What is at Stake in Everyday Aesthetics? Looking for a New Perspective on Aesthetic Experience
What is at Stake in Everyday Aesthetics? Looking for a New Perspective on Aesthetic Experience

Summary/Abstract: In this article, I intend to examine the concept of aesthetic experience. More specifically, the concept of aesthetic experience is examined from the viewpoint of everyday aesthetics. In order to evaluate the concept of aesthetic experience in this regard, I will first turn to John Dewey, who offers an inspiring but certainly not conclusive examination of aesthetic experience. Next, I will consider some more recent approaches in order to see how the concept of aesthetic experience has been taken into account in the context of everyday aesthetics. However, by avoiding reducing aesthetic experience to what has been traditionally considered aesthetic appreciation, i.e. to a set of established aesthetic values, I intend to show that aesthetic experience is not so much about appreciating and judging as about living through, both actively and passively, certain processes of our everyday life-world. By including multiple aesthetic experiences, irreducible to any universally acknowledged faculty or transcending set of values, everyday aesthetics contributes to examining life from the aesthetic point of view.

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