Existential Exchanges 3: The Sublime
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/07/22
Sapira Cahana is a New York-based mental health counsellor (MHC-LP) and is an interfaith chaplain-in-training specializing in existential and relational therapy. Sapira Cahana and Scott Douglas Jacobsen explore the concept of the sublime as both a Romantic heritage and a contemporary phenomenon. Originating in the late 18th century as a reaction to industrialization, the sublime was sought in vast natural landscapes by figures like Wordsworth and Coleridge. Today, artificial means—classical music, immersive technologies, algorithmic stimuli—can reliably evoke awe, yet risk hollowing out its authenticity by masking its existential depth. True sublimity, they argue, arises from organic encounters—nature’s unpredictability, human relationships, ritual, and contextual rootedness—that confront us with infinity, shadow, and wonder, fostering genuine meaning and connection.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we’re here once again with the philosophically broad-minded therapist, Sapira Cahana. We’re going to talk about the sublime. We’ve already covered comedy and the humdrum. So, when you think of the sublime—beyond the musical band—what comes to mind?
Sapira Cahana: First of all, thank you again for doing this with me. I find these conversations stimulating and enriching. Exploring topics we all care about with you is deeply rewarding.
The sublime evokes the Romantic period. The term emerged in the late 18th century as a response to modernity and industrialization, capturing our experience of transcendence in the face of grandeur. It was during the Industrial Revolution—when people fled polluted cities for remote natural heights—that Romantic thinkers sought solace in experiences that moved beyond everyday life.
Classic figures like William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake in Britain, and Goethe in Germany are central to Romanticism. They emphasized the sublime as a counterbalance to industrial rationalism.
Jacobsen: How are you defining modernity in the contemporary period?
Cahana: I begin with the Industrial Age—the rise of mechanization, urban crowds, and smog—pushing people toward mountaintops and untouched wilderness. That unrest birthed our modern idea of sublimity: seeking transcendence, now entwined with today’s ideologies.
Jacobsen: It does bring Tolkien to mind—The Lord of the Rings presents a countercultural critique of industrialization: the march on Isengard, the idyllic elves, and the harmony of nature versus destructive machinery. Do we see nostalgia for a pre-industrial “natural” life cropping up repeatedly in literature and culture?
Cahana: Absolutely. This is central to Romantic imagery: nature as an antidote to industry. Artists like Caspar David Friedrich painted lone figures and mountainous vistas to evoke awe and introspection. You mentioned invisibility in modern industry—reminds me of a thought attributed to Neil deGrasse Tyson: if car emissions were visible, people wouldn’t drive them. The hidden nature of pollution makes it acceptable. It’s an industrial convenience built on invisibility.
The power of the sublime often depends not just on sight but on the phenomenological experience—intense feelings of awe, terror, or grandeur. The Romantics heavily emphasized natural spectacles—stormy seas, towering mountains—as conduits for sublime experience. But the sublime can also emerge in human relationships.
Jacobsen: Do you believe the sublime relates to the physiological response to that sense of awe or transcendence that nature can produce?
Cahana: Yes—while nature is a classic source of the sublime, so are profound human encounters. Intense emotions—whether in beauty, love, or existential revelation—can trigger a cognitive suspension and physiological rush akin to the sublime.
Jacobsen: What are the artificial ways we try to recreate these experiences? Much classical music over the centuries was oriented toward this. It was often composed in deeply religious contexts. Still, nonetheless, it was rooted in a profound devotion to something unseen, something that may or may not exist, but devotion to something invisible, regardless.
Cahana: Yes, I recently attended a workshop where I listened to opera in the forest, among the trees. It took the Romantics out of the opera house. It placed them directly into nature, which produced different emotional invocations—or perhaps evocations. The emphasis on the emotional state intensifies the sublime. It amplifies it. Yes.
Jacobsen: Is there a threshold for the sublime? Can you even experience the sublime in an industrial context?
Cahana: Right. That’s an important and fascinating question. You alluded to it earlier, and I was thinking of Robert Nozick’s “experience machine.” It’s a thought experiment about hedonism—whether people would choose simulated pleasure over authentic experience.
Nozick argued that even if the machine provided maximum pleasure, something would still be missing. It would feel simulated—inauthentic—and most people would not choose to plug in. He concludes that we want more than pleasure; we want meaning and genuine connection. This brings to mind works like Brave New World by Aldous Huxley—literature that explores artificial experiences of pleasure that appear intense but ultimately feel empty or dehumanizing.
I wonder—this is just speculation—but perhaps that’s why naturally induced ecstatic states, like those from ecstatic dance, breathwork, or even childbirth, are so revered. They represent organic, full-bodied experiences that contrast with synthetic ones. We seem to valorize those states and look suspiciously at simulations.
It’s because the shadow side of simulated experiences looms large. It casts a long shadow over the pleasurable aspect of artificially induced sublimity. In contrast, when the sublime is naturally produced—emerging through practice, ritual, or careful preparation—the shadow is worked through more organically. It’s anticipated. It’s processed. I wonder what you think about that. I’m curious.
Jacobsen: I think so. The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who was especially famous for his interpretations of Bach, comes to mind. He died in 1982. He visited the Soviet Union and played a little Bach and other pieces of music they hadn’t heard live in some time.
To some, it may have felt alien, mechanical, or even divine—yet it was a man, sitting at a piano, performing with deep devotion. He, along with Herbert von Karajan, was an early pioneer of recorded music. They foresaw an era where music became a private, immersive experience—listened to alone in a room, during a jog, or while biking—enriching our engagement with the world around us.
Much of the music people play in those settings is banal or repetitive. Still, some of it—at the right moment—can provoke awe, even in the heart of an industrial environment. Think of New York City: people with headphones on, listening to a favourite track on repeat for hours. That, too, can be a sublime experience—personal, transcendent—even amid the noise and chaos of urban life.
You always have Philharmonic orchestras in various cities, and those performances can provide the sublime on a larger scale. But the artificially induced sublime can be achieved—it can be done reliably and repeatably.
So, in some sense, newer technologies blur the line between the industrial period and the Romantic ideal of a more idyllic past. The Romantics chose to move away from the industrial context toward something more ideal. Still, you could not necessarily reverse that movement.
To live in that artificial context, you must first build the entire industrial infrastructure. It is not a vice versa situation. You cannot have the artificially sublime without the industrial scaffolding that enables it in the first place. So when it comes to inducing sublime experiences, whether privately or publicly, the context matters deeply.
Cahana: Yes. That’s about inducing. There’s something mechanical that strips away layers of mystery. It tends to amplify a sense of meaninglessness. The trajectory of the sublime aims toward transcendence—toward ultimate meaning, a sense of oneness, or even non-dualism, depending on your philosophical lens.
But when the experience is metabolized in a way that is deliberate, IV-dripped, algorithmically generated—when it is produced through engineered dopamine hits—it takes on a sinister undertone. It undermines the confrontation that authentic sublimity offers: the experience of infinitude, solitude, depth, the abyss. Ultimately, it’s this confrontation that leads to wonder.
There’s an almost alchemical quality to this movement into the infinite. It is not culturally exclusive, even though its intellectual framing comes out of the Enlightenment and the Western philosophical tradition. It feels more universal. It speaks to a human capacity for wonder. It’sn’t limited by culture.
Jacobsen: That brings something to mind—a minor footnote. There’s a not-so-well-known documentary about Glenn Gould by Bruno Monsaingeon, titled The Alchemist. It portrays him, I think, before the significant decline in his mental health. He eventually suffered a stroke and passed away.
But the other thought is that our current fears—especially around audio-based artificial intelligence—might be misplaced. These systems rely on statistical reproduction, not true generativity.
Noam Chomsky has a famous point in linguistics: language systems are built from a finite set of rules and symbols, but they permit infinite generativity. That is, from a finite base, we can produce endless meaning. We need those boundaries to allow for infinite variation—for different styles and flavours of infinity, so to speak. Human communication happens within this context.
These AI systems, on the other hand, are based on finite statistical models that tend to loop. Think of your favourite song played over and over again. Our evolved context assumed peak experiences happened rarely, sporadically. But we’ve created superstimuli—intense inputs designed to elicit robust responses—that we plan for and repeat obsessively. This may be out of sync with our evolved emotional and cognitive systems.
So, to your earlier point about dopamine and other neurochemical effects, yes—it can resemble a drug. And as with most drugs, overuse can leave us unbalanced. We may be leaving ourselves vulnerable to emotional and cognitive imbalance due to these engineered experiences. We are not fully accounting for that.
And yet, we tend to focus only on the more obvious cases. But even subtle artificial stimuli can impact us in profound ways. This brings me to two additional thoughts. First, the value of more natural environments, where there is an ebb and flow that matches human rhythms. And second, the richness of human relationships within those environments, where you’ve had these profound experiences. And they, in a sense, mean more because they happen less often.
Cahana: They occur less frequently, yes—but they’re also situated within a community that recognizes ebb and flow. So, while there may be death in one’s life, there’s also birth. In a kinship model, you’re in a relationship with everyone and everything. You’re cultivating depth, and simultaneously holding the presence of both birth and death—sometimes on an almost daily basis.
And not to overly romanticize kinship models—they bring their existential weight, if you will—but within relationships, there’s a kind of meaning-making that naturally arises. In contrast, to be atomized, artificially induced into pseudo-sublime experiences, and easily manipulated, that undermines the evolutionary architecture our corporeal states are designed to orient us toward.
We have evolutionary drives. They do not pull us in every direction. Still, they do make us vulnerable—vulnerable to manipulation through superstimuli and false transcendence.
Jacobsen: And everything we produce—vocally or otherwise—is one-off. I think you mentioned this earlier, how the vocal cords shape sound musically, and each production is unique. Over time, a person’s voice changes. We can hear youth, aging, and emotional states.
Similarly, every birth is different. Every death is different. There’s a reason for that design—an evolutionary rationale, perhaps. So when we create artifice built on repeatable sameness, it may prove maladaptive in the long term. There’s a psychological model known as variable reinforcement—that’s the one I was thinking of—where the reward is unpredictable. It’s not uniform repetition, but patterned unpredictability. That seems to strengthen behaviour and resilience.
Each expression may share similarity, but not sameness. That kind of variability is more aligned with how we evolved, and how we should structure societies, favouring diversity in experience over uniformity.
Cahana: What you’re saying makes me think of context as fundamental, and the dangers of losing it. For example, encountering a random mountain can feel transcendent. You’re on a meandering path, and suddenly you come upon an awe-inspiring scene. The novelty of that moment helps create the right conditions for the sublime.
But when we’re entirely out of context—and the things we interact with are out of context—when the world loses its historical and emotional grounding, everything becomes rootless. It’s as if we’re constantly presented with flowers in a vase, detached from the soil they grew in. And we cannot tell if they even grew together or separately.
In that decontextualized state, the sublime becomes hyper-individualized and one-off. It loses continuity. It lacks lineage. By contrast, think about birth—as you were mentioning the metaphor of the voice and the birth canal. There’s a gestational period, a timeline, a lineage of genetic material. It happens at a specific moment, in a particular place.
Whether or not we assign meaning to that place or time, there is an embeddedness—a situatedness—that gives the process weight. It creates a slow unfolding. And that slowness, that contextualization, matters.
And I have, perhaps, a bias—though it feels grounded. I will still name it as a bias: I believe we reach experiences of profound transcendence when we truly engage with the details of our embeddedness.
That existential moment—floating on a rock in space—can evoke dread or the existential sublime. But it can also lead to diverging responses that make it difficult to pin down as a coherent experience of the sublime. It is just one option among many—nihilism, awe, existential vertigo. All become equally plausible.
But when we engage with the specific context—say, the mountain that is directly provoking the sublime experience—it grounds us. It anchors us to the Earth, to our lives. And from that rootedness, we are then lifted upward, diagonally, or however one visualizes transcendence.
It may be a bias, but it feels aligned with more profound wisdom. It invites us to confront our shadows. It reaches into the core of what it means to have a transcendent experience. What do you think?
Jacobsen: I mean, context is relational. The richness of any context lies in the richness of its relations. And for us, those relations only matter to the extent we are aware of them. For instance, someone who is blind might not see a mountain, and if no one describes it to them, they might only feel inclines and declines underfoot. That is still meaningful, but very different from visually encountering the full grandeur of a sunlit mountain in a forest in British Columbia.
It is a very different experience. That’s why the Zen koan comes to mind: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Or, if one hand claps, is that still clapping?
These koans push us toward the idea of the echo, toward internal resonance. The sublime, in our experience, is an internal echo. There is an amount of sensory input required, yes, but also a readiness to perceive.
I think of Ezra Pound’s line: “The water-bug’s mittens show on the bright rock below him.” That image requires a pond, a rock, light from a nuclear furnace—a sun—reflecting on water, and a mind able to register it. You need the scene to be framed—what Pound called the “four wide frame.” There’s a vast temporal and material context required for even a fleeting internal response in a bug.
For us, it is the same. Internal experiences are never isolated. They are embedded in extended, temporal, and material contexts. And honestly, who does not love a big old rock with some trees and dirt on it? It is great.
So when it comes to contextualization, it is primarily relational. It relies on having an internal model, even one you do not entirely control. Our experience of the sublime emerges from that lack of complete control. We are born into the world without mastery over our internal experiences. And that is a prerequisite for encountering the sublime.
If you are not registering those sensations, something has likely gone wrong neurologically or emotionally. For most people, most of the time, we have emotions, and we have them whether we want them or not. Emotional self-regulation can help us manage those states, but the feelings still come. The same is true for the sublime.
How we manifest that sense of the sublime, what it is connected to, the words we use to describe it—those will be culturally shaped. But the core capacity for awe remains. Just as we see many different languages but a very likely universal grammar underlying them, I think we see various manifestations of the sublime. Still, they are all rooted in a shared system of sentiment and response. Otherwise, we would probably be a different species altogether, with an entirely different framework for how we engage with the world.
Cahana: I was holding onto your comment about what we consider different abilities or disabilities. There are many wisdom stories about people who, after losing one sense, become mystic seers. The Pythia in ancient Greek mythology—the Oracle at Delphi—was, I believe, blind. She was the high priestess who evoked the transcendent for others who could see, but could not see clearly.
I’m also thinking of the parable of the elephant—the large elephant being touched by different blind people, each describing only the part they can feel. And there are Hasidic stories, too, involving blind beggars or deaf mystics. So yes, we are all limited—each of us. And our limitations can hinder us from fully experiencing the transcendent. Yet at the same time, we all have an infinite capacity for it.
That feels important—that the sublime is not culturally dependent or body-dependent. It is life-dependent. It is the very essence of being alive: to gravitate toward awe, to orbit around the transcendent, to oscillate between meaning and questioning, to wrestle with it, to confront it. It is our haunting.
Jacobsen: Are there any psychotherapeutic cases where someone is incapable of experiencing the sublime?
Cahana: Incapable?
Jacobsen: Yes. I mean structurally, where there’s a psychological or neurological block, and it becomes nearly impossible to access.
Cahana: I could not be a therapist if I believed anyone was incapable of experiencing the sublime. I do think there are times in our lives when our choices are narrowed—when we do not have 360 degrees of possibility. Sometimes we only have four degrees of movement.
But even within those four degrees, there is space. We feel more constrained, yes, but that does not mean the sublime is inaccessible. I believe that when the internal tension—the inner gnarl—emerges, it creates the conditions for the sublime to descend, to interact, to make contact. That is the inevitable potential in each human being.
Cahana: Now, sometimes life is tragically shortened. Babies die. Do they have a whole life through which to experience the sublime? Perhaps not directly. But the very fact of their existence—being born into context—can evoke the sublime in others. Their brief presence may generate the conditions for others to experience awe, grief, love, and the profound shadow cast when the sublime is absent, when we feel the finite rather than the infinite.
Jacobsen: Let’s say I walk into a bar… Let’s say I walk into a neuroscience lab… Let’s make it a joke:
Let’s say an Orthodox priest, a Hasidic rabbi, and a Muslim Sufi walk into a psychotherapist’s office. Each speaks their respective native language—let’s say Church Slavonic, Hebrew, and Arabic.
They share some intermediate grasp of a lingua franca, perhaps English, and manage to connect on shared ground. Now, imagine they all come to British Columbia. They look upon a majestic mountain, its grandeur wrapped in trees and mist. They each experience awe. They feel the sublimity of the moment.
Perhaps, at the same time, a band named Sublime is playing in the background, singing about a “Lou Dog” being the only way to stay sane. Their English is just good enough to catch the meaning. They translate this lyric into Hebrew, Cyrillic script, and Arabic in their heads.
Then they all fly to New York City and sit in your office. They ask you to help them bridge the gap between their internal and cultural experiences of the sublime. How do you help someone translate intercultural senses of the sublime?
Cahana: So, first, to demystify your example, these are individuals who are already primed for the experience of the sublime.
Jacobsen: It’s speculative, of course. But religious leaders, people who live theological lives with sincere commitment—even with the existence of bad actors—are generally attuned to the unseen. They are sensitized to awe.
Cahana: Yes. That sensitivity cannot be contrived. It cannot be manufactured. That’s what we were discussing earlier, when we talked about artificial experiences of the sublime. Two people can climb Mount Everest and have entirely different experiences—one drawn to the physical exertion, the climb itself; the other struck by the vastness of the view from the summit.
The sublime arises at different moments. It can emerge in the night or bright daylight. When someone walks through my office door and brings me an experience of the sublime through their cultural lens, my role is to hold that experience with them, for longer.
My goal is to draw it out. Let the moment linger. Help them explore it and begin to unpack the symbolic layers, because the sublime is always a symbolic experience—it points to something larger. It belongs to the territory of meaning. So what is the meaning? Does the experience make them feel ready to die, not out of despair, but from encountering something so immense and transcendent that life itself feels complete?
Or is the feeling rooted in fear, perhaps fear of the world’s direction? That’s what the sublime demands. That’s what I try to help them uncover: what is the more profound message? Even someone as spiritually seasoned as a Sufi mystic needs that help. No one is impervious. No one is immune to misinterpreting the message of the sublime. No one is immune to overstating it either. Regardless of training, ritual, or devotion, we are embodied beings.
And that matters. That’s part of the meaning. Our physicality is part of our access to the sublime. You do not become God simply because you have experienced God.
Jacobsen: Any favourite quotes on the sublime before we go?
Cahana: I love Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. He writes: “Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!” It’s this incarnation of the sublime—intense, luminous, almost divine. Coleridge was under the influence of opium when he wrote that poem—an artificial production of the sublime.
And even in that state, he went straight to the danger—the shadow side of it. That warning, that caution he evokes, is one of the reasons not to over-romanticize the sublime. Instead, we should honour it with reverence, for both what it can produce and what it can provoke.
Jacobsen: Sapira, thank you, as always, for your expertise and your time. Lovely to see you again.
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