Aesthetics of the Familiar

Abstract

Everyday aesthetics was recently proposed as a challenge to the contemporary Anglo-American aesthetics discourse dominated by the discussion of art and beauty. This book responds to the subsequent controversies regarding the nature, boundary, and status of everyday aesthetics and argues for its legitimacy. Specifically, its discussion highlights the multifaceted aesthetic dimensions of everyday life that are not fully accounted for by the commonly held account of defamiliarizing the familiar. Instead, the appreciation of the familiar as familiar, negative aesthetics, and the experience of doing things are all included as being worthy of investigation. These diverse ways in which aesthetics is involved in everyday life are explored through conceptual analysis as well as by application of specific examples from art, environment, and household chores. The significance of everyday aesthetics is also multi-layered. This book emphasizes the consequences of everyday aesthetics beyond the generally recognized value of enriching one’s life experiences and sharpening one’s attentiveness and sensibility. Many examples, ranging from consumer aesthetics and nationalist aesthetics to environmental aesthetics and cultivation of moral virtues, demonstrate that the power of aesthetics in everyday life is considerable, affecting and ultimately determining the quality of life and the state of the world, for better or worse. In light of this power of the aesthetic, everyday aesthetics has a social responsibility to encourage cultivation of aesthetic literacy and vigilance against aesthetic manipulation. Ultimately, everyday aesthetics can be an effective instrument for directing humanity’s collective and cumulative world-making project for the betterment of all its inhabitants.