I had some dreams / They were clouds in my coffee

Aesthetic Experiences in The Everyday

Dearest Reader,
I have here transcribed an essay I wrote for my Moral & Aesthetic Philosophy class, because I am proud of it. IDK guys… sometimes you just gotta publish your university essays to the Substack. It got a pretty good grade, but I got -2 points for not including section headers (when they are NOT REQUIRED! (can you tell I have beef?)). ANYWAY.

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In aesthetic philosophy, the everyday is often seen as too fleeting, nebulous, and vapid to foster deep aesthetic experiences. Aesthetic philosophy has mainly focused on the aesthetics of art and nature, using experiences that are extraordinary, or sublime, to define the aesthetic experience. However, I believe everyday life can sustain rich aesthetic experiences that are specific and durable, often in ways that are unique and deeply meaningful to the aesthete. Indeed, living a life in the twenty-first century that is mindful and perceptive requires finding aesthetic experiences in the everyday. After defining the ‘everyday’ and ‘aesthetic experience’, I will then draw on my own experience as well as the works of Sheri Irvin, Emily Brady, and Yuriko Saito to argue against the view that the everyday cannot contain a rich aesthetic experience. Instead, the everyday contains moments that offer aesthetic experiences, if one knows how and chooses to look for them.

In order to discuss the nature of the everyday aesthetic experience, we must define the ‘everyday’ and an ‘aesthetic experience’. There is a largely unified understanding of the word ‘everyday’ among philosophers that converges with the word’s vernacular usage. The everyday can be defined as: routine, ordinary, and habitual aspects of life such as cooking, cleaning, smelling, tasting, walking through a city, using tools, personal grooming, and clothing. Because human beings are an amalgamation of a lifetime of experiences, every person’s ‘everyday’ is different from every other person’s, but each person’s ‘everyday’ is relatively standard for that individual.

The term ‘aesthetic’ was coined in the eighteenth century (Shusterman 2000, 48) as part of “differentiating cultural spheres into artistic, practico-moral, and scientific; [the field of aesthetics] also gave birth to our modern concept of art as the narrower practice of fine art.” (Schusterman 2000, 48) The term is used colloquially to describe visual stimulation that the viewer deems pleasing. Philosophers ascribe to this definition, elaborating in differing ways depending on their perspective of what can be classified as aesthetic; broadly the term is used to denote discussions of beauty, art, and taste.

While the definition of the ‘everyday’ may be straightforward, what makes an experience an aesthetic one is less so. Immanuel Kant, one of the first to describe the ‘aesthetic experience’, considers an aesthetic experience to be a disinterested pleasure, largely linked to art or nature: “In order to play the judge in matters of taste, we must not be in the least biased in favor of the thing’s existence but must be wholly indifferent about it.” (Kant 1987, 46) Here, Kant is reasoning that aesthetic pleasure follows aesthetic judgement, rather than causing it, meaning that if we enjoy something because it is useful, desirable, or necessary, it is not a purely aesthetic judgment because we are judging the object with a bias for its utility. This view —drawing on Platonic dualism, indicating that pleasures of the body (which is where much functional experience lies) are lesser than pleasures of the mind— would make experiencing aesthetic richness in the everyday almost impossible.

Richard Shusterman expands aesthetics beyond disinterested contemplation to include bodily experience: “The idea that reality ultimately consists of well-defined and stable forms that are rationally and harmoniously ordered and whose contemplation affords sublime pleasure suggests a preoccupation with fine works of art, an envious fixation on their clear shapes and distinct contours, their enduring and intelligible harmonies, which set them above the confusing flux of ordinary experience and make them seem more vivid, permanent, compelling — in a sense more real — than ordinary empirical reality.” (Shusterman 2000, 35-6) It would seem that Shusterman is leading us to use the body to understand the everyday as an aesthetic experience, but he makes a more narrow, albeit important, case. Shusterman proposes that aesthetic experience exists foremost in “the appreciation of nature, not at least that part of nature which is the animate human body.” (Shusterman 2000, 47) Kant does not consider the human body as a part of nature in the same manner that Shusterman. Instead, Kant argues that aesthetic judgement should be communicable to others rather than a personal and cultural judgement.

John Dewey’s Art as Experience is a seminal text for anyone studying aesthetic experiences; he was one of the first to reject the rigid separation of art from ordinary ‘aesthetic experience’, arguing instead that aesthetic experience emerges from the continuity of lived experiences. For Dewey, ‘aesthetic experience’ is not confined to moments of detached contemplation —as in Kantian aesthetics— but is rooted in active engagement with the world. Dewey asserts that an aesthetic experience must contain unity, complexity, and closure (Dewey 1980, 36-7). Sherri Irvin writes in opposition of Dewey, “The fact that this [aesthetic] character may be continually in flux does nothing to show that it is absent.” (Irvin 2008, 39) Irvin writes that defining an ‘aesthetic experience’ in a manner that includes every single ‘aesthetic experience’ had in the everyday is not possible. She insists that because the everyday is always in flux, so is the definition of an ‘aesthetic experience’.

The real argument isn’t about defining aesthetic experience but about what brings the experience about. I believe an ‘aesthetic experience’ is one which elicits an immediate response, even if we are not fully conscious of what exactly caused us to have this response. This reaction is not delineated by only the logical portion of our minds, but rather by the parts of our being that feel and remember. I use both ‘feel’ and ‘remember’ because the aesthetic experience cannot be fleeting; for even if the aesthetic experience is not remembered exactly, the feelings that it conjures up will remain in our memory. There is a difference between ‘having' an experience and ‘memory of’ an experience. ‘Having’ an aesthetic experience is a judgement to be made after you experience the sensation, and are remembering your experience. Yet this immediate experience must not be fleeting; rather, the lingering effect of our aesthetic experience is what qualifies it to be an ‘aesthetic experience’. The difference between ‘having’ and ‘memory of’ an experience is important because while many philosophers disagree what constitutes an aesthetic experience, they do not disagree with what it feels like.

Unlike Kant and Shusterman, I believe that the everyday can be a source of aesthetic experience. Finding aesthetic richness in the everyday requires both a mindfulness that capitalism/consumerism does not currently encourage and also an attention to base (i.e., foundational) pleasure that we are not practised in. This essay will now examine aesthetic appreciation (i.e., moments where one could but won’t necessarily have an aesthetic experience) as identified by scholars, and suggest two opportunities in the everyday that the reader can achieve to increase aesthetic value: walking through urban spaces, and, in these urban spaces, interacting with peers and stationary objects.

In her essay “Sniffing and Savoring: The Aesthetics of Smells and Tastes,” Emily Brady makes a case that the preferences derived from taste and smell lead to aesthetic judgements, even if the aesthete abides by Kant’s theory of disinterestedness. Brady argues with Kant, saying that aesthetic appreciation — such as eating or smelling, pleasures also considered lower in Platonic tradition— does have a physical dimension and is not solely a mental experience. Kant articulates that because smelling and touching are lower pleasures, they cannot contribute to an aesthetic experience, as higher faculties, such as the mind, make aesthetic judgements. (Kant 1980) Brady’s contrary view is illustrated in her discussion of vanilla ice cream, “In enjoying the taste of a particular kind of ice cream, we may be involved in contemplation; we reflect on the taste, making comparisons, as we try to approximate where the qualities of the taste fit into our experience, and whether the taste itself is pleasant or unpleasant. […] Imagination comes into play here too, since smells and tastes, just like paintings and poems, evoke images and associations. Smells are notorious for bringing to mind particular times, places, or experiences of the past, so memories may also become part of the reflective activity.” ( Brady 2005, 183-4) Brady thus concludes that in order to aesthetically appreciate the everyday, or recognise how we already appreciate the aesthetics of the everyday, one must dissent from Plato and accept that pleasures of the mind and body are equal.

Brady further opines that “ these aesthetic judgments, whether shallow or deep, suggest a complexity to smells and tastes that Kant, and others, miss.” (Brady 2005, 183) Interpretation and understanding are decidedly faculties of the mind, not the body; despite the often fleeting nature of a scent, it can orient us in an environment, and evoke powerful memories much broader, stronger and richer than the scent itself. As Brady writes, “Through a particular kind of aesthetic orientation we both interpret and understand our surroundings.” (Brady 2005, 186) This orientation to surroundings as a result of sensation is an aesthetic experience— thus Brady successfully integrates the physical nature of everyday aesthetics with Kant’s ideas that understanding and imagination are what is needed for an aesthetic experience.

When walking through an urban space, one is outside but duly removed from nature at scale. When walking down Market Street in St Andrews, one is accosted by bins on the side of the road, lampposts, scaffolding, A-frame signs, sandwich boards, and the occasional cigarette butt; none of these is intuitively worthy of aesthetic appreciation, but a true aesthete recognises how ordinary sights can contain high aesthetic value. Saito writes, “I also believe that it is equally important to illuminate those dimensions of our everyday aesthetic life that normally do not lead to a memorable, standout, pleasurable aesthetic experience in their normal experiential context. […] Such reactions are primarily, if not exclusively, aesthetic reactions.” (Saito 2007, 51) It is important to reconcile that just because the everyday contains aesthetic experiences does not mean that every moment is an aesthetic experience. One must feel and remember (through instinct or recollection) in order to have an aesthetic experience that is not fleeting, nebulous, or vapid.

Consider the lamppost. Its function is to guide drunk students home after a long night out, dissuade the pickpocket, and generally keep us safe and sorted. Yet, when it rains, the lamp’s light shines down into puddles, creating unique refractions of light; and, its glow through the fog can be experienced as ethereal. Lampposts often have design that exceeds the function, in order to create a cohesive architectural narrative with the surrounding property. The quality of light, not just the presence of it, offers profound, but often overlooked, pleasure. The shape of a lamppost — its metal and glass — is anything but nebulous. The occasional exquisiteness of the quality of light is anything but vapid. The evocative memory of the moment of viewing the fractured light in the small pool of water (which one might relay to a friend days later, or capture in an essay) lasts long after the light goes out the following morning, and is far from fleeting.

This combination of function and beauty is— in Shusterman’s, Brady’s, Saito’s, and my opinion— crucial to an everyday aesthetic experience. The lamppost’s aesthetic value is often neglected because it has a strong functional value. The beautiful should not be estranged from the functional; rather, the true aesthete must find beauty in function. In the everyday aesthetic, there must be an intention — even if the intention is not something we are conscious of. This intention can be in the function of the aesthetically perceived object, but this intention can also be found in the perceiver’s intention of finding an aesthetic experience in the everyday world.

As a second example, one could have an aesthetic experience in the everyday occurrence of meeting a peer on the street; where the functional and the pleasurable (pleasure if a friend, displeasure if a foe) interact. This interaction is aesthetic because there is an art to conversation and social etiquette. The manner in which one engages in conversation can be considered aesthetic if done with grace and intention, or non-aesthetic if done poorly. These principles can also be attributed to non-verbal social interactions. Aesthetic qualities emerge in the way we smile, make eye contact, or position our bodies in a conversation. When one believes that functional value does not conflict with aesthetic value, one can clearly see how the aesthetic is not separate from the everyday. These aesthetic qualities of conversation contribute to us remembering the atmosphere of interactions, indicating durability. We perceive the conversations as substantive and lasting because we recognise relationships and interactions as advanced (and thus not vapid), and it is not nebulous, this (representative) encounter is a specific example of an aesthetic experience.

In her 1972 hit single, You’re So Vain, Carly Simon sings “I had some dreams, / They were clouds in my coffee,” This lyric comes from an aesthetic experience that Simon had on an airplane, where the reflection of the sky through the window made it appear that the clouds were in her coffee. Simon is finding aesthetic meaning [art] in her dreams, somewhere that is not traditionally considered to be art. She is finding aesthetic pleasure in the coffee derived not from its taste but rather because of the visually stimulated emotion she experiences. What could have been an ordinary cup of coffee became a vessel that held dreams; it would not be unreasonable to assert that this everyday experience of having coffee on a plane was transformed by Simon’s imagination from an occurrence into an aesthetic experience. This idea—that utilitarian objects, such as a cup of coffee, a lamppost, and casual encounters on the street offer us rich, durable and specific aesthetic experiences— is a far cry from Kant’s assertion that art and nature offer uniquely transcendent (i.e., rich, durable and specific, not vapid, nebulous nor fleeting) experiences. But maybe the problem is also one of expectation and imagination. If we judge something to be more beautiful based on aesthetic generalisations rather than perceiving the pleasure we derive from the interaction between self and the object of appreciation, then we place unnecessary boundaries on an ‘aesthetic experience’ that prevents us from having one with the everyday. If one enters an experience [in nature or while viewing art] expecting an encounter with the sublime, one is more likely to have such an experience at that moment than if one is not expecting to. It might not even have crossed the viewer’s mind that a situation separated from nature or art could contain an aesthetic experience. Perchance an aesthetic interaction with the everyday could be more transcendent than one had with art or nature, due to the fact one might not have been expecting to feel it. The central differentiator here is intention: if an individual is vigilant for aesthetic experiences, they will find them and realize they have been experiencing them for their whole life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brady, Emily. “Sniffing and Savoring: The Aesthetics of Smells and Tastes.” In The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, edited by Andrew Light and Johnathan Smith. Columbia University Press: 2005.

Dewey, John. Art As Experience. Perigee Books, 1980.

Irvin, Sherri. "The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience." The British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 1 (January 2008): 29–44. https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/aym039.

Kant, Immanuel. ANTHROPOLOGY: From a Pragmatic Point of View. Translated by Victor Lyle Dowdell. Southern Illinois University Press, 1966.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Hackett, 1987.

Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Schusterman, Richard. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.