This section comprised of eight chapters addresses the role environmental aesthetics plays in promoting human well-being. In popular parlance, the term, environmental aesthetics, may immediately be associated with nature aesthetics. In fact, this subdiscipline of Western aesthetics discourse first emerged during the latter half of the twentieth century by addressing our aesthetic experience of nature, a topic that had been largely neglected since the eighteenth century. However, its reach soon expanded to include cultivated nature, such as agricultural lands and parks, and built environments and the objects within, leading to the understanding of environment as the world at large, natural or artefactual. The notion of environment further broadened to include our social environment consisting of human behaviour, interactions with others, and atmospheres created thereby. This wide scope of aesthetics is today often referred to as everyday aesthetics, the most recent outgrowth of environmental aesthetics, which was specifically proposed and developed to liberate aesthetics from the art-centric approach that dominated the twentieth century Western aesthetics.
Everyday aesthetics calls attention to the aesthetic potentials of objects, phenomena, and activities that we experience in our daily lives. Mostly concerned with practical interests, our management of everyday life renders those aesthetic potentials rather invisible. Even when they become visible, since most of these items are not specifically meant to induce an aesthetic experience, their aesthetic value is considered to be not comparable to that of works of art. At the same time, the psychological, social, existential, political, and environmental (understood as referring to sustainability) roles their aesthetic experience plays in our lives is significant. The chapters in this section explore such contributions everyday aesthetic experiences make in promoting human well-being and flourishing, as well as helping to construct a humane and sustainable society.
Particularly important in this regard is that everyday aesthetics aims to recover the authentic mode of living in this world. By challenging Western philosophy’s general neglect of our bodily existence involving all sensory engagements, in particular those involving what is more bodily oriented, namely taste, touch, smell, proprioception, and kinesthetic sensations. Everyday aesthetics makes us aware of our bodily attunement to the world, which in turn illuminates our interdependency with the world around us. Ranging from developing a full and rich experience of engaging with the world to deriving a quiet and humble satisfaction from the familiar aspects of our daily lives, everyday aesthetics suggests many ways of improving the quality of life without incurring those psychological, physical, financial, or environmental trappings often associated with pursuing happiness in today’s consumerist and materialist society.
Such mindful living requires practice. Conventional Western aesthetics discourse characterises aesthetic experience as something that we undergo when we adopt a right, namely disinterested, attitude. The characterisation is thus rather passive by emphasising withholding the usual mode of experiencing the world and disconnecting us from the life concerns. Mostly lost in this characterisation is the agency we can exercise in facilitating aesthetic experience, whether conceptually or literally through performing some action. It reminds us that we are empowered to determine the character of our experiences and ultimately the quality of life.
Some aspects of our lives are within our control, and we can change our environments and lives to suit our needs and desires. We decide how to present ourselves to the world with clothing, hair styling, facial make-up, perfumery, and the general comportment with which we carry ourselves, while we try to create a comfortable, stable, clean, safe, and pleasing domestic environment through performing regular house chores and yard work, while changing interior and outdoor decorations from time to time. We relate to others in a caring, friendly, and respectful manner, or in an indifferent, or sometimes even hostile, manner, not only through the content of our conversation with others and actions regarding them but also by aesthetic manifestations: tone of voice, facial expression, and body movement.
However, other aspects of our lives are beyond our control. Plants in a garden grow in a way that we cannot totally control, material existence including our bodies is subject to the natural ageing process, and, for some people, lives and environments are quite precarious due to poverty, political and military conflict, and natural disasters. Even in these cases, we can practise aesthetic agency, on the one hand by discovering or creating as much aesthetic potential as possible in the small crevices of environment and life, thereby fortifying the power of resilience. On the other hand, we can also exercise our agency by actively shifting our focus from self to the world and transforming submission to what we cannot control from a source of disappointment to acceptance or even contentment.
While thus being useful in promoting a good life for oneself, everyday aesthetics also reminds us that we should not conceive of it as a self-enclosed practice. Ever mindful of the authentic mode of human existence, which is always relational, whether in terms of the relationship with the material world, nature, or other humans, everyday aesthetics helps us attend to the inseparability of our own well-being and that of the others and the world. In particular, we develop an awareness that we are not only an aesthetic agent but also an aesthetic object judged by others, sometimes subjected to injustice and degradation, reminding us of the power of the aesthetic in determining the character of a society, for better or worse. Whether regarding the quality of societal life and human interactions within or environmental sustainability of our life on this earth, promotion of our well-being takes place in this web of interdependence, mutual penetration, and entanglement. As such, living a good life is not a solitary venture but is supported by and in turn supports others’ similar efforts.
The essays in this section collectively argue that environmental aesthetics is instrumental in promoting one’s well-being by encouraging more mindful and engaged living in this world. At the same time, they also remind us that developing one’s sense of being at home in the world should not come at the expense of others’ well-being, ethical considerations, and the sustainability of the world.
The Oxford Handbook of Mental Health and Contemporary Western Aesthetics
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