First, I’d like
to thank Tom for the excellent comments and questions. I feel very privileged to have such a sharp and rigorous reader.
[See previous post by Tom Leddy in this blog.]
As
you say, we
seem to agree on many issues but there are some points that call for
further explanation. After that, we may still disagree on some questions
– but in a fruitful way, I hope.
You
propose that
we could perhaps have use for a broader category of “life aesthetics”.
That’s a good idea and I agree that my version of everyday aesthetics
would cover only a part of that. In fact, the figure I present could be
read in the way that in its entirety it would
depict the field of “life aesthetics” or even “general aesthetics”
whereas the core of it (the somewhat darker area within the inner dotted
line) is the field of “everyday” in the sense I tried to describe it.
Although, actually, the figure can be understood
to depict “everydayness” and its relations to “non-everydayness” also
in other contexts, not only in the ones related to aesthetics. The
figure does not include the term “aesthetics” for it seeks to say
something of everydayness in general.
I
also agree that
it is sometimes difficult to say exactly how often and regularly we
should do something to make it of everyday kind in the sense I describe
everydayness. Of course, there are not very many things we do exactly in
the same way and literally every day, and I’m
not after those cases only. To my mind, this issue can remain somewhat
open. There are clear cases of repeated everyday activities such as
eating (if we are not talking about very special fine-dine moments), and
why not also things we do
rather often such as Sunday
drives – and equally clear cases of non-everyday events such as getting
married or into a car accident; moments that are “wildly” unfamiliar.
And border-line cases: holidays, maybe. I can
happily accept variability, and try to judge case-by-case whether
something is everyday-like or not. I think, as you suggest, that “the
everyday is flexible enough to include the nearly every day” if we just
remember to use the word “nearly” when needed.
Why
did I bring
in the word “necessarily” in the sentence you take up? Simply because I
wanted to emphasize the self-evident but yet important fact that we
cannot, in the end, live anyone else’s life and we must live our own,
even if we can, I believe, share things with others.
We – yes, we – all have our own perspective on the everyday because of
our background, skills, knowledge, etc. and we cannot avoid having that
as long as we live. We have limited possibilities for breaking the
everyday even if we wanted that, which means that
most of us, most of the time, necessarily live the everyday.
But ok, it might not be quite that important to accentuate this
and there might be exceptions to the rule as I tried to point out.
How
are exceptional
events like Sunday drives based on everyday events? I’d say, for
example, that also Sunday drives are drives, events where we use very
common, normal, regularly used driving skills and do something
non-everyday-like with the help of them. Everyday is the normal,
non-everyday the exception. Exceptions don’t exist without something
they are exceptions from.
I
did not want
to say that exciting, disturbing, great, interesting, etc. events and
objects are not relevant and important for our lives and aesthetics as a
philosophical discipline. That is why I state that “Most
of us don’t want to have the routine on all the time, to just continue
living the everyday.” I am not suggesting a normative approach that we
should avoid special, exceptional and interesting things, aesthetic or
otherwise. I like them too, and I would not
like to lead a life that is only everyday-like and nothing else.
Actually, I would hate it! I am, rather, describing an attitude and
events that I believe deserve to be called everyday-like, and in its
core, at least, I see the everyday as routine, familiar
and why not also comfortable and peaceful. I guess I could have been
clearer about the difference between the normative and descriptive
approach.
The question of doing something automatically and still noticing its aesthetic aspects
or properties is interesting. I agree that if you do something
completely automatically you don’t really pay attention to this
thing at all (breathing, most of the time, if you are not meditating or
doing certain kinds of sports) – but it is somewhat different if you do
something
almost automatically. For example, I can prepare my daily cup of espresso
almost automatically, pay attention to the aroma and taste, go through the whole process
nearly automatically. There’s
nothing special in it while it happens almost every day. It’s
comfortable, routine, normal, and to me, the aesthetic quality of such a
process, that I still notice very well, is of this
kind, too. I just cannot agree on the thought that “the very fact of
paying attention raises them out of the ordinary”. If this was the case,
almost everything would be “out of the ordinary”. What would be
ordinary then? I think we can have different attitudes
towards things (coffee, cats, shadows) within the sphere of the
everyday and other kinds of attitudes “outside” of it. What is inside
and what is outside for whom, varies with time. That’s why I have dotted
lines between different spheres, not closed borders.
Yes, the “division lines” are not clear in the figure, because I don’t
think they are clear in the world we live in.
I’m
not quite sure whether I have been able to answer all the sharp
questions you
posed in your text. In fact, it seems that I would need to write a
whole book to develop my points further, and perhaps I will. If I will,
your comments will help me a lot. But for now, I just want to thank once
more for excellent points – in their excellence
they are definitely something quite non-everyday-like! Ossi Naukkarinen
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