awe Archives | Neel Burton

What’s the difference between a painting and a sunset?

Article substantially revised on 24 July 2026.

Why does a flower delight us, while a thunderstorm leaves us awestruck? Why are we drawn to mountains, waterfalls, and stormy seas, yet recoil from real danger? Philosophers have sought to explain this by distinguishing between the beautiful and the sublime.

Longinus and Literary Sublimity

The distinction goes back at least to Longinus (first century CE), who saw the sublime as an overwhelming, ecstatic force that uplifts the soul with grandeur. A flower is beautiful, and so is a great oak, but the great oak is also sublime—and it is its sublimity rather than its beauty that we retain.

At the heart of our attraction to grandeur is the desire for transcendence, which we express in sublime art and language. In On the Sublime, Longinus laid out five sources of literary sublimity: noble concepts; passionate feeling; figures of speech; noble diction; and dignified composition. The first two, he argued, are innate, while the last three can be cultivated.

Although Longinus was writing about literature rather than nature, he established the enduring idea that the sublime overwhelms rather than merely pleases.

Edmund Burke on the Sublime—Or Why We Ride Rollercoasters

Later thinkers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant drew a sharper distinction between beauty and sublimity, which they presented as antithetical. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1757), Burke associated beauty with smallness, smoothness, and delicate form; the sublime, by contrast, with power, vastness, and obscurity.

Whereas the beautiful—a flower or a gentle landscape—gives rise to feelings of love, pleasure, and relaxation, the sublime—a storm-tossed sea or towering mountain—awakens awe, terror, and what Burke called ‘delightful horror’.

The sublime is only delightful, however, when experienced from a certain distance or place of safety. If the danger is real and immediate, it ceases to be aesthetic and becomes simply terrible.

Many people who bungee jump, ride rollercoasters, or watch horror films are seeking precisely this experience: the thrill of confronting death while knowing themselves to be safe.

The sublime is more powerful than beauty because the instinct for self-preservation is more powerful than the desire for pleasure. Who, asked Burke, would choose a life of great pleasure if it were fated to end in slow torture?

Kant on the Sublime: A Bridge Between Two Worlds

Kant read Burke and elaborated upon his ideas. He distinguished between two forms of the sublime: the mathematical sublime, which arises from the contemplation of immensity—like the starry heavens or the pyramids—and overwhelms our cognitive capacities; and the dynamical sublime, which arises from the contemplation of great power—like a violent thunderstorm or raging waterfall—and overwhelms our practical capacities.

With the mathematical sublime, the failure of our senses awakens our divine reason, which can readily grasp the idea of infinity or absolute totality, even when our senses cannot. With the dynamical sublime, our feeling of physical helplessness and insignificance awakens our moral vocation, which is immune to natural forces, as well as the noumenal world (the world as it really is, beyond mere appearances), in which we too are powerful, majestic, and free.

In sum, the feeling of the sublime reminds us of the superiority of our rational, moral noumenal selves over the phenomenal world and our mortal, phenomenal selves. Whereas the beautiful makes the phenomenal world feel like a better place, the sublime reminds us that we belong to an altogether different world.

Both beauty and sublimity bridge the divide between the two worlds, the one through harmony, the other through disruption, or disjunction.

Now the reader will understand what Kant meant in The Critique of Practical Reason when he wrote:

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Continue Exploring

To explore these ideas further, see my books The German Greeks, on Leibniz to Nietzsche, and Heaven and Hell, on the psychology of the emotions.

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The Psychology and Philosophy of Wonder

Article substantially revised on 24 July 2026.

In Plato’s Theætetus, written some 2,400 years ago, Socrates presents the sixteen-year-old Theætetus with a series of difficult contradictions. This is the exchange that follows:

Socrates: I believe that you follow me, Theætetus; for I suspect that you have thought of these questions before now.

Theætetus: Yes, Socrates, and I am amazed when I think of them; by the Gods I am! And I want to know what on earth they mean; and there are times when my head quite swims with the contemplation of them.

Socrates: I see, dear Theætetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris [the messenger of heaven] is the child of Thaumas [Wonder].

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle surmises that it must have been wonder that led the first philosophers to philosophy, since puzzled people think of themselves as ignorant and turn to philosophy to escape from their ignorance. St Thomas Aquinas concurred, adding in his commentary on the Metaphysics that, ‘Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.’

If Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas are right in tracing philosophy—and, by extension, science, religion, art, and all else that transcends the mundane—to wonder, then it behoves us to ask: What exactly is wonder?

What is Wonder?

Wonder is a complex emotion involving surprise, curiosity, contemplation, and joy. It can be thought of as a heightened state of consciousness and emotion brought about by something unusually beautiful, rare, or unexpected—that is, by a marvel. ‘Marvel’ derives from the Latin mirus [wonder] via mirabilia [‘wonderful things’]. ‘Admire’ shares the same root and originally meant ‘to wonder at’, although, since the sixteenth century, this sense has been steadily eroded—along, some might say, with wonder itself. Aquinas spoke of philosophers and poets in the same breath because both are moved by marvels, with the purpose of poetry being, broadly, to record and, in some sense, recreate marvels, to inspire wonder.

Wonder is most similar to awe. But compared to wonder, awe is more explicitly directed at something that is much greater or stronger than ourselves. As such, it is more closely associated with fear, reverence, or veneration than with joy. Without this element of respect and reverence, all that remains of awe is fear, that is, no longer awe but terror or horror. Awe is also less detached than wonder, which allows for much greater and freer contemplation of its object.

Wonder may be stirred by grand landscapes, natural phenomena, extraordinary achievements, or astonishing facts. It is expressed by a bright-eyed stare, sometimes accompanied by an opening of the mouth and a suspension of the breath. By drawing us out of ourselves, wonder reconnects us with something greater than our everyday. It is the ultimate homecoming, returning us to the world that we came from and were in danger of losing to our narrow selves.

But notice how this kind of wonder is not the same as the more abstract wonder that moved Theætetus to philosophy.

Socratic Wonder

The wonder of the philosopher, also known as Socratic wonder, is not so much wonder in the sense of awe as wonder in the sense of puzzlement or perplexity. Rather than grand vistas and the like, Socratic wonder arises from contradictions in thought and language, and impels us to investigate these contradictions in the hope of resolving them into some higher truth.

Socrates himself came to philosophy—and to his revolutionary method of doing philosophy—after being bewildered by the Delphic oracle, which, despite his professed ignorance, pronounced him the wisest of all men. To get to the bottom of this apparent contradiction, he questioned several supposedly wise men—first the politicians, then the poets, and finally the artisans—and in each case concluded: ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’

Wonder in the sense approaching awe is a universal experience found also in little children (picture a child at the circus or zoo) and even in higher-order primates and some other animals. Socratic wonder, by contrast, is much more rarefied, and, as Socrates implies by calling it ‘the feeling of a philosopher’, not given to all and sundry.

In his Advancement of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon called this kind of Socratic wonder ‘broken knowledge’, and there is a sense in which wonder, which may be cognate to the German Wunde [wound], breaches us and draws us out of ourselves. That breach yearns to be filled, not only by philosophy but also by science, religion, and art, giving rise to a third kind of wonder: the wonder of insight and creation.

Like Plato and Aristotle before him, the philosopher AN Whitehead (d. 1947) observed that ‘philosophy begins in wonder’, adding that, ‘at the end, when the philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.’ More than remain, the wonder grows. Scientific breakthroughs such as Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Newton’s theory of gravitation, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the periodic table of the elements, and Einstein’s theory of relativity are often more wondrous than the mysteries they were intended to solve. Wonder begets culture, which begets yet more wonder, and the end of wonder is wisdom—not the extinction of wonder, but its perfection.

The Loss of Wonder

Unfortunately, many people do not open themselves up to wonder for fear that it may distract or derail them. After all, wonder is wounding, and thauma is only one letter removed from ‘trauma’. To wonder is also to wander, to stray from society and its norms and constructs, to stand alone, to be free—which is, of course, deeply subversive, and why even organised religions need to tread a fine line with wonder.

To rationalise the fear of it, wonder is dismissed as a childish emotion that ought to be outgrown rather than invited and cultivated. So much is true, that children brim with wonder, before it is leached out of them by need and neurosis.

Today, many young people who go to university do so not for the sake of marvelling or even learning, but of obtaining a piece of paper by which to advance careers that they have scarcely had the freedom to question—entirely bypassing the wonder and wisdom that might have saved them from needing a career in the first place. For the child is not merely innocent but a natural philosopher, still open to wonder before the world.

Jesus said:

Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.

And again:

Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven… whosoever shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.