of the experience of Beauty to that of Sublimity.  But it is not merely that the availability of a counter-example undermines the premise of Universalizability that is essential to Kant's concepts of both.  For, in Schopenhauer's system, Rational Totality is an inadequate approximation to Selflessness, so, likewise, the 'absolute largeness' of the former inadequately characterizes the Sublime, contrary to Kant's definition of the latter.