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Articles

Awe & Sublimity

Robert Clewis on philosophers and psychologists observing mighty things.

According to psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, who published an influential paper on the subject fifteen years ago, ‘awe’ involves a response to something larger than oneself – a perceived vastness – and a need for accommodation, referring to how we make sense of and adjust to what we experience. And although we sometimes use the word without much thought, ‘the sublime’ has a long philosophical history, dating back to a treatise attributed to a first-century writer known as Longinus. I conceive of the concepts of awe and the sublime as more or less the same, and will use the words interchangeably. Recent renewed interest in the concepts of awe and the sublime gives us a chance to test some of the philosophers’ claims about them, as well as to modify some of the theories put forward in psychology.

There is much on which the philosophical tradition and empirical research agree.

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