The Beautiful & The Sublime:
Keys to a Satisfying Life

Photo by Author

An Overlooked Path to a Meaningful and Productive Life?

Every life coach and guru has a magic formula to show you the path to transformation. Some of what they teach is obvious. The rest of it is crazy.

There is also a reliable way to add depth, meaning, and excitement to your life. It makes you feel better and transforms you into a better, more grounded human.

It has been known for ages, but it has been the exclusive possession of a handful of scholars. Most people never get invited into this elite world.

Another factor keeps most people out when they hear anything about it. They’re put off by thinking it’s just some pie-in-the-sky talk that won’t make a real difference in their lives.

Now there’s evidence, hard scientific evidence from neuroscience. And this evidence continues to accumulate.

But I don’t need the new evidence. This knowledge of beauty and the sublime and how to interact with them has already transformed my life in many remarkable ways. But the new independent evidence will help us all benefit.

I’m not saying the way I describe here is the only one. Just that it has worked for me and for many people throughout history.

Why I Describe It as I Do

For most of my life, I’ve been a sucker for books or articles with the word sublime in it. I’ve read them all, some of them many times. Yet I chose to make this piece different.

One of the problems with writing about this topic is to make it interesting and useful for a wide and diverse audience.

Much of the writing about the sublime is, well, sublime. And that keeps these rewarding and useful ideas out of the hands of many who could benefit from them.

There are plenty of writings on this subject from academics, philosophers, and art critics. But the discussion is usually designed for and limited to cognoscenti elites. But the subject deserves to belong to us all.

So I will balance deep thinking with useful practical thinking.

There are thrilling, fun-filled rewards for embracing beauty and the sublime. They provide flourishing in your life and spice it up along the way.

Here’s my approach. I view the beautiful and the sublime as companion experiences of the world as we find it and experience it. 

These modes of experience are not the only ones, but they are the most profound. And better yet, they humanize our nature and exalt our spirit. Mystics would describe the process as transfiguration.

Beauty and the Sublime: Similarities and Differences

An aesthetic experience can happen anywhere. You might be taking a solo walk in the woods. Browsing through an art gallery or museum. In a concert or watching a movie.

Everyone thinks they know everything about beauty. But few moderns know anything about the sublime. For most it’s just another world for beauty. It isn’t. It’s the polar opposite of beauty in most ways.

Philosophers, especially philosophers of art, have clear ideas on the meanings and implications of these two concepts. The discussion goes back at least as far as Aristotle.

A Beautiful Face

Then there was a fever of thinking about beauty and the sublime in the 18th century, especially with Kant, Schiller, and Burke. But as the discussion evolved into the 20th century, confusion rather than clarity ruled the day.

The word sublime has come to mean so many different things, I don’t think it means much of anything anymore. The word is used as a superlative for beauty and to describe all sorts of things from a piece of music to a piece of cheesecake.

I have many modern books on the sublime. I’ve read parts of them many times. They are entertaining, but largely inscrutable.

So I’m going to skip the contributions of modern thinkers–at least until they get their acts together and clarify what they are saying.

Distinguishing Beauty & Sublime

Let’s look at the two concepts and how they differ. I’m mostly following Burke, but there are quibbles with different thinkers, especially Kant. And the disputes continue.

A Sublime Eruption– Image from Megapixel

The idea of beauty includes pleasure, smoothness, smallness, delicateness, proportion. These are elements often included in the idea of good taste. The beautiful is well-formed, proportional, aesthetically pleasing.

On the other hand, the sublime includes vastness, obscurity, power, even terror. There is pain, fear of being overwhelmed, a fear of death. For Burke it was a “delightful horror.”

In addition to profound pleasure and raised arousal, there co-exists a strong sense of fear and humility that is moving and transforming.

No, the sublime is not the superlative of beauty as is thought by many, but a stronger and different emotion altogether. Awe, amazement, bewilderment are also associated with the sublime.

Where Are Beauty and the Sublime Located?

Some argue they are out there in the real, external world. Others say they are in our bodies, with the emotions we feel. I think the experience is in our bodies but there are triggering causes outside us.

It doesn’t matter much which view we hold, so we can take both beauty and the sublime as subjective experiences and not worry much about external causes.

How I Became Interested in Beauty and the Sublime

In my life many paths led me to the rich experience of these emotions. Mathematics, theoretical physics, philosophy, art, and romantic love. Certainly loving and bonding with my dog. And a loyal and trustworthy guide has always been music.

My interest started academically and then continued to grow in my commercial work. Originally there was something that attracted me to philosophers talking about the sublime. I’m not sure what it was, but it continues to the present.

Regarding beauty, it started to become more important for me in graduate school. I was always intrigued by beauty in mathematics, as were most practitioners in the field.

In mathematics it’s usually called elegance rather than beauty, and it’s foundational. An elegant proof is regarded more highly than an inelegant one, even though the truth value is the same.                                                          

The attraction to beauty is also significant among theoretical physicists. It was critical for Einstein, who was my hero.

Beauty is often used as a heuristic in choosing alternate theories, to the consternation of many others who want everything to be strictly empirical.

The last course I took in theoretical physics at the University of Chicago was on General Relativity. It has been my main intellectual interest since I was a teenager.

It was taught by astrophysicist and Nobel Prize winner Dr. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. He was devoted to and in awe of beauty, whether he found it in nature or in theories describing it.

He was also moved when he found it in music as revealed by a story he told us about a meeting with Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg while Chandrasekhar was teaching at Cambridge.

During the time of our class, he wrote a book I came to love called “Truth and Beauty.” In class he told stories about how beauty was often an indicator of truth.

One day in class he was writing a set of equations on the board. It was called the “Newman-Penrose Formalism.” I was eager to learn about this for two reasons.

First the uniting of Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism in 3-dimensional space with Einstein’s equations of gravity in 4-dimensional space-time was a big deal for both theories.

Second because I had participated in a workshop with Roger Penrose and was always eager to study his work.

So Dr. Chandra was writing those equations on the board and explaining just how they work.

Instead of using the 3-dimensional real space of Maxwell or the 4-dimensional real spacetime of Einstein, he used a 14-dimensional complex space (14 complex numbers at every point of the space instead of 3 or 4 real numbers).

I always sat in the first row of the lecture hall for this class. I did this to better understand the good professor who spoke with a thick English-Indian accent. It was sometimes hard to understand, and I wanted to get every drop of what he had to say.

Then I saw something for the first time. Because I was so close, I was able to see tears running from his eyes as he described the great beauty of what this mathematical model had achieved. His voice broke a couple times. He had to take a moment to recover from this attack by beauty upon the ordinariness of a physics lecture.

This might have been the first time I saw a person moved by and physically overcome by beauty.

Finding Beauty in Fashion Photography

I continued to pursue this study until the present. When I became a fashion photographer, a new study of beauty was added to the mix.

Most photographers, unfortunately, seem to think photographic image making in any genre is about using equipment and techniques to make pictures.

Somehow I was spared this perversion, probably because of my experience as an advertising art director.

I had to produce images the agency needed for our ads and TV commercials, using rather than relying solely on the photographers we hired to come up with the ideas they were shooting.

It was always about creating cool and persuasive images. Rarely about the equipment and other tools we used when making those images.

I see photography as pursuing interesting ideas and developing them to work commercially for my clients. And whenever possible I try to add beauty to the mix. It makes ads work better, and it’s more fun to produce them. I rarely saw the opportunity to use the sublime, but someday maybe…

Neuroscience Makes the Experience of Beauty and the Sublime More Tangible

Neuroaesthetics is an emerging discipline within neuroscience. It studies the biology of aesthetic experiences including beauty and the sublime.

They are studying awe, wonder, and the sublime, because they believe that such emotions enrich and enhance physical and emotional health.

The target of the research is the aesthetic experience of beauty and the sublime in nature and in artistic representations of nature. Specifically they are looking at the positive effects of those experiences.

In the field of positive neuroscience, they study not brain pathology, but how the brain functions to achieve processes crucial for well-being and optimal social functioning.

Many studies use neural imaging like fMRI (functional magnetic resonance), EEG (electroencephalography), and MEG (magnetoencephalography). 

They investigate visual processing of images, and then show that after initial visual processing other behavior becomes involved.

Brain imaging of people when exposed to the sublime shows activation in specific regions of the brain. These regions are usually associated with self-reflection and emotional processing.

Many investigators use the PERMA model as a framework for their work. The acronym stands for positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

The field is young and the evidence so far is limited. It takes time to build a body of results that strongly confirms their conjectures. But researchers seem to know they are likely to be true, so they continue the search.

Wang, Yiya. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7gs3627k.
  Berkeley Undergraduate Journal, 38(1). 11-26-2024

How to Make This Path Work forYou–What Some of Us Have Found

I don’t have a systematic answer. At least not yet.

But there are many things I’ve found that work for me. It seems like these discoveries were random, but my strong interest in the beautiful and the sublime probably had a lot to do with it.

I think the essence of the transformative appreciation comes in the details. My path is only an example to show you how to find yours.

When you’re sensitive to something, you’re more likely to notice it when you stumble across it. 

This is true even when there’s only a hint that it’s present. You should see me when I’m on the hunt for the right books or music. It’s always a passionate search.

When I was young, I would appreciate beauty in ideas, mathematical theories, and nonstandard but interesting points of view. As I got older I appreciated the beauty in faces, images, and written language.

At 12 I started to learn philosophy, beginning with Socrates and Plato, followed by Descartes, Spinoza, and then back in time to Medieval philosophy.

I would study the arguments of Thomas Aquinas word by word, frequently in Latin, loving the beauty even more than the wisdom of the thinking.

One Thanksgiving afternoon when I was 13, while waiting for the big dinner with relatives, I spent four hours trying to understand St. Thomas’s third way to prove the existence of God–from necessity and contingency.  It was only a few paragraphs, and I had already read it many times. But I was trying to extract every note from the ideas.

And always, from my earliest years, there was the beauty of music that would engulf me with nurturing moods and excited feelings.

This grew every year as I matured and learned more about the language of music. From my early teens I would follow the scores of Beethoven symphonies note by note. It was almost impossible at first.

Although there is a lot of music I can’t stand, there are several musical genres that move body and soul. Certain classical pieces, especially Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Rock, dance music, especially vocal trance. Also Dream Pop, Blues, and many others.

I don’t think the actual subject matter for your pursuit of beauty and the sublime is important. Different people have different tastes. But when you find something that suits your life, you need to focus deeply on its inner beauty. And do it in more than one area. That’s what works.

I’m not suggesting you follow the exact path I did, but that you find your own based on your unique interests. They will work for you as well as mine work for me.

Mine was focused on certain intellectual pursuits. Yours might be based on gardening or watch collecting. It’s the approach and appreciation that matters.

And when it’s something you love deeply, it’s not hard to keep that kind of intense focus. Dare I call it contemplation?

When I read a text or listen to a song that moves me, something deep happens within me. Repetition helps.

Other people might read the same text or listen to the same music but never experience any of what engulfs me. You have to tune in! We’re not talking about casual reading or listening.

Music Is a Special Path–The Moving Aesthetic Experience of Frisson

It can begin on the back of your neck, or run up and down your spine. For me it’s especially strong on the fronts of both arms.

Hairs stand up straight, called a piloerection. Sometimes there are goosebumps and tingling. Your heart beats faster. Your face becomes flushed. There’s a lump in your throat.

You tune into the music like never before. You feel a strong sense of emotional well being. You feel pleasure and excitement. You feel the music moving your whole body. Makes you want to dance. It all lasts only seconds or maybe a couple of minutes.

It’s called frisson. Sometimes people call it shivers or aesthetic chills. It’s related to but different from ASMR.

Not everyone has this experience. I’ve talked to several professional musicians who have never had it, which is a pity.

Women have it more than men. And empathetic people are more likely to have it. That’s because they are more attuned to the emotions in the music and can establish a deeper emotional connection to it.

Estimates of how many people experience this sensation range from less than 10% to as high as 86%.

Some researchers have looked into the elements of the music that might cause this. Two factors are emotional contagion and violations of what is expected musically. 

When the listener’s expectations are violated, the autonomic nervous system responds with frisson.

Complexity and variation from what we expect have been tools of composers and musicians throughout history.

In a YouTube video titled “The Most COMPLEX Pop Song of All Time,” Rick Beato dissects the song to reveal these features and the effects they have. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnRxTW8GxT8

Music critics have composed lists of songs from a wide range of musical styles that cause some people to experience frisson.

Here’s a 715-song list constructed by a team of neuroscientists that is available on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/54ZA9LXFvvFujmOVWXpHga?si=070902caeeab4b47&nd=1

Here’s another list with 899 songs they call frisson triggers: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7wDUxrOUqWyoiBRW56B60C

Here’s one of my favorites that works for me reliably (but not every time). Some say it works for up to 90% of people. Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbmS3tQJ7Os

I worked with people who were Stones lovers and Stones in-studio and on-stage collaborators. I would say that Gimme Shelter is usually the favorite of each of them.

A big part of it is how it was made. For the original recording, which took a lot of time, they felt something was missing.

It was the middle of the night when the Stones decided to bring someone in.

They called the singer Merry Clayton, a 20-year-old singer, who was pregnant and in bed with her husband. The opportunity to record with the Stones got her out of bed.

She came to the studio with curlers in her hair and a nightgown under her fur coat.

She was a little disturbed when she read the lines she would be singing. Rape, murder, It’s just a shot away. But this is the part that most often stimulates the frisson.

Here’s a music trick that works for me. I make a playlist with several different versions of a favorite song. In this case, it was Gimme Shelter. I have about six versions, all by The Rolling Stones. In one of the newer versions of the classic, Lady GaGa is singing the Merry Clayton part along with Mick. It is electrifying!

I walk along with my dog Lola listening to these versions one after the other. Don’t always get the frisson, but am always engulfed in a semi-ecstatic state–feeling a coming revolution that will dangerously transform a corrupt world.

Hope I don’t look too weird to the people I pass on the street!

How Focusing on Beauty & the Sublime Elevates You and Makes You Whole

Why are there so many good results from engaging with the beautiful and the sublime? Here’s my theory.

In my period of adolescent iconoclasm, one of the things I crusaded against was the trivial. Everywhere I looked I saw triviality and people devoting themselves to that triviality.

When I look at my yearbooks from 8th grade and high school, there are many comments, mostly friendly, some mocking, about my obsession with trivialities and stamping them out.

Years later I had a friend who was a model and ballet dancer. Her almost constant target for derision was what she called the generic. People, places, and things could be generic. And every one of them irritated her.

But when you are thoroughly engaged with the beautiful, which draws you in, or with the sublime which attracts or repulses you, the trivial and the generic fall away into insignificance.

Freed from these petty distractions and irritants, you become more focused, more concentrated, more transcendent.

When you are wrapped up in beauty and the sublime, you’re able to purge things that bring you down and hold you back. You  become the person you were destined to be.

That’s How These Emotions Make You a Better, Stronger, Nobler Human Being.

Both the beautiful and the sublime can act as organizing principles in your life. Each helps you realize what counts, versus what is just trivial distraction.

I mentioned there are many other ways to do this in addition to the engagement I am discussing. And I suspect all of them have the same effect of stripping away nonsense and leaving you with the essence of living as your best self.

We’ll never know how many people have been helped by this over the centuries. Most of them don’t mention it. But I suspect the number is legion.

I hope this brings a new practice and adds a new dimension of living to like-minded souls. Call it a “touching grass” kind of experience for those too online or too immersed in commercial consumer culture.

Choosing Your Lifestyle in a Society Based on False and Flimsy Values

Too many people settle for too little. Surviving instead of thriving, languishing instead of flourishing.

And most everyone suffers along with them, assuming that’s the way it has to be. Signs of societal decay are everywhere, yet we continue in the morass of the meaningless.

Directionless loons rule current culture. Children are raised with little hope of greatness or noble achievements.

As a result, they cling to childish fantasies that were once dismissed as they entered adolescence. And so adolescent iconoclasm persists into adulthood.

But there’s a choice available to us. We can choose to flourish, a term now used by neuroscientists studying mental well being. Of course we’ll have to walk alone much of the time, at least until there’s a greater awakening.

Why is it that in the richest country in history, so many people settle for the cheap? And even fixate on it.

Cheap music, cheap art, cheap drugs, cheap thrills. All ok, I guess, for sporadic diversion. But what a soul numbing, joyless way to exist.

Generic triviality is deadly. What do we feel when we see a man at the pinnacle of wealth, power, and opportunity live a life that is fundamentally shallow and boring?

You can sit on a golden toilet, but if you never feel love or warmth, never experience depth or understanding, can’t separate truth from fantasy, you’re living a cheap life.

Religious people can say God gave beauty and the sublime to us as opportunities to develop. Scientific people can say we sometimes learn how to exploit our thoughts and feelings to improve our chances for survival. Two ways to say the same thing.

I would say they give us a chance to grow into better people and have a lot of worthwhile experiences along the way.

References

Books:

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford UP.

Seligman, Martin E. P. Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. Atria Paperback, 2012.

Journal Articles:

Chatterjee, Anjan, and Oshin Vartanian. “Neuroaesthetics.” Trends in Cognitive Neurosciences, vol. 18, no. 7, July 2014, pp. 370–75. Cell Press, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2014.03.003.

Clewis, Robert R. “Why the Sublime Is Aesthetic Awe.” The Journal of Aesthetic and Art Criticism, vol. 79, 2021, pp. 301–14. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaac/kpab023.

Ishizu, Tomohiro, and Semir Zeki. “Toward a Brain-Based Theory of Beauty.” PLOS ONE, vol. 6, no. 7, 2011, e21852. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0021852.

Koch, Sabine C. “Arts and Health: Active Factors and a Theory Framework of Embodied Aesthetics.” The Arts in Psychotherapy, vol. 54, 2017, pp. 85–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aip.2017.02.002.

Marin, Manuela M. “Crossing Boundaries: Toward a General Model of Neuroaesthetics.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 9, 2015, article 443. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00443.

Wang, Yiya. “Neuroaesthetics, Sublime, and Well-Being: Positive Affect of Awe and Aesthetic Emotions, and a Practical Framework.” Berkeley Undergraduate Journal, vol. 38, 2024. https://doi.org/10.5070/B3.39975.