Everyday Aesthetics Through a Neo-Realist Lens — Epoche C1
Democratised beauty: the claim, and the bill it quietly runs up A well-made cup of tea, laundry dried outdoors, the plain competence of a swept pavement: everyday aesthetics — the strand of philosophical aesthetics that, from the 1990s onwards, began treating such things as objects of aesthetic appreciation in their own right — holds that these belong to the same enquiry as Vermeer and late Beethoven. Yuriko Saito's Everyday Aesthetics (2007) gave the position its most sustained defence, arguing that a discipline organised around the museum had left the aesthetic texture of ordinary life untheorised, and that the omission matters practically, since the aesthetic responses people have to their surroundings shape what they build, buy and protect. The slogan attached to the move is the 'democratisation of beauty': aesthetic experience is not the preserve of a trained few but is distributed across the whole of lived experience. Taken as a claim about the reach of aesthetic experience, the slogan is plainly right, and this essay does not dispute it. Taken as a claim about aesthetic value — that no aesthetic engagement stands above any other, since to rank them would be to reinstate the elitism the field set out to dismantle — it runs up a bill that is rarely itemised. Christopher Dowling, in 'The Aesthetics of Daily Life' (2010), presses the difficulty as a dilemma. Either 'aesthetic' is being used in a thin sense, in which it means little more than that someone liked something, in which case the democratisers have won an argument nobody was having; or it is being used in the robust sense that philosophical aesthetics has always had in mind, in which case it brings with it the apparatus of that sense — the possibility of appreciating something inattentively, of missing what is there, of being wrong. You cannot help yourself to the robust sense and then refuse the apparatus. The thesis defended here is that democratisation conceals a pluralistic hierarchy of aesthetic experiences, and that leaving it unacknowledged produces an undue relativisation of aesthetic value. The argument runs in four steps: Markus Gabriel's neo-realist ontology, which lets us deny that beauty is a property objects carry about with them without making it a matter of taste; the correction that ontology forces on the notion of hierarchy, which turns out to be local rather than global; Kendall Walton's account of category-relative aesthetic properties, which supplies the criterion of depth without snobbery about subject matter; and the consequence for environmental aesthetics, where aesthetic value is not merely an academic commitment but a criterion written into conservation statute. What Gabriel's ontology says, and one label this essay must give up This section supplies the ontological machinery, starting from a result any undergraduate in philosophy will have met and then taking the one step beyond it that the argument needs. The familiar result is Gottlob Frege's: existence is not a property of objects. When we say that tigers exist we are not attributing a feature to each tiger, as we do when we call one striped; we are saying that the concept tiger has instances. Existence, on this analysis, is a property of concepts rather than of things. Markus Gabriel takes over Frege's insight in Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (2015) and modifies it. Existence, for Gabriel, is the property of a field of sense — a domain with its own rules for what counts as appearing in it, and its own standards of individuation — that something appears within it. Numbers exist in the field of arithmetic, characters in the field of a novel, tigers in the Bengali mangroves; 'exists' means the same in each case, namely appearance in a field. Gabriel then argues that there is no field of all fields. Suppose there were one, call it the world, containing absolutely everything. Then the world itself would have to appear somewhere in order to exist at all; if it appears in itself, it is not the domain but an item within it, and if it appears in a further field, that field lies outside it and the world was never all-encompassing. Gabriel's conclusion is his best-known thesis: the world does not exist, and what exists is an unlimited plurality of fields with no roof over them. Here the first correction is due, and it is the essay's own. This argument has previously been described as Gabriel's 'Ontology of the World'. That label inverts the doctrine: Gabriel's is expressly a no-world ontology, and the difference is not terminological. A hierarchy of aesthetic experiences that ran from the shallowest to the deepest, on a single scale, would require exactly the all-encompassing field that Gabriel denies. The correction strengthens the essay's position rather than weakening it, and the next section shows how. A second correction concerns beauty. It has been said, in shorthand, that beauty is a field of sense. Strictly this cannot be right, and the shorthand invites the wrong picture. A field is a domain in which things appear; beauty is not a domain but something that appears — in the field of Dutch genre painting, in the field of proof, in the field of a well-made teabowl. What the phrase 'the non-objecthood of beauty' is reaching for is the correct claim: beauty is not a field-independent property, carried by a thing the way mass is carried by it and detectable irrespective of the domain in which the thing is taken up. Gabriel's own aesthetics, in The Power of Art (2020), presses a related point about artworks: a work is not identical with the physical object that bears it, and is not at the beholder's disposal either, since it imposes conditions on how it is to be taken. Extending that thought from art to nature is this essay's step, not Gabriel's. Non-objecthood without subjectivism The obvious objection to what has just been said is that it has conceded the whole game to relativism: if beauty appears only relative to a field, then anyone can s