The Phenomenology of Awe

[Author's Note: The following is an outline of a talk I delivered on January 26th, 2018 at The Society for the Phenomenology of Religion Conference in Berkeley, CA]

“[Phenomenology] is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valery or Cezanne, by reason of the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being.”

-M. Merleau-Ponty, "Phenomenology of Perception"

I want to suggest that not only is the sense of awe or humility and wonder-adventure-toward living integral to the well being of individual and collective lives; it is foundational to the major religions and may even be at the vanguard of a new spiritual consciousness that Huston Smith called a “post-secular humanism” and I call “awe-based consciousness.” This consciousness seems highly compatible with the so-called “Nones” movement among our youth, the non-aligned (non-denominational) spiritual seekers. It is also compatible with the spirit of science (see Merleau-Ponty quote above). Indeed awe-based consciousness can be seen as a way of being that expands and deepens many approaches to life.

First, let us touch upon the etymology of “awe” then I will discuss and provide quotes from my phenomenological investigations of the impact of awe on individual and collective lives.

The sensibility of awe seems to derive from our earliest reactions to the mysteries of existence and formed the basis for the world's religions. As movingly detailed in Rudolf Otto’s “Idea of the Holy” the sense of awe or what he calls the “numinous” seemed to form our primal reaction to nature, and was mainly based on dread or what he called the “daunting.” This reaction was then followed by a rudimentary sense of wonder or what he called “fascination” with that "tremendous mystery" or daunting quality of nature. There is some indication that this early sense of awe, from Chinese to Greek to Norse origins continued to associate with the daunting, painful (agon), and fearful (or what the Chinese referred to as the command of “respect”) for the natural world.

It wasn’t until about 18th century and the advent of the writings of Edmund Burke on the “sublime,” J. von Goethe, and later James, Otto, Tillich, Buber, Heschel et al that the element of wonder and the fascinating came into fuller bloom. So now we developed something closer to the modern dictionary definition of awe as the “comingling of dread, veneration, and wonder” or what I have termed the “humility and wonder, sense of adventure toward living” for short-hand. In most recent years we’ve actually moved all the way to the other side of this paradoxical dimension, stressing only its capacities to thrill while forgetting its capacities for anxiety and humility, which I think is problematic. I therefore distinguish (in the spirit of Japanese folklore) between the “quick boil” and “slow simmer” approaches to awe which I elaborate in a recent article in The Humanistic Psychologist (June. 2017) titled "The Resurgence of Awe in Psychology: Promise, Hope, and Perils."

Awe as an imperative cross-cultural dimension vs. Us/Them: Awe embraces the foundational paradoxes of living vs. one-dimensional, rote or mechanical modes of living. Awe acknowledges the "other" both in oneself and another, and even celebrates the possibilities in this bridge-building.(See my recent book "The Spirituality of Awe: Challenges to the Robotic Revolution," particularly the section on the cross-cultural implications of awe). See https://www.amazon.com/Spirituality-Awe-Kirk-J-Schneider/dp/1945949694

Awe is a hedge against and can provide a needed counterbalance to roboticism and the machine or efficiency model for living. There appears to be a need for some discomfort and anxiety to live the full life.

Note then the potential impact of awe on child-rearing, education, work setting, religious and spiritual settings and governmental-deliberative settings in "The Spirituality of Awe." See also my discussion of secular spirituality in "Rediscovery of Awe," "Awakening to Awe," and "The Spirituality of Awe."

Finally, consider the need for an army of depth facilitators (a public works program for awe) equivalent to the military lest we lose our capacity for imagination, discovery and creativity while interacting with computerized society. Exploring the "lenses of awe" can give us a personal tool to complement the society-wide need for the army of depth facilitators (See examples of how these approaches can be lived in "Awakening to Awe" and "The Spirituality of Awe").