Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion

Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion is a work by Dacher Keltner (2003).

Core claims

• Keltner and Haidt propose a prototype approach to awe built around two core appraisals — perceived vastness and a need for accommodation — that transcends the traditional confinement of awe to religious or peak-experience categories.
• The paper distinguishes awe from adjacent emotions (admiration, elevation, wonder) by insisting on the cognitive disruption component: awe requires the failure of existing mental schemas, forcing structural revision rather than mere positive affect.
• By mapping awe across five domains — threat, beauty, ability, virtue, and the supernatural — the paper implicitly recuperates what Rudolf Otto isolated as the dual structure of the numinous (tremendum and fascinans) within a secular emotional taxonomy.

Related questions

• How does Keltner and Haidt’s ‘need for accommodation’ map onto Jung’s concept of ego-relativization before the numinous, and does the cognitive framing lose the ontological weight that Otto’s phenomenology preserved?
• In what ways does the paper’s five-domain taxonomy of awe anticipate or diverge from the embodied account of aesthetic chills that Schoeller and others later pursued through psychophysiological methods?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-body/keltner-approaching-awe/

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