Ordinary Aesthetics

The impetus for this special issue comes less from conventional debates in philosophical aesthetics itself and instead from one area of recent work on ethics. More specifically, our turn to aesthetics has been inspired by a rich conversation that has emerged in recent years between anthropology and philosophy on the idea and importance of the ordinary. Oftentimes, the ordinary continues “to be treated as a residual category of routine and repetition punctuated by the disruptions of the event.” Many similarly continue to think of ethics as principally concerned with rules and their infringement, as a domain constituted by judgements made some distance from the everyday.

But this new body of work has powerfully questioned these assumptions. Veena Das explains that ordinary ethics by contrast examines “What is it that blocks our ability to see the everyday and hence to imagine the ethical as inhering in the quotidian rather than standing out and announcing its presence though dramatic enactments of moral breakdown or heroic achievement.” In this sense, she writes, it “allows us also to think of the unethical as growing within the forms of life that people inhabit – it is, thus, not a matter of eliciting opinions about what behavior is considered ethical or unethical, or of cataloguing cultural practices on which we can bring judgment from an objective, distant position but rather of seeing how forms of life grow particular dispositions.” As these debates continue to develop, we began to see a further need for thinking about the possibility of ordinary aesthetics, a field which though intimately tied up with ethics, merits its own inquiry.

Cite this special edited issue: Brandel, A. & Laugier, S. (2023). Ordinary Aesthetics. Open Philosophy, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2022-0275