THE AESTHETICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE, edited by Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, 224 pp., paper.


Confronted with the notion of "everyday aesthetics," one is immediately faced with some problems of definition. Such problems potentially threaten the viability of the everyday aesthetics project to extend the scope of philosophical aesthetics, so that, as Jonathan Smith suggests in his introduction to this collection of essays, "nothing in the everyday world (or at least very little) can be supposed devoid of the power to excite an aesthetic response." "Everyday" can mean both "daily" and "ordinary," and while the two definitions often coincide in practice, there's no necessary connection: we can conceive the "daily" as remarkable, and the "ordinary" may not be a regular occurrence. If we focus on the aesthetics of the "daily," we might wonder which particular daily occurrences we can be properly said to experience aesthetically and if this means some reassessment of the category of "aesthetic objects" is required, given that "daily" is so often associated with the mundane, the nonaesthetic. Alternatively, if we conceive an aesthetics of the "ordinary" (with agreement on this classification of certain events and objects), then our notion of the "aesthetic" now seems vulnerable on either of two counts: (1) to claims of incoherence, given any agreement that exemplary aesthetic experience, at least, is fundamentally not of the "ordinary" (and never of the "ugly," of the stained, damp, cracked, and so on, in our domestic lives) but of an extraordinary class of events and objects called "art"; (2) to claims of cognitive and moral triviality (to amorality too, perhaps, that it's possible then, after Thomas de Quincy, to appreciate the way a murder is done), so that the aesthetic response is understood as merely a subjective, noncritical "look and feel" response to (almost) everything. It should be evident, then, that the notion of everyday aesthetics needs clarification before it can be of value to those interested in instructing or helping people to live aesthetic lives, and that such work of clarification gets to the very heart of philosophical aesthetics: answers to questions about what constitutes the "aesthetic" in life will inform all aspects of aesthetic inquiry, education, and practice, including the making and appreciating of artworks.