By Chip Limeburner
Chip Limeburner is a doctoral student in the individualized program at Concordia University, Montreal. Their research is focused on the aesthetic outcomes of tech integration in themed entertainment and the experience of awe in theme parks.
In considering the “sense of awe” there are two very big questions that must be answered: what, precisely, is meant by “awe”, and in what way does the human capacity to feel it constitute a sense. Indeed, these are not trivial questions as different academic traditions leverage different terminology, such as awe, the sublime, and wonder, to capture the aesthetics of great and terrible experience, and these different traditions rather uniformly frame these experiences as an emotion rather than a sense. However, while Kant might deem the sublime “supersensible” (Kant 2002 [1790]), I would like to illustrate the various ways scholars have elaborated awe as an experience that emerges precisely at the margin of where traditional senses fall just barely short. As I will discuss, the sense of awe, though pronounced in affective qualities, nevertheless also acts as a complement to the more quotidian senses—extending human perception to stimuli that otherwise exceed our direct capacity of apprehension, making it, in effect, a sixth sense.
What is Awe?
The question of “what is awe?” is one that is deceiving in its simplicity. While awe might be a concept all people have experienced themselves, defining it beyond, “I know it when I feel it,” proves slippery. While the beginning of the intellectual treatment of awe in western thought is often accorded to Longinus sometime in the 1st century AD (Konečni 2005), the modern philosophical articulation of awe, via the notion of the sublime, arrives in the 18th century with Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry (Burke 1998 [1757]), and Kant’s third critique on judgment (Kant 2002 [1790]). Burke and Kant would both set out an understanding of the sublime predicated on an overpowering stimulus which induces some measure of fear, yet against which the spectator is safe from harm. Kant further distinguishes between two kinds of the sublime: the dynamic sublime—those stimuli that overwhelm through their forcefulness, such as the ocean, or a storm—and the mathematical sublime—stimuli overwhelming in their scale, such as a mountain. Though both Kant and, to a lesser extent Burke, situate the sublime primarily, if not wholly, in natural phenomena, more recent scholars have found the sublime also in works of human artifice. Some scholars have discussed sublimity in artwork (Crowther 1991), while others have alluded to a “technological sublime”, finally articulated by David Nye in his examination of larger-than-life technologies following the industrial revolution and their impact on American society (Nye 1994).
Meanwhile, the other major scholarly tradition examining awe comes to us primarily from the field of neuropsychology, attempting to understand the cognitive underpinnings of the experience of awe. This is a much younger current in the literature, with most efforts largely emerging in the wake of Abraham Maslow’s articulation of “peak experiences” (Maslow 1964; Keltner and Haidt 2003). Psychology literature typically positions awe squarely in the space of emotions, framed as a response to a grand stimulus and producing certain affective and social outcomes. These outcomes include a range of prosocial effects, whereby those experiencing awe experience stronger connectedness to others (Perlin and Li 2020).
The relationship between these two primary traditions of the philosophical sublime and psychological awe is fuzzy, though not entirely beyond synthesis. For instance, Vladimir Konečni has argued that philosophical writing on the sublime better describes qualities of a stimulus, to which awe is the affective response (2005). Arcangeli et al. have taken this further, surveying a variety of possible relationships between awe and the sublime as identical, overlapping, or each subsets of the other (2020). Though they don’t find all possible configurations equally workable, they nevertheless find the sublime and awe undeniably overlap in some capacity.
In their attempt to pin down the character of awe, Keltner and Haidt (2003) have surveyed domains of religious, sociological, philosophical, and psychological awe to elaborate key features of the awe experience shared across understandings. In their findings, they advance two key features of a perceptual experience necessary for awe, along with five additional qualities that colour the encounter. Their two key features, which they generalize from the oft overlapping domain-specific approaches, are vastness of the stimulus, and the need for accommodation. That is to say, the awe-inspiring stimulus must surpass comprehension by some measure, and must demand the mind adjust to the incomprehensibility by some means. Keltner and Haidt further suggest that these features account for the divergent responses to some stimuli, where some individuals experience awe while others are consumed by fear: “[t]he success of one’s attempts at accommodation may partially explain why awe can be both terrifying (when one fails to understand) and enlightening (when one succeeds)” (2003, 304). For the purposes of the present discussion, Keltner and Haidt’s definition provide a sufficient integration of disparate traditions to discuss the sensory properties of awe. Though the boundaries are uncertain, there is undeniably a particular experience provoked by the encounter with a vast stimulus (physical, conceptual, or otherwise) that demands a mental readjustment to unusual scopes and scales. Accordingly, I will use the terms “sublime” and “awe” largely synonymously for the rest of this article, though it is still worth noting the identity does not necessarily hold for all models of either.
How is awe “sensed”?
Though existing literature frequently frames awe as an emotion, it is worth considering a key facet of most descriptions—that awe is a response to a particular kind of sensory encounter. Describing two religious encounters with deities—Arjuna with Krishna, and Saul with Jesus, from Hinduism and Christiniaty respectively—Keltner and Haidt draw attention to the sensory dimension of awe: “[t]his contact triggers an overpowering and novel sensory experience that causes confusion and amazement.” (2003, 299) Likewise, though Kant asserts that, “the very inadequacy of our faculty for estimating the magnitude of the things of the sensible world awakens the feeling of a supersensible faculty in us” (Kant 2002 [1790], 134), Charles Emmer underscores that, “[o]ne must not forget that, even though the basis for the aesthetic judgment is a [sic] apriori one, the aesthetic judgment begins with a singular sensuous encounter” (2001, 512).
In Kant’s own articulation of the sublime, he makes an example of the pyramids to illustrate a point about how sublime stimuli are received. More specifically, he argues that one must be neither too far—lest the observer fail to discern anything of the nature of the pyramids—nor too close—in which case the observer becomes unable to perceive the pyramids in their totality (Kant 2002 [1790], 136). This need to appreciate the entirety of a sublime stimulus as an irreducible whole suggests it is not enough to simply conceptually grasp the stimulus, but that its specific presentation to the observer, through the senses, is non-trivial to the experience. Konečni likewise argues that sublimity is a property of a rare or grand stimulus within a specific context, either physical, as in the case of a landscape, or circumstantial (2005). Both these arguments demonstrate that the sensuous encounter described by Keltner and Haidt, and Emmer, is furthermore sensorially specific in some capacity; the experience of awe only emerges from certain sensory encounters.
So then how do we resolve the tension between awe as an encounter with an object that overwhelms the sensorium by its force or power, and awe as a response to a precise configuration of sensorial data? It is here that I would suggest that through the process of accommodation laid out by Keltner and Haidt, and building upon prior authors—in which the observer adjusts to accept and appreciate the overwhelming stimulus—is a moment of sensory perception beyond the traditional senses. The traditional senses serve as an important conduit to this greater perception, but they cannot, in-and-of-themselves constitute this additional understanding.
For example, the immensity of space is entirely incomprehensible. Though we can provide many relative comparisons of its size, the full appreciation of these facts emerges only when confronted with a view of the night sky or space itself. In this moment, all that is directly observed is darkness and small points of light, but armed with the context that each of those points is a planet or star surrounded by planets at unfathomable distances, the mind is caught by a certain dizzying perception of the vastness of the universe. The awe is not a response to the small points of light, nor the abstract understanding of these great distances, but the sudden realization that one is seeing these great distances for themselves.
Similarly, if one were to view the launch of the Saturn V rocket, which took humans to the moon, the sight of a 36-storey structure flying towards space in a plume of fire would no doubt inspire awe by itself, yet as David Nye would suggest through his articulation of the technological sublime, this rocket also inspires awe as a manifestation of human capacity (1994). The experience of awe does not emerge in learning all the various facts of engineering that make the rocket work, nor even in considering all the individuals who worked on it, but rather in the moment of witnessing, through the rocket launch, the physical embodiment of countless hours of work by innumerable experts.
What both these examples illustrate is that, in making sense of the overwhelming stimulus, we come to sense something about the stimulus that was not previously accessible. Though it requires an understanding of the nature of the thing perceived, this understanding is not capable by itself to provoke the fully embodied sensation of awe, instead requiring more traditional sensory stimulation to set the process in motion. What’s more, this “making sense” of the object arguably happens at an entirely prereflective level. “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, […] is Astonishment,” writes Edmund Burke, “and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it” (Burke 1998 [1757], 53). Burke underscores that the actual experience of awe predominantly suspends thought as the mind is consumed by an immediate impression of the stimulus. Accordingly, any association between the stimulus and background context the observer happens to know must be operating intuitively, and below the threshold of conscious reasoning.
On a final note, much of this discussion of awe and the sublime has focused on visual stimuli. This is particularly observed of Kant’s work by Charles Emmer, who advocates for a more sensorily expansive notion of the sublime beyond the visual (2001). Indeed, he provides hearing thunder, and feeling the ground shake as the result of some distant phenomenon as very relatable examples of ways one might experience an upwelling of the sublime in absence of visual stimuli. This supports the prior point that the traditional sensory information, though crucial to the experience of awe, is not the strict understanding sensed by awe. That is to say, though one might see a volcano erupt, or feel its vibrations through the ground, the experience of awe is not a response to that vision or tactile feeling, but rather to a shared underlying sense of the volcano’s power and magnitude, accessed through those senses.
As has been shown, though awe is conventionally framed as an emotion by both philosophical and psychological traditions, careful comparison of these traditions teases out a uniquely perceptual quality of the awe experience. While awe is precipitated by specific sensory circumstances around an overwhelming stimulus, the experience of awe itself acts as a window into a deeper truth about the scope and scale of the object under consideration. In this fashion, we might productively consider awe as a sense in its own right that operates in parallel and beyond the traditional senses—a sensory attunement to magnitudes beyond what our other sense can measure.
References
Arcangeli, Margherita, Marco Sperduti, Amélie Jacquot, Pascale Piolino, and Jérôme Dokic. 2020. “Awe and the Experience of the Sublime: A Complex Relationship.” Frontiers in Psychology 11 (June): article 1340.
Burke, Edmund. 1998. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by Adam Phillips. Re-Issue. The Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. (Original work published 1757).
Crowther, Paul. 1991. The Kantian Sublime: From Morality to Art. Oxford Philosophical Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Emmer, Charles E. 2001. “The Senses of the Sublime: Possibilities for a Non-Ocular Sublime in Kant’s Critique of Judgment.” In Kant Und Die Berliner Aufklärung, edited by Volker Gerhardt, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, and Ralph Schumacher. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.
Kant, Immanuel. 2002. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. (Original work published 1790).
Keltner, Dacher, and Jonathan Haidt. 2003. “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion.” Cognition and Emotion 17 (2): 297–314.
Konečni, Vladimir J. 2005. “The Aesthetic Trinity: Awe, Being Moved, Thrills.” Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts 5(2): 27-44.
Maslow, A.H. 1964. Religions, values, and peak-experiences. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.
Nye, David E. 1994. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Perlin, Joshua D., and Leon Li. 2020. “Why Does Awe Have Prosocial Effects? New Perspectives on Awe and the Small Self.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 15 (2): 291–308.