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At once tiny and huge: what is this feeling we call ‘sublime’? | Aeon Ideas
When you take a hike and you feel a sense of awe at everything that you're seeing, you're experiencing the sublime. In most of life, this sense of “smallness” is experienced as a humiliation. But the sense of smallness in the presence of the sublime has an oddly uplifting effect.
I love the idea of coming face to face with our cosmic insignificance ... See more
I love the idea of coming face to face with our cosmic insignificance ... See more
sublimeinternet.substack.com • Can I Ramble for a Sec?
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On the Sublime:
In the presence of the sublime, we are made to feel desperately small. In most of life, a sense of our smallness is experienced as a humiliation (when it happens, for example, at the hands of a professional enemy or a concierge). But the impression of smallness that unfolds in the presence of the Sublime has an oddly uplifting and pr
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The first issue was how to define awe. What is it? The thesis they alighted on rested on two key appraisals: “perceived vastness” and “a need for accommodation,” qualifying the latter as “a challenge to or negation of mental structures when they fail to make sense of an experience of something vast.”
Henry Wismayer • Finding Awe Amid Everyday Splendor
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In 1757, the Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke revolutionized the intellectual contemplation of awe with his celebrated “Philosophical Enquiry,” in which he described the distinction between beauty and “the sublime,” a de facto synonym for awe. Burke argued that the sublime was “our strongest passion.” It could often
... See moreHenry Wismayer • Finding Awe Amid Everyday Splendor
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After reviewing accounts of psychological, sociological, religious, artistic, and even primordial awe (awe toward power), the researchers surmised that awe universally involved the perception of vastness and the need to accommodate the experience into one's present worldview. That is, awe is triggered by some experience so expansive (in either a po... See more
Jesse Graham • How Awe Stops Your Clock
Keely Adler added
two key features define it: The first is a sense of vastness – whether vastness of space, time, beauty, understanding or connection – that makes us feel smaller and experience a dissolution of the self. The other is the need to adjust our understanding of the world, in order to accommodate the experience, or at least try to.
Rob Hopkins • From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want
We spend a lot of time in life trying to make ourselves feel bigger — to project ourselves, occupy space, command attention, demand respect — so much so that we seem to have forgotten how comforting it can be to feel small and experience the awe that comes from being silenced by something greater than ourselves, something unfathomable, unconquerabl
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