Ten reasons for examining everyday aesthetics

Photo by Bruce Muller 

Life is filled with opportunities, as well as their accompanying risks, uncertainties, and inevitable pitfalls. If we do not accept them, life is not worth living. We can jump in and make life an adventure, risking the challenge of overcoming setbacks or potential failure, or we can step back and live a safe and anaesthetic life. The problem is, anaesthesia brings the deepest pitfall of all, an apathy that swallows opportunity and breeds monotony.

At times the choices we make, even when they at first seem good and rewarding, lead to situations that dissipate our spirit. They can leave us feeling burned out--an idiom that recalls the hollowness of a charred and empty home, with only the walls and open window frames remaining, vulnerable to the wind and whatever it brings. Investment in life has this risk if we are not equipped with the required resilience.

Burnout can result from many things: endless demands, a pace that leaves no time for thoughtful reaction, lack of appreciation for our efforts, unnecessary roadblocks and detours, effort without challenge, and meaningless or futile tasks. These situations can seem as inescapable as monotony, perhaps leading us to seek anaesthesia in the many addictive forms available--chemical alteration, excessive consumption, media overload, closed-minded beliefs for the sake of belonging, or mindless routine.

Photo by cmiper, copyright Creative Commons

This is where art and everyday aesthetics can help.

The opposite of anaesthesia, aesthetic experiences help us avoid and build resilience against burnout and monotony. They offer an outlet for our expressive energy and an infusion of meaning. Aesthetics is often thought of as applying to objects or events that we engage with just for pleasure, not needful and productive activities. But it is more useful, and more cohesive, to think of aesthetics as describing those particularly engaging and rewarding types of experience that can emerge in almost any realm-- those that are optional and primarily pleasurable, or those absolutely necessary. (For a larger discussion, see the post, What makes an experience aesthetic?) Art is a special case--a refinement of the everyday. As explored in the post, The Purpose of Art, some of the key values of art that have been identified by philosophers over the centuries relate to its potential for therapeutic cleansing, healing, celebrating, distracting, instructional, or transcendent qualities. These values relate to everyday aesthetic experiences as well.

Engaging in an activity as simple as a vigorous walk, tending the garden, creating a photo album, or preparing a special dinner can bring meaning lost during the more mundane efforts of the day. Taking an extended trip to an exotic destination can provide a lifetime of resilience through the memories gained and things learned. Completing a marathon that was long trained-for can bring a new sense of power and the will to do more with life. Learning to play a musical instrument, writing a book or completing a PhD can do the same. These are special not just for the final products, but for the experience as a whole, from initial frustration, to learning, to challenge, and to culmination.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Resilience to burn out comes not by relaxing and dropping out, but by going through experiences that engage us, challenge us, and push back, but also finally give back and reward us with the realization that we can have an effect on our lives and on the world. Art is evidence of that need. Art is the distillation of life experiences, and experiences in and of themselves, helping us to see the aesthetic potential around us. We seek art in its many forms for the wide variety of reasons already mentioned (cleansing, healing, celebrating, distracting, learning, transcending), and we seek everyday aesthetic experiences for exactly the same reasons. This blog is devoted to short essays demonstrating how everyday experiences can do this.

This rest of this post will expand on the reasons for this line of study, which is currently rising in popularity among philosophers. For example, see Practicing Pragmatist Aesthetics (Malecki, Ed., 2014) and Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Shusterman, 2000). But the discussion is wasted if it stays within the discourse of philosophers. It is a useful topic for all of us.

Why bother examining the aesthetics of everyday life? Why not just enjoy them without trying to dissect or classify them? I will offer a few reasons below.

1. Increased acceptance: Art is both idealized and berated for being so idealized. The same is true for many everyday aesthetic activities like team sports, gourmet cooking, extreme sports, and others. Those who aren’t interested do not understand how others might be so enthusiastic about activities that they feel are pretentious, shallow, or reckless. So, one reason to examine these phenomena together is to embrace the varieties of aesthetic experience, to know that aesthetics is not an elitist concern, but something we all engage in everyday, each in our own ways. It is OK to be disinterested in some forms, but we should realize that the reason we enjoy our own chosen experiences is fundamentally the same reason others enjoy theirs. All should be admired as human expressions arising from the same needs.
2. More engagement: Understanding and accepting the similar foundations of aesthetic experiences might encourage us to engage in more of these life-enhancing activities. We might see more opportunities, and these might bring us more power to affect our lives in positive ways to resist burnout, even bringing increased happiness by avoiding pitfalls or helping us climb out of them more easily.
3. New sensitivities: Routine binds us, but aesthetic experiences open our doors of perception. They ask us to see with new eyes, listen with new ears, taste and touch with new sensitivity. They expand the abilities of our senses, allowing us to notice things we would otherwise miss. They help us find beauty where we might otherwise miss it. Conscious practice of aesthetic activities can expand the powers of our senses. Logic and analytical understanding are particularly valued in most societies today, but aesthetic experience, while often built upon these, also reveals that sensory experience is also an important source of knowledge on its own (Baumgarten). This expansion of knowledge into the sensory realm helps us to bring more to bear.
4. Deeper learning: Aesthetic experiences are also learning experiences. They teach us about the world through deeper examination of its many aspects, including what we can offer to it. They build knowledge about the world through greater exposure, and can bring insights that build perspective on our roles in the world. They help us to grow, and to develop the skills to be more resilient in life. The provide new strategies to give and receive more.
5. Expanding viewpoints: Life is full of non-obvious qualities that stay that way due to our habits of compartmentalizing, rather than synthesizing. Exploring everyday aesthetics is a synthesis that can bring new qualities to light by exercising our synthesis capabilities.
6. Connection to others: Even though aesthetic experience is in some perspectives personal, we all share in having them. The experiences we engage in are more often than not collective ones--things done in teams, groups, or with partners, or as part of an audience. Connecting with others with similar interests helps us to be more connected to life in general, and to grow from what we learn from one another.
7. Connection to our environments: Moreover, aesthetic experiences connect us to the natural and built environment as well. One of their properties is developing the power to interact in our environments--to build, climb, hike, travel, throw, fly, represent, qualify, quantify, collect, explain, etc. They help us appreciate our surroundings for what they can offer, and give life new meaning in these ways as well.
8. Curiosity: Understanding brings power. Understanding is a fundamental path to, or at times synonymous with, finding meaning. Any knowledge is empowering, but more so when it challenges our status quo. Knowledge of everyday aesthetics, which tells us about the common source of art and so many everyday activities, brings an especially deep cutting knowledge about life. The pursuit of a deeper understanding of this pervasive aspect of human experience is in itself, like all other ventures into the unknown or not-well-understood, an aesthetic experience.
9. Appreciation of art: Art surrounds us, and it can be empowering to know that art enhances experience, not by lifting us above or distracting us everyday life (although it can be used this way), but by distilling life to uncover its essences. In the end, art is not an escape, but a confrontation of life. It can bring a particularly powerful aesthetic experience.
10. Designing experiences for others: The final reason is perhaps the most important for many of us. Aesthetic experience brings change, and those engaged in professions that aim to change others, help them grow, overcome personal challenges, make decisions, and overcome oppressive circumstances, can use a knowledge of aesthetic experience to ensure that happens. Whether you are in marketing; a teacher, trainer, coach, or mentor; a manager, politician, or social activist; a therapist, a preacher, … a parent, … or an artist, you have the potential to use a knowledge of aesthetic experience to support your work.

A nice, round, ten reasons. Enough to keep us going in the exploration.

John Muir, the famous naturalist, has been quoted as saying that “when one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.” The exploration of aesthetic experiences, a natural phenomenon certainly, has this potential. Once we know what we are looking for, we see how pervasive aesthetic experiences actually are. Today during my hike, a large and dripping wet dog ran up to me with a large stick in his mouth, his lips pulled back into a grin. He had just been retrieving thrown sticks from the Versoix River and was proud of his accomplishments, so I congratulated him with a pat on his head. As I walked on up the trail, I found a short stick on the ground similar to the one the dog was carrying. I picked it up and threw it as far as I could up the trail, for no immediately apparent reason.