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The Aesthetics of Everyday Life

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Nature, Artforms, and the World Around Us

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Abstract

In this chapter Plato’s discussion of the built environment furnishes the direction for an analysis of the various features of that world. Architecture is basic and is filled with varying formed objects: interior decoration, furniture design, artworks, utensil design. In everyday life there is clothing, wine, food, dining, manners, overall aesthetic taste and physical fitness, the automobile, sports, entertainment, and kitsch.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Republic, II, 268Dff.

  2. 2.

    Republic, II, 272D.

  3. 3.

    Republic, III, 410D.

  4. 4.

    Republic, X, 596D.

  5. 5.

    Tom Leddy , “The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics,” AEL, 9.

  6. 6.

    See Barbara Sandrisser, Exploring Environmental Aesthetics in Japan (Netherlands: Peter Lang, 2009).

  7. 7.

    See Magdalena Droste, The Bauhaus : 1919–1933 (Taschen: 2006).

  8. 8.

    See Leddy , “The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics,” AEL, 9.

  9. 9.

    Leon Kass , Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (New York: Free Press, 1985), 325.

  10. 10.

    See Christian Norberg-Schultz, Baroque Architecture (Milan: Rizzoli, 1979).

  11. 11.

    The Prince: Second Edition, H. Mansfield, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999).

  12. 12.

    See Charles Baudelaire,. “In Praise of Cosmetics .” The Painter of Modern Life . J. Mayne ed. and trans. (London: Phaidon, 1964), XI, 31–34.

  13. 13.

    Gorgias, 464Bff.

  14. 14.

    One of my students from a well-to-do family tells of a friend of his father who had become something of a wine connoisseur . But he said he finally could not tell the difference between wines that cost more than $500 a bottle! It’s a problem most of us will never have.

  15. 15.

    See Emily Brady, “Sniffing and Savoring,” AEL 177–93.

  16. 16.

    See Kass , HS.

  17. 17.

    Hans-Georg Gadamer , Truth and Method (New York: Crossroads, 1982), 33–9.

  18. 18.

    “On the Aesthetics of the Everyday,” AEL, 52.

  19. 19.

    John Dewey , Art and Experience New York: Capricorn, 1934), 5 (henceforth AE).

  20. 20.

    Frank Lloyd Wright , The Future of Architecture (New York: Mentor, 1963), 141.

  21. 21.

    Art of the Novel . L. Asher, trans. (New York: Grove Press. 2000), 135, 163. The sixth part of his Incredible Lightness of Being was on kitsch.

  22. 22.

    Mark Roche ( in “The Function of the Ugly in Enhancing the Expressivity of Art”) distinguishes kitch and quatch . The former is prettification without metaphysical depth ; the latter is uglification without metaphysical depth. The Many Faces of Beauty, Vittorio Hösle ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 327–55.

  23. 23.

    Wolfgang Welsch , “Sport Viewed Aesthetically, and Even as Art?,” AEL, 135–55. For an overall philosophical view of sport, see Paul Weiss , Sport: A Philosophical Inquiry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971).

  24. 24.

    Republic, III, 403C.

  25. 25.

    See the Appendix to the chapter on Sculpture.

  26. 26.

    Phaedrus 250D.

  27. 27.

    Plotinus , Enneads V, 8, 10. See my chapter, “Plotinus and the Latin Middle ages ,” In PA.

  28. 28.

    Enneads V, 9, 11.

  29. 29.

    Enneads II, 9, 16.

  30. 30.

    Cf. Eric Perl’s study of Dionysius , Theophany: The Neo-Platonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Aereopagite (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008).

  31. 31.

    AE, 192–5.

  32. 32.

    I and Thou, W. Kaufmann trans. (New York: Scribners, 1970), 136–7.

  33. 33.

    Graham Parkes , “Ways of Japanese Thinking,” Japanese Aesthetics and Culture , N. Hume ed. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 85, 92–3.

  34. 34.

    Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999).

  35. 35.

    Martin Buber, Daniel: Dialogues on Realization, M. Friedman, trans. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 91.

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  1. Institute of Philosophic Studies, University of Dallas, Irving, TX, USA

    Robert E Wood

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Wood, R.E. (2017). The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. In: Nature, Artforms, and the World Around Us. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7_10

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