I find it hard to think of a word that is as unmoored from its root as “awesome”. It comes from the early Middle English age, meaning dread, or terror, but these fail to capture awe’s particular blend of fear, reverence and submission. It is often found in religious contexts (Milton wrote of “aw” in Paradise Regained), but crops up in politics too (Hobbes viewed awe as a valuable tool for an all-powerful state, or “Leviathan”). Since the time of those writers there have been ongoing attempts to claim the emotion; the most reviewed book about awe on Amazon is by a Philadelphia-based pastor, who laments: “All too often, we stand in awe of everything but God.”
The author of those words should probably stay clear of Dacher Keltner’s new book. Like a dogged species collector, Keltner pursues awe wherever it may be found: in historical and literary sources, scientific papers, the lives of his interviewees and his own experiences. Yet the book is far more than a field guide. Keltner, a bestselling author and psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is on a personal mission to reveal the secrets of the good life. “Twenty years into teaching happiness,” he writes, “I have an answer: FIND AWE.”
Keltner studied under the psychologist Paul Ekman, a pioneer in the study of emotion who documented facial expressions in different cultures (Ekman argues that certain expressions of emotion are universal, a view that has been challenged by other psychologists). Like Ekman, Keltner is now in high demand as an emotion expert; he has collaborated with Pixar on its film Inside Out and now heads Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, which offers advice on everything from parenting to political polarisation.
Early on in his book Keltner defines awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world”. There is a lot to unpack in this definition: our experience of awe is bound up with cultural notions of scale, our place in the cosmos, and context (whether we find a mountain awe-inspiring or simply terrifying may depend on the local risk of avalanche). Keltner tells us that the experience of awe varies among different cultures, but it is a universal emotion, one accompanied by its own language of chills, tears and “vocal bursts”, like “oohs” or “whoas”.
He acknowledges that awe has a dark history, but insists that today it has largely been shorn of fear, citing one study that suggests it sits closer to emotions like joy and admiration. For Keltner, awe is an ennobling experience, one that can foster wonder, creativity and collaboration. He understood this in 2019 when he lost his brother, Rolf, to colon cancer, and he writes movingly about the transformative feelings that followed. “The boundaries that separated me from the outside world faded,” he writes. “I felt surrounded by something vast and warm. My mind was open, curious, aware, wondering.”
In his quest to make sense of awe, and convince us of its virtues, Keltner embarks on a journey to find the emotion in a wide range of sources, from mystical texts to conversations with artists. In doing so he shows that the stimuli for awe are remarkably varied, dividing them into eight categories (or “wonders”), including “moral beauty” and “collective effervescence”. Awe often defies language, but Keltner is highly attuned to its traces. Detective-like, he observes his interviewees’ facial expressions and gestures. “When I play, I feel the vibration in my heart,” the cellist Yumi Kendall tells him. “It is beyond language. Beyond thought. Beyond religion. It is like a cashmere blanket of sound.”
In one chapter, Keltner describes his visit to San Quentin state prison in San Francisco where he asks prisoners about their experiences of awe. It’s a crucial part of his book that seeks to anticipate an oft-made criticism of the self-help genre: that the author’s proposed remedy, if it works at all, can only be taken up by those familiar with cashmere blankets. Keltner finds that prisoners, facing unfathomably difficult circumstances, do indeed experience awe, whether when reading the Qur’an or singing in a church band. “Awe,” he writes, “is almost always nearby, and is a pathway to healing and growing in the face of the losses and traumas that are part of life.” If anything, he says, those who have wealth or status may find it harder to access.
It is no easy task to reconcile scientific research with the messiness and ambiguity of the stories that we tell about ourselves and our emotions. The sciences and the humanities are sometimes compared to an estranged couple, and Keltner nobly seeks to address both parties, discussing the vagus nerve and Saint Francis of Assisi in the same breath. Yet the two can never quite converse in this book. Presented in rapid succession, Keltner’s stories and cultural references can seem mere instruments to buttress his taxonomic system; rarely does he stay with his characters and explore how awe has played out in their lives.
As an author he wears many hats: there is Keltner the scientist, carefully explaining what we know about human emotion; Keltner the ethnographer, quizzing prisoners and artists about awe; Keltner the spiritual guide, exhorting us to embrace an emotion which leads to an ennobling sense of smallness; and Keltner the status-conscious public intellectual, dropping into Pixar’s offices or having dinner with the Spielbergs. It makes for an interesting, if disorientating, reading experience, and one that speaks to our own age, where the secular now holds ground previously occupied by religion.
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His case is often convincing, and yet as a lay reader this text left me with more questions than answers. Is awe always the pathway to happiness? Anyone who dips into the troubled history of the 20th century will learn that fascism was adept at harnessing the power of awe, whether through monumental architecture or mass rallies. Keltner briefly writes about a veteran of the Iraq war, but he doesn’t pause to unpack the meaning of the US military strategy which, in part, took the name of his subject: “shock and awe”. “Awe” here is not ennobling, but an instrument of domination, as those on its receiving end well understood (some Arab writers translated “awe” in this phrase as tarwī˛ : terror).
All this suggests, at the very least, that the meaning of this elusive emotion may not be as far from its fearful origins in Middle English as we suppose. That if one can write a book extolling awe, citing Gaudí, Romanticism and Nelson Mandela, there is another one to be written which draws on the work of fascist architect Marcello Piacentini, the Rajneeshpuram cult and the nuclear bomb. That to call an emotion good or bad depends a great deal on our assumptions about human nature and history.