Are We Losing Our Capacity For Awe?

How to recapture the joy of the sublime.

Most people old enough to have refined aesthetic experiences will know the sense of being wondrously overwhelmed by something vast and majestic.

It’s usually brought about by a landscape, artwork, or building. Perhaps you’ve felt it when gazing up at a mighty snow-capped mountain or when listening to the climax of a four-hour Wagnerian opera. 

I vividly remember being a teenager and standing beneath Cologne Cathedral, a gothic masterpiece dramatically blackened by centuries’ worth of rain and grime. I was awestruck by its sheer presence and felt small before its greatness. Adding to my disorientation was the fact that, at the time, I had no idea how to describe what I was feeling.

It was only later that I discovered the name for this feeling is the sublime and that in the 18th and 19th centuries, philosophers wrote a fair amount about it. 

Immanuel Kant, perhaps the greatest modern Western philosopher, shed light on the sublime by contrasting it with the beautiful. According to Kant, beauty is generally more pleasurable to experience and is typically brought about by something elegant, light, harmonious, and contained. Think of an ornamental pond dotted with water lilies, as opposed to the roar and churn of the iron-grey Atlantic Ocean. 

In centuries gone by, discussions of the sublime were common not only among philosophers but amongst the literary and intellectual public more broadly. In the last hundred or so years, though, the sublime has largely disappeared from philosophical and cultural discourse. 

People do still experience the sublime, of course. But its profile has declined, suggesting that it’s less prevalent in our lives than it once was. Why?

Year zero

The reason for the diminished place of the sublime in contemporary life is a matter of some debate. Arguably, though, it’s a result of the ongoing social and cultural revolution that is modernity. 

Modernity refers to a form of social life that originated in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries but has since spread across the world. It began with a newly experimental form of natural science associated with great figures such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. At the same time, philosophers like Francis Bacon and René Descartes argued that the new science challenged our basic assumptions and stood to transform our worldview. 

Bacon and Descartes were right, insofar as, over the centuries, we’ve come to view nature as mere matter in motion (even if this view is itself incorrect!). On the basis of that worldview, scientists and inventors have been able to reshape and reorder both nature and human life. This manifested most dramatically in the 18th and 19th centuries with the industrial revolution, which in turn led to the age of mass production, and eventually to the rise of digital technology that we’re experiencing today. 

Being modern 

So how does modernity deter us from feeling the sublime?

Essentially it has ‘shrunk’ the Earth and disenchanted nature. Whereas human settlements were once islands in the vastness of the natural world, now the reverse is true. Today there is no terra incognita, unconquered mountain, or uncharted ocean. The Earth’s mysteries have been unraveled, conquered through measurement, and exploited through commodification. Goods can be sent from China to America in a matter of hours; video calling allows someone in Australia to see and hear someone in Britain almost instantaneously.

While this changed experience of the world leaves plenty of room for appreciating its beauty, there are fewer opportunities to experience nature as vast, powerful, and overwhelming – and thereby sublime.

But what of art and architecture? As we said earlier, and as the example of Cologne Cathedral shows, human creations can be sublime too.

The problem is that modernity has also transformed art and architecture. Pre-modern societies constructed monuments and buildings that gave physical expression to great and transcendent ideas – most obviously their conceptions of divinity, the afterlife, and our place in the universe. Well-known examples might be Stonehenge, the pyramids at Giza, or the Leshan Buddha. An encounter with any of these is still a sublime window into a very different culture. 

Today, however, our grandest buildings are skyscrapers and shopping malls, which symbolize little more than the capitalist mode of production. One of the many unfortunate consequences of this development is that it further shrinks the place of the sublime in modern life.

The value of the sublime

Now, you might take issue with that last sentence and wonder why any of this matters. Who cares if we’re less disposed to feel wondrously overwhelmed by the vastness of nature or by grand monuments to the beyond?

One reason for caring is that the experience of the sublime is interesting in itself. Although tinged with a sense of danger or personal insignificance, the overarching sense is of wonder and awe. It’s simply a shame that we’re less likely to feel this than our ancestors were.

More than that, though, the sublime is valuable because it breaks us out of bad habits engendered by modernity itself. More specifically, it grants us a different way of relating to nature, whereby we cease to see ourselves as the latter’s master. Equally, when the sublime is experienced through a monument like Stonehenge or a building like Cologne Cathedral, we see ourselves standing in a different relation to human history: not at its pinnacle, as contemporary culture would have us believe, but just one stage of it. 

In both of these cases, what’s crucial is that we cease to think of ourselves as the center of the universe and instead recognize that we are actors on a worldly stage. In doing so, we can become a little less hubristic and a little more appreciative of what lies outside and behind our immediate circumstances.

Staying open to wonder

So how do we keep our minds open to the sublime? How do we stay receptive to feeling wondrously overwhelmed by anything when our whole culture trains us to think of the world as raw material there to satisfy our individual needs?

The answer, I think, is that we have to cultivate a less demanding attitude of the world. I say this because whenever I’ve experienced the sublime, I didn’t anticipate doing so. Certainly, I thought I might enjoy Stonehenge or Cologne Cathedral, but I had no preconceptions about what form that enjoyment would take. It was something of a surprise to be wondrously overwhelmed – in fact, it might even be the case that to be wondrously overwhelmed, you have to not expect it.

So rather than going to places and hoping that they’ll be sublime, the key might instead be to approach things in a way that makes no firm expectations of them at all. In other words, we can try to be curious, open-minded, and engaged without challenging the world to appear to us in a particular way.

Perhaps this is the way to open ourselves and allow the sublime back into our lives – I don’t know for certain, and can’t promise anything. But it would certainly be a less modern way of being – and might, as a result, lead to a richer and more rewarding experience of the world.