Awe

This story leads us to epiphanies—when we suddenly understand essential truths about life—which were the eighth wonder of life. Around the world, people were awestruck by philosophical insights, scientific discoveries, metaphysical ideas, personal realizations, mathematical equations, and sudden disclosures (such as a wife leaving her husband for his best friend) that transform life in an instant. In each instance, the epiphany united facts, beliefs, values, intuitions, and images into a new system of understanding. Here is an epiphany from Japan that delighted me, because I had found awe in my childhood in art and natural history museums and later in Darwin’s theory of evolution:

Just before I was twelve, I saw a science museum exhibit and understood the evolution of biology. I realized that human beings are undoubtedly only one species of many creatures (not particularly advantageous compared to other creatures).

We can find awe, then, in eight wonders of life: moral beauty, collective effervescence, nature, music, visual design, spirituality and religion, life and death, and epiphany. If you are offended that your favorite form of the sublime did not make this periodic table of awe, the Eight Wonders of Life Club, perhaps you’ll find solace in this: our “other” category encompassed 5 percent of the responses worldwide. This category included stories about incredible flavors, video games, overwhelming sensations (for example, of color or sound), and first experiences of sex.

It also merits considering what was not mentioned in stories of awe from around the world. Money didn’t figure into awe, except in a couple of instances in which people had been cheated out of life savings. No one mentioned their laptop, Facebook, Apple Watch, or smartphone. Nor did anyone mention consumer purchases, like their new Nikes, Tesla, Gucci bag, or Montblanc pen. Awe occurs in a realm separate from the mundane world of materialism, money, acquisition, and status signaling—a realm beyond the profane that many call the sacred.

A Space of Its Own

The etymology of the word “awe” traces back eight hundred years to the middle English “ege” and Old Norse “agi,” both of which refer to fear, dread, horror, and terror. The legacy of this etymology is deep. If I asked you now to answer our current question—What is awe?—you might define it in terms related to fear. Remember, though, that when “ege” and “agi” emerged in the spoken word some eight centuries ago, it was a time of plagues, famines, public torture, religious inquisition, war, and short life expectancy; what was vast and mysterious was violence and death.

When we use the word “awe” today, are we describing an experience similar to fear, or a variant of feeling threatened and seeking to flee?

Another question is this: Do our experiences of awe differ from our feelings of beauty? We feel beauty in response to all manner of things that can bring us awe, from skies to music to vibrant neighborhoods in cities. Is awe just a more intense feeling of beauty?

Up until recently, the science of emotion had no answers to these questions. The study of emotional experience had largely focused on those six states Paul Ekman had studied in the 1960s, eliciting emotions like fear and disgust with images of horrifying, repulsive things—spiders, snarling dogs, bloody gore, feces—and, for sensory pleasure or joy, photos of chocolate cakes, tropical beaches, beautiful faces, and bucolic nature scenes. No study had sought to inspire awe in its participants. Had it done so, it still would have failed to capture that experience, since the most widely used emotional experience questionnaire, which measures these positive states—active, interested, proud, excited, strong, inspired, alert, enthusiastic, determined, attentive—makes no mention of awe or beauty (or amusement, love, desire, or compassion, for that matter). The experience of awe was uncharted.