It is tempting to see aesthetics as something much broader
than dealing with art and nature. I have
elsewhere argued for an aesthetic of everyday life. There are limitations to this notion,
however, since an aesthetic of everyday life might be seen as positing everyday
life as distinct from non-everyday life, and a new emphasis on the everyday
might shortchange the non-everyday. Perhaps there is a problem with seeing the everyday as a separate domain in the sense that the aesthetics of art or the aesthetics of nature is. The
division everyday and non-everyday might, rather, be seen as cutting across distinctions
between such things as art, nature and design.
It could be argued that there are everyday art experiences, everyday
experiences of design, and everyday experiences of nature. Then there are also unusual or non-everyday experiences of all of
these. For example, an everyday
experience of art is noticing and enjoying a work of art by a friend that graces one of the
walls in my home. The work may be highly valued by me, but it is not hitting me for the first time. An unusual
non-everyday experience of art would include one I had of visiting Colmar and seeing the Grünewald Isenheim altarpiece. The later
experience was unique, powerful, and maybe even life-changing. Still, for the leprosy patients who
experience Grunewald’s piece every day of their lives back in the 16th
century, this would be literally an everyday experience. Of course the non-everyday can include experiences
that are truly horrifying as well as those that are incredibly uplifting. Would these be considered aesthetic in a
sense? Moreover, if we collect certain
kinds of aesthetic experiences under the non-everyday, let’s say just the
positive ones, how are we to distinguish these from experiences of religious
enlightenment or from experiences of scientific discovery? Thomas Alexander, whom I am reading right now
as I write this, thinks that a religious world view in which the world is
experienced as holy is to be seen as one in which “people experience the world
as aesthetically profound relationships that connect them with vital
meanings.” Here, the holy is associated
with the aesthetic and the meaningful (and probably not with either of these
alone). This seems right for me, and can
even be made consistent with atheism, although not of the reductivist
materialist sort.
Keeping these difficulties in mind, it is worthwhile to talk
about another broader concept, i.e. the aesthetics of life or the aesthetics of
human existence. Such an aesthetic view
would include all of the other subdisciplines of aesthetics under a larger
rubric. Alexander thinks that
aesthetics “should be understood first and foremost as ‘aesthetics of human
existence.’” [1] So what
would the aesthetics of human existence be, and how would it be distinguished
from ethics, the other major value domain under which we see human
existence….or should it be distinguished as all? It might consist in (following the language
of early American philosopher Jonathan Edwards) seeing the excellency of
things, i.e. seeing the world as beautiful (Edwards was deeply religious…so for
him it was a matter of seeing the world as God sees it). On the surface, this may just be problematic
since if you did achieve this, as a kind of ideal, you might well be transfixed
by the beauty of slavery or some other deeply unethical thing. Or you might jut not want to improve things
or work hard since everything needed for the good life is already present. Well, the notion of an aesthetic of life
probably doesn’t mean seeing absolutely everyday as beautiful, but rather as
looking for beauty in every realm of being, and seeing the achievement of
beauty and beauty-experience as a kind of life ideal. Some would see this as a matter of escaping
the everyday, but it might be seen rather as a matter of seeing something in
the everyday, something special. It is
also tempting to see the aesthetic to be most manifest in the realm of
possibility. I have argued that to see
something aesthetically is to see it as having an aura of significance. Could this be true whenever you see something
as containing a future within it? Well,
if one did, this would pose the initial problem that aesthetics is associated
with pleasure, and, again, we do not see possibility as always associated with
pleasure…often it is associated with dread.
One debate that often occurs in the field of everyday aesthetics is
between those who would find continuity between everyday aesthetics and the
aesthetics of art and those who want the everyday to have its own distinct
quite separate realm. I have argued for
the continuity thesis. However, this has
sometimes been interpreted as giving primacy to art and to the aesthetics of
art within the domain of aesthetics.
Shouldn’t the primacy go, following Alexander’s comment, to the
aesthetics of life, under which art experiences, both everyday and
extraordinary, will count as no less or more important than experiences of
beauty, for example, in an individual or a designed object such as a
wonderfully designed chair, or the moving experience we might have of a wooded
dell.
Alexander also writes “With the rise of modernity, the
holiness of the world as an aesthetic home has been fading away.” This seems right, but what approach should we
take to it? Let’s say that the word
“holy” just is associated with belief in God, and the rise of modernity
correlates with the death of God. But
what of the notion of the world as “an aesthetic home”?
[1] Thomas M. Alexander. The Human Eros: Eco-Ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence. (Fordham University Press, 1913) "Chinese
an American Philosophy: The Aesthetics
of Living."
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