The Psychology of The Sublime can Connect us to Deep Time
This is the second in a two-part series on deep time and the psychology of the sublime.
You can access part 1 here
Stand at the rim of the Grand Canyon and something happens that has nothing to do with width or depth. Yes, the scale is staggering. But what really unsettles you, what produces that strange tightening in the chest, is the time. You're looking at two billion years of Earth's history, compressed into striated rock, and your brain is trying to do something with that information that it simply cannot do.
You are attempting to feel a duration that exceeds your cognitive architecture by several orders of magnitude. The rocks don't care. They were there before anything with a nervous system existed, and they will be there long after the last one is gone.
This is the temporal sublime. And it may be the most underappreciated psychological experience available to us.
As we've explored previously, the sublime operates at a deep psychological level: encounters with vast, terrifying natural forces shatter our mental schemas, shrink the ego, and activate entirely distinct neural pathways from those associated with beauty. The philosophical tradition, stretching back to Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, has overwhelmingly framed the sublime in spatial terms. Towering mountains. Raging storms. The sheer, incomprehensible scale of things.
In part 1 of this series, we traced a different kind of crisis, a temporal one: the progressive compression of our time horizons, from natural and seasonal rhythms to industrial clock time to the frenetic standstill of the algorithmic scroll. If the problem is temporal, the solution may need to be temporal too. And the sublime, it turns out, has a temporal dimension that philosophers have largely overlooked.
The Temporal Nature of The Sublime
Burke and Kant were writing in a world that didn't yet know what we know. As Richard Fisher pointed out in a recent conversation, Burke "didn't know about the existence of other galaxies. He probably barely knew about bacteria." He had no concept of the Big Bang, of evolutionary timescales, of the four-and-a-half-billion-year biography of the planet he stood on. The sublime, for Burke, was anchored in what he could see on human terms: mountains, oceans, storms.
Since then, scientific discovery has massively expanded the frontier of the sublime. And much of that new territory is temporal.
Consider the work of the biologist Karen Lloyd, whom Fisher studies in his work. Lloyd researches organisms called eonophiles, a form of life that exists dormant between layers of rock deep in the Earth's crust, potentially for thousands, possibly millions of years. They live on plate tectonic timescales. They metabolize so slowly that the very question of whether they qualify as "alive" becomes genuinely uncertain. As Fisher described them, "they challenge both our sense of time and also what life even is." This is time on nature's terms, so radically different from our own that it destabilizes the very categories we use to make sense of the living world.
Or consider the deep ocean. Fisher suggested that if you were transported to the bottom of the abyssal plain of the Pacific in a submarine, peering over the edge of the Mariana Trench, you might feel the sublime in a way that's almost impossible to access on the surface anymore. The deep ocean operates on timescales and at pressures that make human experience feel like a brief, shallow anomaly.
The sublime can also arrive through the very small. In 1665, the Royal Society of London published Robert Hooke's Micrographia, a book of detailed engravings showing the world as seen through the recently invented microscope. The images were revelatory. A common flea, invisible in its particulars to the naked eye, was revealed to be "all over adorn'd with a curiously polish'd suit of sable armour, neatly jointed." Mites looked like terrifying mastodons. Mold swelled like lush mushrooms. As the philosopher Helen De Cruz writes, Micrographia "opened to its audience an emotional world: one of awe and wonder including that unmistakable sense of horror that often accompanies the sublime."
The microscope revealed an entire parallel reality, operating at scales and tempos entirely outside human terms, that had been there all along, invisible only because of the limitations of our own perception.
What's striking across all of these examples is that knowledge deepens the experience rather than diminishing it. The philosopher Robert Clewis has argued that the person who lives in the mountains may actually have an enhanced experience of the sublime, because their familiarity and knowledge allow them to perceive what a casual visitor would miss. As Fisher put it, "nature is continually providing new things to feel sublime about. You just have to go seek them out."
The sublime hasn't vanished. Its borders have expanded into territories that Burke could never have imagined, both temporally and in scale. We just have to be willing to follow.
The Modern Search for The Sublime
There's a catch. At the same time that the frontier of the sublime has expanded, our everyday access to it has narrowed considerably.
Fisher is candid about this. "Present-day experience, especially in nature," he observed, "is Disney-fied. There's mountains that you can climb now in a cable car that have a handbelt and a cafe at the top." He pointed to Niagara Falls as a case in point. When Charles Dickens visited, he wrote about it as a place of genuine sublimity. Today, it's surrounded by commercial infrastructure, and the experience is, as Fisher put it, "completely safe." Yosemite is beautiful, certainly, but the danger that once made such places sublime has been carefully managed away. We've taken the landscapes that once confronted us with time and scale on nature's terms and rebuilt them on human terms: safe, comfortable, commercial.
The sublime requires a willingness to be uncomfortable. That's the psychological architecture of the experience: close enough to feel the weight of the thing, far enough to survive the feeling. And we've systematically engineered discomfort out of our encounters with the natural world.
The temporal sublime doesn't always require an expedition to the Mariana Trench or a submarine journey to the abyssal plain. It can begin with something much simpler: a psychological shift in attention. Fisher's observation that "nature doesn't have an x-axis" is, in its own quiet way, a sublime recognition. The realization that linear, measurable time is a construct, roughly four hundred years old, and that before it, human beings experienced time through sunrise and sunset, through seasons, through rhythms embedded in the physical world rather than imposed upon it.
Time on nature's terms rather than human ones. That recognition, genuinely felt, produces a kind of temporal vertigo. The ground shifts. The familiar framework wobbles. And for a moment, you catch a glimpse of what time looks like when it's not being managed, optimized, or scrolled through.
Edmund Burke's Sublime Contract
There's a connection here that deserves attention.
Edmund Burke, who gave the sublime its most influential philosophical treatment, also held a remarkably expansive view of time. In a passage that has echoed through centuries of political thought, and referenced by Fisher in The Long View, he wrote that society is "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."
This is a vision of human existence embedded within deep temporal continuity. And it came from the same mind that spent years thinking about what happens when we stand before something so vast and powerful that our usual frameworks collapse. That's probably not a coincidence. A person attuned to the sublime, to the felt experience of being dwarfed by forces beyond comprehension, would naturally develop a longer view of human connectivity. The sublime humbles us in space. It also humbles us in time. And from that humility, a different relationship with past and future becomes possible.
The temporal sublime is what reconnects us to Burke's contract. It pulls us out of the monstrous present, out of the frenetic standstill, and reminds us that we exist within a continuity far larger than any individual life, any quarterly earnings report, any election cycle. Where fast media trains our brains to skip across the surface of time, the temporal sublime asks us to sink into it, to feel the weight of timescales that dwarf our own, and to recognize that those timescales are not abstract. They are ongoing. We are embedded within them right now.
The Millennium Man's Heartbeat
In Part 1, we met von Baer's Millennium Man, whose heart beats once every few centuries, whose life stretches across millions of years. From his vantage point, mountains rise and fall like ocean waves and continents drift like clouds. We noted that we've mastered the Minute Man's perspective through technology, but the Millennium Man's view remains beyond our direct experience.
The temporal sublime suggests that this isn't entirely true. We may never watch the Andes rise and erode like sand dunes. We may never perceive a human life the way a mountain would, as a flash of sunlight on a pond. But we can feel those timescales. We can stand at the rim of a canyon and sense, in our bones, the weight of two billion years. We can learn about organisms that live on plate tectonic timescales and feel our categories for what counts as "life" start to tremble.
We can peer through a microscope and discover that an entire sublime world has been operating right beneath our feet, at tempos and scales we never suspected. We can look up at stars whose light left them before our species existed and let that duration land, not as a fact, but as an experience.
In an era that has systematically compressed our temporal horizons, these encounters may be among the most important things we can seek out. The Millennium Man's heart is still beating. And if we’re patient enough, we just might be able to hear it.
Photo by Alexey Demidov via UnSplash
References for The Psychology of Deep Time
Burke, E. (2009). A philosophical enquiry into the sublime and beautiful. Routledge.
Fisher, R. (2023) The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time, Wildfire Press
Fisher, R. (April, 2026) Personal Interview via Zoom
