Abstract Following a prominent eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition, some contemporary philosophers have appealed to the notion of the sublime as a promising avenue for exploring the aesthetic experience of ancient ruins. Nevertheless, existing accounts have typically focused solely upon the great magnitudes of ruins—specifically the magnitude of time—and have therefore operated exclusively within the bounds of the ‘mathematically sublime’. However, this paper defends a less well-represented view in contemporary literature, that ancient ruins ought to also be appreciated in terms of the ‘dynamically sublime’: being confronted with great powers and forces of nature relative to our own. Drawing upon hitherto under-utilized conceptual resources, especially those offered by Schiller, the paper explores the necessary and sufficient conditions for conceiving of the sublime experience of ancient ruins in terms of their ability to express human vulnerability, and what the philosophically significant implications of this view may be.
Patrick Hassan (Tue,) studied this question.