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Experience of Awe: An Expansive Approach to Everyday Aesthetics
Contemporary Aesthetics (2015)
  • Thomas Leddy, San Jose State University
Abstract
As opposed to Melchionne and Naukkarinen, I defend an expansive definition of everyday aesthetics, one that includes festivals, tourism, and many daily activities of artists and other professionals, along with most ordinary and common experiences.  I argue for continuities between aesthetics of everyday life and the aesthetics of art and nature.  Looking through a window, for example, may involve aspects of all three.  Although I agree with Melchionne that everyday aesthetics is closely related to questions of subjective well-being, I take a more expansive approach to this, drawing from recent psychological studies of the experience of “awe” to stress the importance of such experiences in subjective well-being, thus tying the high points of everyday aesthetics more closely with the high points in the aesthetics of art and nature.
Keywords
  • awe,
  • definition,
  • everyday aesthetics,
  • Melchionne,
  • Naukkarinen,
  • restrictivists,
  • subjective well-being
Disciplines
Publication Date
2015
Citation Information
Thomas Leddy. "Experience of Awe: An Expansive Approach to Everyday Aesthetics" Contemporary Aesthetics Vol. 13 (2015) ISSN: 1932-8478
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/tom_leddy/190/
Creative Commons license
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY-NC International License.