Abstract
This article addresses two controversial open questions in philosophical aesthetics: the nature and value of the aesthetic and of aesthetic experience when approached from the standpoint of ‘aesthetics of everyday life’ (AEL). Contrasting ‘strong’ AEL accounts that consider them radically different from those in the sphere of art, I claim that extending the realm and scope of aesthetics towards everyday life does not necessarily dispense with the concepts of the aesthetic and aesthetic experience as shaped in relation to the arts. Drawing on ‘weak’ formulations of AEL and on theories that call attention to concepts of art different from modern ones, I defend a normative but open model of the aesthetic and aesthetic experience pertaining to both art and everyday life. This more integrative theoretical framework needs to include clear and consistent views of the aesthetic as well as of the self, intersubjectivity, and everyday life.
Highlights
Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, L/VI, 2013, No 1, 3–26 remapping the realm of Aesthetics: On recent Controversies about the Aesthetic and Aesthetic Experience in Everyday Life
This article addresses two controversial open questions in philosophical aesthetics: the nature and value of the aesthetic and of aesthetic experience when approached from the standpoint of ‘aesthetics of everyday life’ (AEL)
Drawing on ‘weak’ formulations of AEL and on theories that call attention to concepts of art different from modern ones, I defend a normative but open model of the aesthetic and aesthetic experience pertaining to both art and everyday life
Summary
In the field of philosophical aesthetics there are various claims that aesthetics should be redefined and practised differently from the way it has hitherto been done in this branch of modern Western philosophy. It is worth noting that, for Dowling, the distinction between ‘the aesthetic’ and ‘the merely pleasurable’ is not based on their extension and integration in patterns of daily life (such as for Melchionne) or on the division of senses, ‘higher’ versus‘lower’(which Saito and Irvin decline in favour of multi-sensory experience), but on the normative aspect of the former This is the main reason for the aesthetics of daily life to follow the standards upheld in normative accounts of the aesthetic experience – of art and of nature – notably the normative aspect of the aesthetic, Dowling, ‘Aesthetics of Daily Life’, 225, 241. The everyday mode and an adequate comprehension of aesthetics/ethics interrelations in everyday life
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