Awe: The Fifth Existential Given

On Kirk Schneider’s case for a missing dimension of the human condition

A collage of nebulae and stars from the ESA - European Space Agency and NASA

Picture yourself standing on a gigantic flat field, a soccer ball at your feet. This is the sun, rendered to scale. You are handed a peppercorn and told it is Earth, and then you begin to walk.

Ten paces from the soccer ball “sun” and you pass Mercury, a pinhead. Twelve more, and you pass Venus, another peppercorn not unlike the one in your hand. Nine more, and you set yours down — this is Earth, this is home. Already the soccer ball behind you has begun to look exceedingly small. Thirteen more paces to Mars, and then the gaps begin to widen: ninety-five paces to Jupiter, another hundred and thirty to Saturn, two hundred and sixty to Uranus, and two hundred and ninety-five more before you finally stop at Neptune. You've walked the length of nine football fields, the soccer ball behind you no longer visible, a small round shape resting somewhere far back in the direction you came from.

It gets even more wild, though. Consider that this solar system—the soccer ball, the peppercorn “earth,” the nine football fields of empty space between them—is itself one of hundreds of billions of solar systems in the Milky Way alone, and that our sun is by any cosmic measure unremarkable, traveling at 483,000 miles per hour in its orbit and still not due to complete a single rotation of the galaxy for another 225 million years.

This is the exercise astronomers use to teach scale, though I’d argue that it can have a secondary effect: instigating a sense of awe. Existential-humanistic psychologist Kirk Schneider defines the phenomenon as “a perception of vastness that cannot be assimilated but can be accommodated, or as the experience of humility and wonder—adventure—toward living.” Awe has the power to knock you off your feet, to totally unmoor you, making the ordinary architecture of your concerns feel, at least for a moment, much less significant.

A rendering of the Solar System to scale by artist Roberto Ziche

---

That feeling is not merely philosophical. Research shows that awe triggers a distinct autonomic nervous system response, a measurable shift in the body that sets it apart from other emotions. Across cultures, it reliably produces what researchers call the “small self” experience: a felt dissolution of the ego’s ordinary boundaries, or a momentary loosening of the self’s grip on its own importance. Awe is something the body experiences, not just something the mind thinks. These signs point to awe being understood as a universal experience—a given—that is central to what it means to be human.

As I’ve discussed in past pieces here, Irvin Yalom (1980) identified four existential givens: universal conditions of human life that shape how we think, feel, and move through the world. He explained how these givens—death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness—are each experienced as a source of deep psychological conflict. We grapple with the tension between knowing we will die and wishing to continue to be; the vertigo of recognizing that we alone are responsible for our choices, with no predetermined ground beneath us; the ache of ultimate aloneness, even in the presence of people we love; and the confrontation with a universe that offers no inherent meaning, leaving us to construct our own.

The Four Existential Givens: Death, Freedom, Isolation & Meaninglessness

These are not comfortable things to sit with. Existential psychology does not ask us to resolve them, but instead to turn toward them, to let the awareness of our human condition become the ground from which authentic living grows.

---

Schneider now carries the proverbial torch that Yalom lit many years ago when he published Existential Psychotherapy, his landmark book that helped to popularize existential psychology in the United States. Now close to 50 years since Yalom delineated his original four givens, Schneider makes the excellent point that awe “should be added to the traditional givens of the human condition” (p. 249). Yalom’s list, as it stands, accounts for what terrifies us about existence without accounting for what stops us in our tracks and makes us feel, against all rational odds, that being alive is extraordinary.

Schneider defines awe a few ways, my personal favorite being “the humility and wonder, thrill and anxiety, splendor and mystery of living.” Humility and wonder together, not one or the other. Awe is not simple delight, and it is not simple terror; it holds both simultaneously, which is precisely what makes it so difficult to metabolize and so impossible to manufacture. You cannot decide to feel awe any more than you can decide to feel grief.

Crucially, Schneider argues that awe is felt, not known — that it “encompasses one’s whole bodily experience” (p. 249) in a way that separates it from meaning, which is more cerebral, more cognitive in its structure. Meaning, we can construct; awe, we can only receive. This is part of why Schneider contends it belongs not beneath the other givens but alongside them, as something ontologically foundational: a basic condition of human consciousness, as universal as the awareness of death and as unavoidable, in the right conditions, as the anxiety that awareness produces.

He goes further still, suggesting that we expand our understanding of the human condition from “the challenge for meaning in a meaningless universe to the challenge for meaning and awe in an unknown universe” (p. 249). A meaningless universe feels like a conclusion, a philosophical position one arrives at and then must live with. An unknown universe is something altogether different: it is open, genuinely unresolved, and the appropriate response to it is not despair but curiosity, not resignation but wonder. Awe, in this framing, is the emotional and somatic correlate of intellectual humility taken to its furthest reach, the felt recognition that existence is vaster than anything we will ever understand.

---

This is where Terror Management Theory (TMT) becomes relevant, and where the argument for awe as a given takes on a sharper edge.

Transforming Terror Management

TMT, as I’ve written about at length, asserts that human beings manage the anxiety produced by mortality awareness through two main psychological routes: adherence to cultural worldview and the bolstering of self-esteem contingent upon that worldview. These buffering systems are largely automatic, operating outside of conscious awareness, and while they are effective at keeping existential distress at bay, they carry a cost — because what we buffer against, we also close ourselves off from. The worldview we cling to for protection can becomes the very thing that narrows our perception of what is possible, what is “real,” and what is worth attending to. We manage the terror by shrinking the aperture.

Awe, by its very nature, blows the aperture wide open.

Schneider describes this view as the whole enchilada approach, an orientation toward life that encompasses its entirety, “from the melancholic to the ecstatic, and from the deeply troubling and even mortifying to the poignant and profound” (p. 105). The whole enchilada implies an uncomfortable truth: you cannot selectively numb. The same willingness to feel the smallness—to look up at the night sky and let yourself be pressed down into the earth by the metaphorical (and physical!) weight of existence—is the willingness required to feel the fullness of being alive. TMT’s buffering systems protect us from the former and inadvertently foreclose the latter. We trade awe for comfort, and we do it so automatically that we rarely notice the transaction.

This is not a uniquely Western problem, though Western culture has arguably perfected it. As Schneider observes, Eastern traditions have generally been more oriented toward accepting life’s full range: cultivating calmness and acceptance in the face of impermanence rather than constructing elaborate symbolic fortresses against it. But awe, he argues, transcends the cultural distinction; the search for the sacred is universal, even if the path toward it differs. What varies is not the capacity for awe but the degree to which our structures of meaning—our worldviews, our self-esteem, and our carefully maintained identities—allow us access to it.

The existential-humanistic tradition asks something difficult of us here. It asks us to recognize that terror and awe are not opposites, not a spectrum with darkness on one end and wonder on the other, but two faces of the same encounter with existence. To accept awe fully is, as Schneider writes, “to fully accept the paradox, ambiguity, and absurdity of our condition” (p. xv). It is to stop asking existence to be more manageable than it is. And that, per usual, is easier to write than it is to live.

Terror & Awe: Two Faces of The Existential Encounter

---

If we are to accept awe as a fundamental condition of existence that we can either open to or defended against, there are practical implications for how we might choose to remain open.

Drawing on the work of Bugental, May, and Schneider, Bounfiglio (see citation below) offers two principles identified as awe’s necessary preconditions: appreciation and discernment. To experience awe, one must first be present enough to notice what is actually happening—not what we expect to happen, not what we have categorized and filed away, but the thing itself, in its particularity—and then discerning enough to recognize its significance, and to let the awareness of it reverberate rather than immediately reaching for an interpretation. Without that quality of presence, moments that could become awe are likely to collapse instead into background noise or anxiety because the same vastness that opens into wonder when we are present can produce dread when we are defended.

This is a practice not a personality trait, which matters because it means that awe is available to more people than the temperamentally mystical. It requires, more than anything, a willingness to be interrupted: to let the ordinary reveal its strangeness, and to resist the impulse to immediately domesticate whatever has just unsettled us. In a review of Schneider’s Rediscovery of Awe, Levy remarks that cultivating awe as central to one’s consciousness requires moving away from consumerism, conventionality, competitiveness, and the general preference for comfort over encounter — a list that reads, rather accurately, as a description of the cultural water most of us are swimming in.

None of this is simple. Schneider is clear-eyed about the fact that for many adults, transitioning toward an awe-oriented life requires confronting a lifetime of accumulated insecurities and anxieties that have been carefully managed rather than metabolized. The whole enchilada is not always appetizing. There will be moments when the peppercorn exercise that started this piece produces not wonder but something closer to panic, when the vastness feels less like an invitation and more like an indictment of how small and brief and insufficient everything seems. That response is not a “failure” of awe; it is awe, in its less comfortable register, doing exactly what it does.

And so we return to the paradox at the center of this: that the path toward a fuller life runs directly through the things we would most prefer to avoid: our smallness, our finitude, our radical uncertainty about what any of this means. The givens are not obstacles to living well; they are, in Yalom’s framing and Schneider’s extension of it, the very ground from which authentic living becomes possible. Awe does not resolve the other four givens. It does not make death less final or isolation less real or meaning easier to construct. What it does, perhaps, is change our relationship to the unresolvability itself, so that standing nine football fields from a soccer ball that represents the sun, we feel not only small but, strangely, grateful to be here at all.

Memento vivere.

**Couldn’t hyperlink this citation, so sharing it here:
Bounfiglio, R. J. (2014). The search for inner awareness and the possibility of living a fuller existence and experiencing awe based on the writings of James Bugental, Rollo May, and Kirk Schneider (Publication No. 3611449) [Doctoral dissertation, Saybrook University]. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global.