Possible Worlds of Everyday Aesthetics: The Experiencing Self, Intersubjectivity and Life-World

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between the subjective-private and intersubjective-public dimensions of the aesthetic experience in everyday life. I claim that our everyday aesthetic life cannot be conceived of as a mere private world in absolute discontinuity to the public world, such as the “artworld” or the “life-world”, since it includes both personal and intersubjective dimensions. Likewise, although the “everyday” should not be thought of as absolutely one and the same for all, it is possible to search for the common features that emerge from the background of its multiple particularities. The intersubjective engagement is an essential element when analyzing the subject experiencing the everyday aesthetically, so we should acknowledge as well the intersubjective nature of a subject’s self-constitution and experience. Against the idea of the overall discontinuous nature of one’s aesthetic experience, in everyday context vs. artworld contexts, it is therefore important to consider everyday aesthetic experience as being both distinct and integrated into the continuous flux of one’s experiences, as well as related to one’s whole life. These claims will be supported by some insights on the experiencing self, supported by practical philosophy (Gadamer), as well as the characteristics of everyday life and life-world highlighted by phenomenology (Husserl, Simmel, Schutz). All these accounts offer powerful lines of argument in defending a consistent conception of the whole experiencing self and the structure of one’s everyday aesthetic life as well as its intersubjective dimension. Article received: April 28, 2020; Article accepted: June 23, 2020; Published online: September 15, 2020; Original scholarly paper