Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life

Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life is a work by Dacher Keltner (2023).

Core claims

• Keltner’s taxonomy of awe inadvertently recapitulates the phenomenology of the numinous as formulated by Rudolf Otto and absorbed by Jung, but strips it of metaphysical depth—producing an empirical map of a territory whose ontological status the book refuses to adjudicate.
• By grounding awe in vagus nerve activation, collective effervescence, and prosocial behavior, Keltner effectively reduces what depth psychology treats as the ego’s encounter with the archetypal to a measurable physiological event—a move that simultaneously validates and domesticates the experience.
• The book’s most radical contribution is its insistence that awe is quotidian rather than extraordinary, which aligns it more closely with Thomas Moore’s ensouled ordinary life than with the peak-experience tradition of Maslow, even as Keltner never engages the soul tradition directly.

Related questions

• How does Keltner’s concept of the “small self” compare to Jung’s account of ego-relativization before the numinous as discussed in Tarnas’s Cosmos and Psyche, and does the empirical framing gain or lose explanatory power by excising the archetypal dimension?
• In what ways does Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul anticipate Keltner’s emphasis on everyday wonder, and where does Moore’s insistence on descent into shadow expose a critical blind spot in Keltner’s uniformly positive account of awe?
• Could Michael Conforti’s archetypal field theory in Field, Form, and Fate provide the missing ontological framework for Keltner’s vagal-nerve data—reinterpreting the body’s response to awe as somatic evidence of entry into an archetypal field rather than merely an adaptive physiological reflex?

See also

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

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