In the historical analysis of the discourse on the Sublime in the late 18th-century Romantic literature, it can be said that the Enlightenment reason, by enlisting the imagination in the experience of the Sublime, achieved its goal of breaking the psychological inertia of the feudalism and the absolute monarchy. The Enlightenment project of the Sublime overlaps, in purpose, with that of the culture of the feeling, sentimentalism. Sentimentality is said to be a state of the mind the Enlightenment would induce in the individual mind for the moral consciousness. It starts with the invoking of the feeling to look outside of selfish narrow concerns in man. Romanticism, in its discourse on the Sublime, took over that project of sentimentalism for the constitution of the modern enlightened self. In this paper, the three theorists of the Sublime in the eighteenth century, Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Schiller were discussed to prove that their discourse contributed to instituting autonomous subjects the Enlightenment required in establishing the modern bourgeois society. Their thoughts have one thing in common: the Sublime is the determinant in the aesthetic modulation of the moral. The aesthetic is drawn to serve the social and the moral in the constitution of autonomous subjects. According to Althusser, ideology is concerned with the reproduction of the relations of the production. The discourse on the Sublime could reproduce the social relations in that it puts the Real beyond phenomenality, forcing subjects to subject themselves to the supersensible Idea as the reification of their social alienation. In this process, the Sublime mediates freedom with law, desire with duty and the individual with the social in forming the autonomous subjects without any external constraints.
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