Experience of Awe: An Expansive Approach to Everyday Aesthetics

• Main Author: Thomas Leddy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Contemporary Aesthetics, Inc. 2016-01-01
• Series: Contemporary Aesthetics
• Subjects: awe; definition; everyday aesthetics; Melchionne; Naukkarinen; restrictivists
• Online Access: http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=727

As opposed to Melchionne and Naukkarinen, I defend an expansive definition of everyday aesthetics, one that includes festivals, tourism, and many daily activities of artists and other professionals, along with most ordinary and common experiences. I argue for continuities between aesthetics of everyday life and the aesthetics of art and nature. Looking through a window, for example, may involve aspects of all three. Although I agree with Melchionne that everyday aesthetics is closely related to questions of subjective well-being, I take a more expansive approach to this, drawing from recent psychological studies of the experience of “awe” to stress the importance of such experiences in subjective well-being, thus tying the high points of everyday aesthetics more closely with the high points in the aesthetics of art and nature.