Awe

One emotion, though, would not get the call for this revolution, an emotion that is the provenance of so much that is human—music, art, religion, science, politics, and transformative insights about life. That would be awe. The reasons are in part methodological. Awe seems to resist precise definition and measurement, the bedrock of science. In fact, how would a scientist study awe in a lab? How could scientists lead people to feel it on cue and measure its near-ineffable qualities, or document how awe transforms our lives, if, indeed, it does?

There were theoretical barriers as well. As the science of emotion got off the ground, it did so in a theoretical zeitgeist that held that emotions are about self-preservation, oriented toward minimizing peril and advancing competitive gains for the individual. Awe, by contrast, seems to orient us to devote ourselves to things outside of our individual selves. To sacrifice and serve. To sense that the boundaries between our individual selves and others readily dissolve, that our true nature is collective. These qualities did not fit neatly within the hyperindividualistic, materialistic, survival-of-the-selfish-genes view of human nature so prominent at the time.

One cannot help but suspect that personal hesitations were at play as well. When people talk about experiences of awe, they often mention things like finding their soul, or discovering what is sacred, or being moved by spirit—phenomena that many believe to be beyond measurement and the scientific view of human nature.

Emotion science had a field guide, though, a road map for charting the what, how, and why of awe. What awe needed first was a definition, the place where all good scientific stories begin. What is awe?

Defining Awe

With emotion science turning its attention to the varieties of positive emotion, in 2003 my longtime collaborator at New York University Jonathan Haidt and I worked to articulate a definition of awe. At the time, there were only a few scientific articles on awe (but thousands on fear). There were no definitions of awe to speak of.

So we immersed ourselves in the writings of mystics about their encounters with the Divine. We read treatments of the holy, the sublime, the supernatural, the sacred, and “peak experiences” that people might describe with words like “flow,” “joy,” “bliss,” or even “enlightenment.” We considered political theorists like Max Weber and their speculations about the passions of mobs whipped up by demagogues. We read anthropologists’ accounts of awe in dance, music, art, and religion in faraway, remote cultures. Drawing upon these veins of scholarship, we defined awe as follows:

Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.

Vastness can be physical—for example, when you stand next to a 350-foot-tall tree or hear a singer’s voice or electric guitar fill the space of an arena. Vastness can be temporal, as when a laugh or scent transports you back in time to the sounds or aromas of your childhood. Vastness can be semantic, or about ideas, most notably when an epiphany integrates scattered beliefs and unknowns into a coherent thesis about the world.

Vastness can be challenging, unsettling, and destabilizing. In evoking awe, it reveals that our current knowledge is not up to the task of making sense of what we have encountered. And so, in awe, we go in search of new forms of understanding.

Awe is about our relation to the vast mysteries of life.

What about the innumerable variations in awe? How awe changes from one culture to another, or from one period in history to another? Or from one person to another? Or even one moment in your life to another?

The content of what is vast varies dramatically across cultures and the contexts of our lives. In some places it is high-altitude mountains, and in others flat never-ending plains with storms approaching. For infants it is the immense warmth provided by parents, and when we die, the enormous expanse of our lives. During some historical periods it is the violence humans are capable of, and during other times protests in the streets against the machines and institutions that perpetrate violence. The varieties of vastness are myriad, giving rise to shifts in the meaning of awe.

“Flavoring themes,” Jon and I reasoned, also account for variations in awe. By flavoring themes, we meant context-specific ways in which we ascribe meaning to vast mysteries. For example, you shall learn that extraordinary virtue and ability can lead us to feel awe. Conceptions of virtue and ability vary dramatically according to context: whether, for example, we find ourselves in combat or at a meditation retreat, whether we are part of a hip-hop performance or a chess club, whether we live in a region of religious dogma or one governed by the rules of Wall Street. How we conceptualize virtue and ability within our local culture gives rise to variations in awe.