Have you ever felt awe and exhilaration while contemplating a vista of jagged, snow-capped mountains? Or been fascinated but also a bit unsettled while beholding a thunderous waterfall such as Niagara? Or felt existentially insignificant but strangely exalted while gazing up at the clear, starry night sky? If so, then you’ve had an experience of

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Responses to the sublime are puzzling. While the 18th century saw ‘the beautiful’ as a wholly pleasurable experience of typically delicate, harmonious, balanced, smooth and polished objects, the sublime was understood largely as its opposite: a mix of pain and pleasure, experienced in the presence of typically vast, formless, threatening,

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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 stem from sensory

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