Wonder, the Sublime, and Blue Flower Power

You know that wide-eyed feeling when something extraordinary hits you—a thunderstorm ripping across the sky, or seeing lava spill down a mountain, or even your child's first steps? That’s wonder. But is it the sublime?

Jesse Prinz, in his essay “Why Wonder is the Most Human of All Emotions,” argues that wonder might be our most important feeling. It’s tied to joy, curiosity, and creativity, and is right at the heart of Blue Flower Power. But it’s not the same as the sublime.

Wonder vs. The Sublime

• Wonder is surprise mixed with admiration. It’s the spark when something new catches your attention and cracks open your usual way of seeing.

  
  

• The Sublime is deeper. It swallows you. It’s awe with fear and humility thrown in—standing on the edge of a canyon or watching a lightning storm close in.

Samuel Palmer – Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star (1830s)

Immanuel Kant drew the line: wonder might be part of the sublime, but it isn’t enough by itself. The sublime overwhelms and disorients; wonder invites and expands.

(Critique of Judgment, 1790)

What Makes Wonder Different?

Prinz points out that wonder is a hybrid emotion—positive and negative, emotional and cognitive. It jars your perception, then reorganizes it.

• Wonder is affective: it stirs feeling.

• It’s cognitive: it changes how we understand what we’re seeing.

• It’s relational: it shifts our stance toward the world and opens up new ways of being in it.

Wonder is what keeps the imagination alive. It fuels art, science, love, and philosophy. It doesn’t demand control—it invites engagement.

Albert Bierstadt – Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie (1866)

Wonder Cultivates Imagination

Unlike fear or anxiety, wonder doesn’t shut you down. It opens you up. It makes you look again. That’s why it’s central to so many philosophical and artistic traditions. Wonder reminds us we don’t have everything figured out—and that’s the point.

“The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder.”—G.K. Chesterton

“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.”—Socrates

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious… He to whom this emotion is a stranger… is as good as dead.”—Albert Einstein

The Sublime Hits Harder

Frederic Edwin Church – Aurora Borealis (1865)

The sublime is what happens when the mystery gets too big to hold. It’s what William Wordsworth called “the voice of the soul seeking release.” It doesn’t just move you—it destabilizes you. It doesn’t just invite—it engulfs.

“The sublime is the terror of the infinite.”—Jean-Paul Sartre

“The sublime transcends language and reason. It speaks to the deepest parts of our being.”—Immanuel Kant

“The beautiful is tame. The sublime is wild.”—Victor Hugo

Wonder leads you in. But the sublime pulls the floor out from under you.

Takeaway:

Wonder is the gateway - the spark.

The sublime is the threshold - when wonder reaches its limit.

Blue Flower Power (the never-ending Romantic longing) lives in between. It wants transcendance, but it also wants to stay human.