John Dewey and the Roots of Everyday Aesthetics

HAUBERT, LAURA ELIZIA

São Paulo

Encuentro; 21st International Meeting on Pragmatism; 2022

Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo

In the last two decades, everyday aesthetics has become an important topic of debate among philosophers in the Anglophone tradition. Usually, in the classical modern tradition, objects contemplated by aesthetics analysis generally belonged to the scope of art or were considered to have a kind of natural beauty, as in the case of a sunset landscape. Now, contemporary thinkers of everyday aesthetics, however, seek to extrapolate these limits to find the aesthetic experience in objects, actions and even in daily habits. From this perspective, from doing laundry to arranging the furniture in the house can be seen as a source of aesthetic experience. Undoubtedly, this contemporary theory finds many similarities with the proposal presented in 1934 by the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who in his book Art as Experience; already aimed to expand the theoretical limits by reinserting the aesthetic experience in everyday life. The objective of the currently presentation is to understand how Dewey operates the reinsertion of aesthetics in life and to what extent his proposal approaches or differs from more contemporary theories. For this, at first, we turn to Dewey’s distinction between experiences and aesthetic experiences; then the notion of everyday life is contemplated; and finally, it is evaluated to what extent its proposal approaches or departs from the more contemporary proposals of everyday aesthetics.