Mark Windsor is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Philosophy at Uppsala University. He works mostly in aesthetics, but also in philosophy of mind, and especially on imagination and emotion. He is an associate editor of Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics and a trustee of the British Society of Aesthetics.
A post by Mark Windsor and Jakub Stejskal
Many of us are inexorably drawn to material remains of humanity’s deep past: we like to read about new archaeological finds and observe them up close in situ or in museums. What is it about them (and us) that enchants us so? One obvious answer is that they offer us a glimpse into past ways of life: they afford a felt connection with people and events remote in time; they put us, as Carolyn Korsmeyer has described in a recent book, ‘in touch with the past’ (Korsmeyer 2019; see also Windsor 2025).
But while this must be part of the story, it doesn’t account for the phenomenology of the experience of many archaeological objects that we are interested in here. An important part of the experience of many such objects is precisely that the past they promise to put us in touch with lies out of reach. Consider this near life-size, high-relief sculpture of a man and a woman, probably dating to the Republican period, discovered recently near the eastern walls of Pompeii, the Roman city destroyed by the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79 CE.
Jakub Stejskal is an assistant professor of aesthetics at the Department of Art History and Theory, Faculty of Fine Arts, Brno University of Technology (Czech Rep.). He works on topics at the intersection of philosophical aesthetics, art history, archaeology, and anthropology. He is also an associate editor of the journal Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics. For more on his research, see http://jakubstejskal.eu.
Looking at the sculpture, we feel the solemness of its purpose, but we also feel the depicted couple’s inscrutability. Do the sculptures represent a married couple, siblings, or perhaps a mother and son? Why is the woman holding a scroll? What is the meaning of her posture? Part of the attraction of such objects is that they carry a profound sense of mystery, heightened by the fact that they still speak to us across a vast temporal distance. Our example is not unusual in this respect. Many of the most famous archaeological sites and objects, such as the Stonehenge megaliths, the cave paintings of Altamira, or Cycladic figurines, manifest human purposes we can only speculate about.
We propose that this ambivalent experience of such archaeological objects can fruitfully be approached using the traditional aesthetic concept of the sublime. This refers to a feeling typically had in response to vast or powerful natural phenomena, such as mountains, volcanoes, or storms, that overwhelm but also exhilarate one’s cognitive capacities. On the face of it, it might seem that many archaeological artefacts have little to do with such vast and powerful phenomena. The Altamira cave paintings are delicate and fragile; Cycladic figurines could fit into the palm of your hand. Yet these objects do possess a kind of overwhelming vastness: a temporal one.
Several philosophers have acknowledged a temporal form of sublimity (Hume 1888, 428–34; Kant 2011, 2:210; Schopenhauer 2010, 239–45; Noel 1994). But how exactly do vast time periods cognitively overwhelm us? Kant (2000, 5:248–53) gave what is probably still the best account of how great magnitudes can lead to a feeling of the sublime. According to him, vast objects can have a sublime effect because they exceed one’s imaginative capacity to comprehend them in a single intuition.
The idea that we cannot imaginatively grasp great distances of time seems right. You can easily imagine how long ago your last birthday was. But can you imagine just how long ago 1,946 years (when Pompeii was destroyed by Vesuvius) was? Yet there is a puzzle here about how this imaginative failure would work. When Kant talks about vast objects exceeding one’s imaginative capacity, he is understanding imagination as a constitutive of perception. Looking at the ocean, for example, one cannot fit it all into one single perceptual representation. What would imaginative failure look like in the case of sublime archaeological objects?
One can, of course, simply try to imagine some ancient object in its original time. But that is not the same as imaginatively grasping how long ago the object was. To do that, one must represent the timespan between then and now. The question is: What determines the maximum span of time one can grasp in imagination? In the case of perceiving objects in space, the maximum is determined by one’s perceptual capacities: it is how much one can perceive in one go. Perhaps a plausible candidate in the temporal case might be supplied by the capacity of memory.
We can remember events that happened decades in the past, and it seems that we can intuitively grasp how long ago those events were without having to represent any intervals in between. And perhaps one can, up to a point, imaginatively multiply this unit in estimating large temporal distances, in a similar way that one might imagine a large spatial distance as a succession of football pitches. One might be able to imagine how long ago one’s grandfather, or great-grandfather was born – perhaps even one’s great-great-grandfather. But there’s a limit as to how far one can do this while still holding the base unit in one’s imagination; there are only so many ‘grands’ one can add to the equation.
But the failure to imagine the time separating us from the relief does not exhaust the challenges it poses to our imagination. Consider another recent discovery from Pompeii. Earlier this year, archaeologists announced a ‘once-in-a-century’ find of an exceptionally large and well-preserved private bathhouse. What is especially exciting about this is that it exemplifies what the director of the Archaeological Park at Pompeii, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, calls the ‘Pompeii Effect’: ‘it’s almost as if the people had only left a minute ago’.
Given the eruption’s catastrophically sudden effects, many of Pompeii’s structures are very well preserved, providing ample opportunity for us to vividly imagine what it was like living in a first-century Roman city. By contrast, the funerary relief sculpture delivers no Pompeii Effect – quite the contrary. While we can imagine upper-class Romans (or even ourselves) enjoying the bathhouse facilities, we have trouble making sense of the relief’s arcane symbolism. Who were these people and what meaning does the relief’s iconography carry? There are just too many equally plausible options.
The relief’s enigmatic nature thus also frustrates our imagination – not as surveyors of time but seekers of historical knowledge. Philosophers of history have long recognized the indispensable role of imagination in deriving from written and material evidence coherent pictures or narratives of human cultures and civilizations (Collingwood 1946, 231–49; White 1973; Danto 2007, 112–42). Given gaps in historical evidence and uncertainty about how to interpret what evidence there is, the creative act of imagining how events might have unfolded is essential to our making sense of history. But sometimes the historical record proves impervious to our best sense-making efforts. Perhaps it is too patchy, allowing for too many plausible interpretations, or else it defies the realm of the plausible: we cannot even imagine how some such state of affairs could have been brought about.
That history can be the source of sublime feelings when it defies our desire to make it rhyme is not a novel idea (Schiller 1966, 206–12; White 1987), but we propose to extend it to cases when one tries, and fails, to reconstruct imaginatively what it would have been like to live under particular historical conditions. As the bathhouse illustrates so well (see the walk-through video embedded in the linked article), archaeology plays an important role in these efforts because it recovers material traces of past forms of life that can be used as props for stimulating our historical imagination and thus for making the past more familiar (Shanks 2012). But, as was the case with the Roman relief, sometimes archaeological objects stubbornly refuse to be woven into the fabric of a coherent historical image or narrative.
What is intriguing and fascinating – yes, sublime – about the relief sculpture is not just that we fail to grasp imaginatively the temporal distance that separates us from it. We are drawn to it because it manifests human purpose, yet that purpose cannot accurately be specified in any satisfactory level of detail. Our imagination is thus doubly challenged: we struggle to imagine what it would be like to be part of the historical circumstances in which the relief would be purposeful, and we fail to imagine the time that has passed since these circumstances obtained. This double challenge to our imagination is what characterizes what we call the archaeological sublime.
Why do we enjoy this archaeologically sublime experience? One answer that was central to traditional accounts of the sublime is that we enjoy stretching our imagination to its utmost (Addison 1996, 62; Priestley 1996, 119; Mendelssohn 1997, 194–95). We enjoy trying to imagine the vast temporal distances separating us from archaeological objects’ origins and to form an accurate picture of the ways of life they were part of, even if those attempts are ultimately bound to fail. Another, loftier idea has to do with the sense of connection that archaeological objects can afford with people spanning vast temporal distances. Perhaps the most awesome experiences of being in touch with the past are to be had when we are also sharply made to feel that the past lies irrevocably out of reach.
References:
Addison, Joseph. 1996. ‘The Spectator No. 412 Monday, June 23, 1712.’ In The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, edited by Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, pp. 62–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Collingwood, R. G. 1946. The Idea of History. London: Oxford University Press.
Danto, Arthur C. 2007. Narration and Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hume, David. 1888. A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. London: Oxford University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 2000. Critique of the Power of Judgment, edited by Paul Guyer and translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kant, Immanuel. 2011. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, translated by Paul Guyer. In Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and Other Writings, edited by Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer, pp. 2:205–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Korsmeyer, Carolyn. 2019. Things: In Touch with the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mendelssohn, Moses. 1997. ‘On the Sublime and Naive in the Fine Sciences.’ In Philosophical Writings, translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom, pp. 192–232. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Noel, Justine. 1994. ‘Space, Time and the Sublime in Hume’s Treatise.’ British Journal of Aesthetics 34 (3): 218–25.
Priestley, Joseph.1996. ‘From A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (1777), Lecture XX. Of the Sublime.’ In The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, edited by Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, pp. 119–23. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schiller, Friedrich von. 1966. Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime: Two Essays, translated by Julius A. Elias. New York: Ungar.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2010. The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, edited and translated by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shanks, Michael. 2012. The Archaeological Imagination. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
White, Hayden. 1987. ‘The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation.’ In The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, pp. 58–82. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Windsor, Mark. 2025. ‘Imagining the Past of the Present.’ Philosophical Quarterly 75 (1): 268–87.