EPIPHANY

by Dacher Keltner excerpt from Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform your Life

THE BIG IDEA OF AWE: WE ARE PART OF SYSTEMS LARGER THAN THE SELF. WHILST THIS PLANET HAS GONE CYCLING ON, ACCORDING TO THE FIXED LAW OF GRAVITY, FROM SO SIMPLE A BEGINNING, ENDLESS FORMS, MOST BEAUTIFUL AND MOST WONDERFUL HAVE BEEN, AND ARE BEING, EVOLVED.

~CHARLES DARWIN

Darwin’s emotions so often gave rise to his big ideas, including the science of emotion, of which the story of awe is but one chapter. Caring for his 10-year-old daughter Annie until her death shaped his thinking about the evolutionary benefits of sympathy. His humble curiosity about fellow human beings brought Darwin, of a privileged background, into conversations with working class pigeon breeders, opening his eyes to their science of breeding species for signature qualities or adaptations. His kind cheerfulness on the Beagle held the crew together as Captain Robert Fitzroy suffered a nervous breakdown and enabled a 5 1/2-year voyage of incomparable and inexplicable wonders.

Might awe have shaped Darwin’s thinking about evolution?

In The Descent of Man in 1871 and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, Darwin locates the emotions we experience today and the vast story of mammalian evolution. Reading his descriptions of more than 40 emotional expressions is an epiphany, as rich a portrayal of emotional expression as any, except perhaps that of Japanese artist Kobayashi Kiyochika’s print series “100 Faces” from 1883. But Darwin never used the word awe in those descriptions.

Perhaps awe – so often a religious emotion – was a psychic battleground for him. To tell a story about the mammalian evolution of awe would challenge the creationist dogma of his era, one his devout wife Emma hewed to. That dogma held that our self-transcendent emotions, emotions like bliss, joy, sympathy, gratitude and awe, are the handiwork of God placed into human anatomy and our social lives by some form of intelligent design. Perhaps Darwin was avoiding awe to keep the peace at home.

FIREFLIES | Tsuneaki Hiramatsu