The Common Currency of Our Aesthetic Sensibility

Abstract:Our aesthetic sensibilities are the common currency that shapes every aspect of our experience. The term “aesthetic” does not refer merely to a particular type of experience, or even less to a specific type of mental judgment, but rather to all of the ongoing bodily and social processes by which we make and experience meaning. The aesthetic dimensions of the basic processes of life maintenance and enhancement are also operative in our higher activities of meaning-making, culminating in our most noteworthy artistic achievements. We develop a Deweyan aesthetics, supported by contemporary neuroscience, showing that aesthetics emerges from the organic processes of search for satisfaction and fulfillment, which are present in mundane experience as much as in high art. The profound truth of an aesthetics of everyday life is that appetitive search for consummatory moments of satisfaction characterizes our most basic life-sustaining activities, and these processes are equally present in extraordinary labor ripe with effort and consummation.