Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Perhaps science, built upon essentialist names and quantification, could never unearth the secrets of awe. Perhaps matters of the spirit operate according to different laws than materialistic conceptions of human nature. Not to be deterred by these concerns, evolutionists have recently begun to make the case that Muir’s experiences of wonder and awe are examples of emotions designed to enable people to fold cooperatively into complex social groups, to quiet the voice of self-interest, and to feel a sense of reverence for the collective.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF AWE

 

That John Muir could stand in the Sierras and experience a sense of the sacred when surrounded by the pine, manzanita, granite, cascading water, and dark lakes of those mountains is a testimony to radical thinkers who fought pitched battles about the nature of the sublime (awe) and the beautiful. These thinkers liberated the experience of awe, wonder, and the sacred from the strictures of organized religion, which had laid claim to this powerful emotion, no doubt because of its transformative powers. Most directly, Muir’s experience in the Sierras traces back to Ralph Waldo Emerson:

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

 

And Emerson could preach transcendentalism in nature as a result of Enlightenment philosophers, in particular Edmund Burke, whose more secular musings provide clues to how our capacity for awe and wonder evolved.

Early in human history awe was reserved for feelings toward divine beings. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus involved a blinding light, feelings of awe and terror, and a voice guiding him to abandon his persecution of the Christians. In the climax of the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the hero of the story, Arjuna, loses his nerve on the eve of battle. To provide Arjuna a sense of higher purpose, Krishna (a form of the god Vishnu) gives Arjuna a “cosmic eye” allowing Arjuna to see gods and suns and to experience infinite time and space. He is filled with amazement (vismitas). His hair stands on end. He prostrates himself before Krishna, begs for forbearance, and hears and heeds Krishna’s command: “Do works for Me, make Me your highest goal, be loyal-in-love to Me, cut off all [other] attachments…”

In 1757, with the age of enlightenment, political revolution, and the promise of science in the air, Irish philosopher Edmund Burke transformed our understanding of awe. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke detailed how we feel the sublime (awe) in hearing thunder, in viewing art, in hearing a symphony, in seeing repetitive patterns of light and dark, even in response to certain animals (the ox) rather than others (a cow). Odors, Burke observed, could not produce the feeling of the sublime. In these mundane and purely descriptive observations, Burke was advancing a radical claim fitting for his times: Awe is not restricted to experiences of the divine; it is an emotion of expanded thought and greatness of mind that is produced by literature, poetry, painting, viewing landscapes, and a variety of everyday perceptual experiences.

Burke believed the two essential ingredients to the experience of awe are power and obscurity. On power, Burke wrote: “whereso-ever we find strength, and in what light soever we look upon power we shall all along observe the sublime the concomitant of terror.” On obscurity, Burke argued that awe follows from the perception of objects that the mind has difficulty grasping. Obscure images in painting are more likely to produce sublime feelings (Monet) than those that are clearly rendered (Pissarro). Despotic governments keep their leader obscure from the populace to enhance that leader’s capacity to evoke awe.