In her recent impressive study on the aesthetics of design, Jane Forsey launches a thorough challenge to the movement as it has thus far been practiced. The considerations I tackle in this paper touch on some core issues in the field of everyday aesthetics. The paper ends with some notes on what the Deweyan aesthetic everyday looks like. The reading of Dewey’s conception of aesthetic experience underlying my response to Saito will form an important basis for the critique I present in the second half of the paper of views that see the aesthetic character of the everyday as constituted by a particular feeling of familiarity. In the first part my paper I counter this argument by showing that Deweyan aesthetic experiences can be part of everyday life in a much more comprehensive way than Saito’s criticism assumes. Given, however, that in our waking lives we only seldom have such experiences, Dewey’s notion, Yuriko Saito argues, offers a highly limited foundation for a theory of everyday aesthetics. Dewey viewed aesthetic experience as one of the peak experiences of human life, as an experience. One line of criticism sees Dewey’s notion of aesthetic experience as too restrictive.
Despite its merits in showing that everyday events and artifacts can be objects of genuine aesthetic reflection, Dewey’s view has been considered to involve problematic aspects that call into question its theoretical value and usefulness for everyday aesthetics. Yet not all have been convinced that Dewey’s ideas provide the most adequate starting point for this new discipline. Introductionīecause of the severe criticism Dewey leveled against the creation of a dichotomy between art and the everyday, he has been generally acknowledged as a forerunner for everyday aesthetics. Key WordsĪesthetic experience, Dewey, everyday aesthetics, Haapala, Melchionne, rhythm, Saito 1. This article defends the view that the conception of aesthetic experience developed by John Dewey offers a much more promising foundation for a theory on the aesthetics of everyday life than some scholars have believed. One of the primary disputes concerns aesthetic experience and how that concept should be understood. In the relatively fragmented field of everyday aesthetics, some issues have gradually become the subject of increasingly heated debate.
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