Reclaiming Awe

I base my general premise on the assumption that
for one reason or another, humans need awe.

Nicolas Humphrey, a prominent psychologist, suggests that the
capacity to experience awe is in fact a biological adaptation
that allows for self-narrative and which provides him with
sense that his actions are of more than everyday importance

Frustrations with "Awe"

There are no pertinent pictures for abstract musings, so this
is Shangri La. You'll have to just pretend you're there if you
want the full effect, because as Walter Benjamin notes, the
age of mechanical [digital] reproduction is not the best at
reproducing aura/awe.

I've had a tough time wrapping my head around the idea of awe this semester, because I feel like it can be so subjective (and as I'll discuss later, I think moments of awe are most often isolated and individual). As I've read posts from people's wonder journals, I've thought to myself time and time again, "I'm not feeling it," and at times I get the sense that sharing my moments of awe through social media is really just cheapening my true moments of wonder and making me search for them in places where they aren't. I grew even more frustrated when I read Burke's treatise on the sublime, because though I followed his argument and found myself agreeing with pretty much everything  he was saying, I still didn't really feel like it encapsulated my idea of awe or wonder at all. It's then that I began to wonder if maybe awe and the sublime are not so synonymous as we like to make them and, aside from that, if awe is truly communicable. The conclusion that I've come to is that while awe and the sublime are certainly related, they nonetheless represent separate experiences which are transferable but not to the same effect or potency as the original experience.

So, as to the question of whether the sublime and awe are the same thing, I thought about what each is composed of. I originally did a ton of searches for the physiology of awe/wonder/the sublime but turned up little that was of value. Apparently, scientists care little about things like the sublime, and those involved in humanities research have a poor working definition of physiology, because the only things I could find were interpretive, personal findings rather than the brain scans and endorphin maps that I was hoping for. So, as personal, opinionated interpretations are all that is to be had, I figured I would offer my own.