Is Awe the New Sublime?

A Critical Reading of William B. Irvine’s “Regaining Your Sense of Awe”

I recently came across William B. Irvine’s “Regaining Your Sense of Awe”, which I have transcribed verbatim here. The essay gave me an opportunity to revisit my own thinking around beauty, wonder, the sublime, the aesthetic experience, and more. But first, a summary—one I’ll admit I used the help of AI to generate.

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Core Summary

1. Childhood Awe as a Natural State of Receptivity
Irvine opens with an anecdote of a three-year-old girl watching a sandcastle being made, utterly transfixed by what to an adult might seem banal. This sets the stage for his thesis: that young children possess an abundant and instinctive capacity for awe, which diminishes over time.

“She was awestruck that such magic was possible and that her father had power to perform that magic.”

2. Awe as a Positive Emotion to be Reclaimed
Writing as a Stoic philosopher, Irvine frames awe as one of the most significant positive emotions—rare but rejuvenating.

“Feelings of awe… feel absolutely wonderful from the inside.”

He recalls his own jaw-dropping, breath-catching encounter with a smoke-dimmed sunrise and later, a total eclipse that transformed spectators into “the psychological equivalent of three-year-old kids.”

3. Delight as the Gateway Drug
He suggests that awe can be cultivated by starting with its “cousin”: delight. Noticing the colours of the sky, the shimmer of ginkgo leaves, or the precision of a dovetail joint—each becomes a site of re-sensitisation.

“Delight is triggered by the simple recognition that what you are experiencing didn’t have to exist, but it does.”

Delight, in Irvine’s framing, is a practice of attentiveness. Awe, when coupled with understanding and imagination, becomes a deeper resonance.

4. His Prescription: The “Fresh-Eyes Project”
Irvine proposes deliberate practices to recover awe: learning a craft, studying science, or developing artistic skills so that one recognises the depth of what might otherwise seem ordinary.

“A blue sky in October, fringed with orange leaves, is surely one of the most striking sights our universe has to offer.”

His argument: skill breeds perception. Knowing what it takes to make or do something increases our susceptibility to awe when we see it done well.

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Whereas Irvine is coming from an important place—where, as adults, we have become jaded, having lost our sense of awe and our ability to appreciate the world around us—I noticed several fundamental areas where my perspective diverges.

I first propose that this sense of awe is nothing other than a reframing of the word beauty—a term that has been written about by many before me. Irvine’s awe comes closest to Kant’s Sublime (formless) and Burke’s Sublime (terrible). However, both Burke and Kant recognised the Sublime as something distinct from beauty—not gentle harmony, but overwhelming force (I beg to differ, but more on this later).

As per Burke, the Sublime arises from terror, obscurity, vastness, power, and infinity. It is often linked to natural phenomena—thunderstorms, dark abysses, mountain ranges—things that dwarf the human subject.

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger… is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”
Edmund Burke’s Sublime (1757) – A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

For Kant, the Sublime does not reside in objects themselves, but in the mind’s struggle to comprehend the formless or infinite. It occurs when reason fails to fully grasp an overwhelming object or idea, yet becomes aware of its own power to think beyond limits.

“Sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense.”
Immanuel Kant’s Sublime (1790) – Critique of Judgment

Irvine’s awe often hovers near Kant’s Sublime: the vastness of time (450 million years of geology), the uncanny precision of an eclipse, the invisible cause of a dimmed sunrise (smoke from distant fires). His delight-turned-awe, fuelled by understanding and imagination, is deeply Kantian. But he also evokes Burkean moments: jaw-dropping astonishment, sensory overwhelm, the eclipse as “a quantum level above spectacular.”

For both Kant and Burke, the Sublime belongs within the broader discussion of aesthetics but is not beauty per se. In both accounts, beauty remains an object-centred aesthetic category. It is tied to proportion, delicacy, clarity, and ease. The Sublime, by contrast, arises when the object exceeds or overwhelms the subject’s faculties—through terror (Burke) or magnitude (Kant). Yet both still treat the Sublime as a mode of aesthetic experience—not beauty itself, but a register that arises from the disturbance of beauty’s conditions. The varying degree by which an object is terrifying, perplexing, or pleasing lands it into the category of either Sublime or Beautiful.

For Burke, beauty arises from what is small, smooth, delicate, and pleasurable. It is associated with love, ease, and harmony. Beauty, in Burke’s view, calms—while the Sublime disrupts.

For Kant, beauty is “purposiveness without purpose”—when we encounter a form that feels meaningful, though it serves no clear function. It needs no explanation, yet it satisfies the mind. We do not understand it fully—but in its presence, our faculties fall into harmony, and that harmony brings pleasure.

If Irvine’s argument about awe losing its potency and settling into delight over time were applied to the Sublime, it would still not “devolve” into the Beautiful. A thunderstorm may grow less terrifying through the night, and less so to an adult than to a child, but it would never be referred to as beautiful. On the other hand, Irvine proposes that cultivating delight keeps us open to awe when it does arrive.

So, is awe the new Sublime? I sense a loss in translation. It feels more like pop-psychology chasing “positive” emotions. It lacks the conceptual and ethical depth of Kant, or the dark forebodings that line the Burkean Sublime. In our search for awe, we risk spectacularising the world. In our constant search for delight, we might just dull true attention. In the wilful incitement of awe, we arrive at its commodification—a kind of perceptual tourism that atomises experience. Most importantly, in noticing the set, we miss the plot of the play.

So how do I perceive beauty, in a way that distinguishes it from awe or the Sublime?
That is the topic of the next essay. But before I end, I want to leave you with this:

How can beauty be both a property of an object and something that lies in the eye of the beholder?
How can it have an ethical facet, if we are able to find beauty even in grief and loss—states which are considered negative, not harmonious?
Is there a single satisfactory answer that solves all these mysteries that surround beauty?

There is.
–– Coming Soon.

Cover Image: Photo by Johannes Plenio from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/island-during-golden-hour-and-upcoming-storm-1118873/