Aesthetic Values in Everyday Life: Collaborating with the World through Action (2024)

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Aesthetic value cannot be discussed separately from aesthetic experience. According to Western aesthetics discourse, the paradigm of aesthetic experience is a spectator’s reactive response to an object, leading to a judgment of its aesthetic value. Despite Dewey’s (1934) account of aesthetic experience which integrates undergoing and doing, being receptive and creative, and Berleant’s (1991) notion of aesthetic engagement that also involves the experiencing agent’s creative and imaginative activity, a typical characterization of such an agent is a receiver of the effect the object produces.

Aesthetic experience also tends to be regarded as out of the ordinary, disengaging us from the humdrum of daily life and transporting us to a different dimension. Commonly invoked aesthetic values, such as beauty and sublimity, are often stunning and rare, whether they are attributed to the inherent features of the object or our changed perception and attitude through distancing and disinterestedness.

Furthermore, positive aesthetic values garner almost exclusive attention. In comparison, until recently, negative aesthetic qualities, such as bland, ugly, disgusting, dehumanizing, and depressing, unfortunately present in many corners of our lives and lived world, have not received due regard.

There is no question that we sometimes gain positive, standout aesthetic experiences as spectators in our daily lives. However, such experiences do not exhaust the entirety of our aesthetic lives. It is not simply because we experience many different aesthetic values and disvalues as we manage our everyday lives. As live creatures in the world, we are constantly interacting with our environs comprised of other human beings, nature around us, built structures, and objects within. We create, change, and work with the world around us, while also observing and at times making judgments. We engage in conversations, cook and eat food, do house chores, care for loved ones, and repair things.

These activities are primarily performed for practical reasons and there is no “object” to which we can ascribe aesthetic values. However, our “doing” these activities itself can offer an aesthetically valuable experience. For example, the multi-sensory, kinetic experience of making soup can infuse a sense of homey comfort by integrating chopping vegetables, stirring soup while inhaling its aroma and listening to the sound of its gentle boil, and tasting a spoonful while adjusting seasoning. We also engage our imagination by eagerly anticipating the loved ones’ reaction when eating the soup.1 A good conversation delights us when each party listens and responds to the other party, building upon each other’s inputs and developing a rhythm of give and take.2 Furthermore, some features of the environment, where the conversation and cooking take place, such as the spatial configuration, contribute to creating a certain atmosphere.

We may go through the motions mechanically when cooking soup or talking with somebody, without any aesthetic investment or satisfaction. It is thus up to us to collaborate with the world around us to create a specific atmosphere, although the other party also has to offer a favorable condition, such as our conversation partner’s willingness to engage in a fulfilling dialogue and the good qualities of the soup ingredients, kitchen environment, and utensils. Relationality and interdependence characterize the aesthetic experience we generate through interacting with the world around us. We can certainly derive aesthetic satisfaction by observing somebody else cook or two people conversing with each other, but aesthetics discourse needs to account for a large swath of our daily lives with us as active agents. Various non-Western aesthetic traditions and practices are principally concerned with the aesthetics of doing, such as dancing, calligraphy, and swordsmanship. Many contemporary art projects also require participation and social engagement by the audience who cannot remain third-party onlookers.

As we perform mundane activities, we appreciate the way in which various elements coalesce into a unified atmospheric whole, or feel a sense of frustration or disappointment when they do not. However, lacking both a dramatic rupture from the daily routine and a clearly determinable “object” of the experience, the aesthetic character of daily activities tends to stay below the radar which is calibrated to capture standout experiences.

One may object to assigning aesthetic credentials to the experiences we create in collaboration with the world for being too subjective, unstable, and indeterminate. If I find an aesthetic value in making soup in my kitchen, how can we subject my experience to critical discourse or ensure intersubjectivity? What would be the value of a first-person account of doing things? There are two responses. First, a judgmental discourse, which requires a clear object and a possibility of objectivity, does not exhaust our aesthetic lives. Phenomenological description is also necessary for the aesthetic arena to be faithful to the rich and multifaceted aesthetic dimensions of our lived experiences.

Second, unlike when many people can experience the same object in an art museum, it may appear to be more difficult to share one’s own activity. However, an activity like cooking is practiced the world over, although with different spatial environments, utensils, ingredients, methods, and the taste of the resultant food. The same with conversing, doing house chores, caring for loved ones, and repairing things. What connects us all as cooks in a kitchen is the multi-sensory bodily engagement, affection for one’s loved ones and friends for whom we cook, grateful appreciation for the ingredients that nourish our body and soul, and respectful acknowledgement of the faithful service rendered by the cooking tools, as well as the comfort and stability offered by home cooked meals. What counts as comfort food differs from culture to culture, household to household, person to person. But the notion of comfort food itself is shared by all and this makes intersubjectivity of this aesthetic experience possible.

Thus, far from being purely subjective and personal, the values we create through actively doing things cannot be dismissed from the aesthetic arena. I even venture to say that those values sustain our mode of living in this world, because the aesthetic characters of our daily lives cannot but determine the quality of life.3

REFERENCES

1

See Giard (1998) for a detailed discussion on the aesthetics of cooking.

© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society for Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

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SYMPOSIUM: Aesthetic Value

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