Graduate Student, Department of Philosophy
Thesis Title: Aesthetic Consciousness in Daily Life
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Nick Zangwill
Elisabeth Schellekens |
About
Recently the new field of 'everyday aesthetics' has begun to establish itself. So far the work in this area has been concerned with establishing the legitimacy of turning aesthetic attention towards the objects and experiences of everyday life: the built environment, bodily sensations, eating, 'unscenic nature', commercial design, green architecture, and so forth. My aim in this thesis is to take the arguments of everyday aesthetics or 'the aesthetics of daily life' and look at how our aesthetic consciousness would have to be in order to accommodate this diversity of objects and experiences. I will provide a theoretical framework for what Christopher Dowling calls 'the aesthetics of daily life intuition' in terms of an 'integrated aesthetic consciousness'. This will involve an analysis of the common kinds of mental states and structures on which diverse aesthetic appreciation in daily life depends.
I will then develop this idea of an integrated aesthetic consciousness: a consciousness which has, as an integral but by no means exclusive element, an aesthetic awareness which is always operative albeit often in the background. Firstly, in order to ground this pervasive aesthetic awareness, I will show how an aesthetic sensitivity which constantly analyses the relations between diverse objects must be 'always on' if we are to make sense of the kinds of qualities we seem to appreciate in daily life. Although apparently disjunctive, such an aesthetic consciousness displays a continuum of aesthetic experience through daily and art-centred life. Secondly, I will show how, on the basis of this, we must understand our aesthetic consciousness to be indissolubly linked to wider cognitive structures; and how the very idea of a 'special aesthetic experience' is dependent on the 'framing' of experience by our understanding of its context and moral and social value.
