Living with Everyday Objects: Aesthetic and Ethical Practice

Summary

Everyday aesthetics, one of the most recent subdisciplines of philosophical aesthetics, is often credited with opening the door to the aesthetic potential of a wide-range of different aspects of our lives. Its main contribution is generally regarded as challenging and expanding the scope of the dominant art-focused Anglo-American aesthetics of the twentieth century. It is more accurate, however, to characterize its contribution as restoring the original meaning of ‘aesthetic,’ focused on the sensory, and hence ubiquitous in our lives. The presumed newness of everyday aesthetics should thus be understood in its proper historical and cultural context. Aesthetic concerns with various aspects of our lives often appear in Western philosophy before everyday aesthetics; furthermore, they are prevalent in other cultural traditions.

There is no denying that everyday aesthetics helps to diversify and enrich our aesthetic life. However, I believe that an equally, or arguably more, important contribution it makes is restoring aesthetics’ connection to other life concerns: practical, moral, social, political, and existential. This shift helps reclaim aesthetics’ rightful place in our lives as intricately entangled with the management of everyday life. The eighteenth-century philosophers’ move to carve out the distinct realm of the aesthetic by appealing to the notion of disinterestedness may have given a degree of respectability for aesthetics as an independent area of inquiry. But, at the same time, I believe that its subsequent development sometimes tended to mischaracterize the realm of aesthetics as a kind of bubble disconnected from the rest of human life concerns.

One way in which everyday aesthetics calls attention to this interconnectedness of aesthetics and other life concerns is to expose the serious social, political, and environmental ramifications of seemingly innocuous and trivial aesthetic choices and judgments we make in our daily life. Our judgments on the aesthetic appearance of various objects, ranging from consumer goods and farm produce to wind turbines and different landscaping practices determine what kind of goods are produced, sold, and thrown away, as well as what kind of environment is constructed and how it is maintained. Similarly, the consequences of ‘lookism’ are profound, leading to unjust judgments and treatments of those whose bodies do not conform to the societal aesthetic norm of normality and beauty, exacerbating racism, ablism, and ageism. In addition, those whose appearance and demeaner do not conform to societal and cultural norms of respectability are subject to moral censure, intensifying homophobia, classism, and cultural discrimination.