Everyday aesthetics and world-making

Abstract

The project of world-making is carried out not only by professional world-makers, such as designers, architects, and manufacturers. We are all participants in this project through various decisions and judgments we make in our everyday life. Aesthetics has a surprisingly significant role to play in this regard, though not sufficiently recognized by ourselves or aestheticians. This paper first illustrates how our seemingly innocuous and trivial everyday aesthetic considerations have serious consequences which determine the quality of life and the state of the world, for better or worse. This power of the aesthetic should be harnessed to direct our cumulative and collective enterprise toward better world-making. Against objections to introducing a normative dimension to everyday aesthetics, I argue for the necessity of doing so and draw an analogy between everyday aesthetics and art-centered aesthetics which has dominated modern Western aesthetics discourse.