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This chapter argues for the need for everyday aesthetics for filling the lacunae created by prevailing Western aesthetic theories that are primarily concerned with paradigmatic Western art and memorable aesthetic experiences. Even with an expanded scope of art to include more recent art — such as environmental art and art of the everyday, and non-Western art like the Japanese tea ceremony — everyday objects, environments, and phenomena often do not share art-making characteristics, making them seem either second-rate ‘wannabe’ art or not worthy of investigation. However, confining the aesthetic to art-making features or standout experiences is misleading and deprives us of an opportunity to explore a rich array of aesthetically relevant and significant issues. The twofold mission of everyday aesthetics is to highlight the extraordinary aesthetic potential of the most ordinary everyday experience and, at the same time, to analyze our ordinary aesthetic reaction in its everyday mode.

Allen Carlson provides an historical backdrop for this volume by outlining ten pivotal stages in the development of Western environmental aesthetics, briefly describing some of the main contributions to the field that have been made at each stage. The chapter begins with Ronald Hepburn’s seminal 1966 essay ‘Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,’ and ends with what Carlson calls the ‘Coming of Age’ of environmental aesthetics, which is marked by the proliferation of new monographs, anthologies, reference volume entries, and introductory textbooks that have been published in the field since the turn of the century. He then adds a coda concerning environmental aesthetics beyond the West.

This book addresses anew the old question, often neglected in contemporary aesthetic debates, about art and truth, or art and cognition. A central thesis of this book is that the question remains to be resolved, and that taken as a whole, later Western aesthetic tradition counts as an ongoing effort to formulate a successful anti-Platonic analysis of art and art objects of the most varied kinds. Early in the Western tradition, Plato focused on the relation of art and truth in inventing an early form of aesthetics. There is little attention given to the Platonic view that philosophers, who alone know reality, are the true artists, but the Platonic attack on artistic representation has been hugely influential in Western aesthetics. The post-Platonic Western aesthetic tradition can be read as a series of responses to the Platonic attack on the relation of art and truth.

This chapter discusses Kant’s continuing influence on the aesthetic debate as well as his decisive role in its modern discussion. Kant, who claims to begin philosophy worthy of the name during his so-called critical period in his critical philosophy, is sometimes thought of as the founder of Western aesthetics. It is perhaps more accurate to say that he did not invent but deeply influenced both theory of knowledge and aesthetics. In treating the questions of aesthetics with the same rigor and the same tools as other themes, Kant erased any distinction between aesthetics and the other facets of critical philosophy, and hence erased any distinction between aesthetics and philosophy in general. Kant, who is deeply influential on the entire later modern debate, is especially influential on later aesthetics, which often can be depicted as a series of reactions to his aesthetic theories.

This chapter illustrates a few of the many differences between modern art and earlier art forms. For one, modern art can be seen as the transformation of what was earlier an artistic endeavor that appeared in many guises to one that increasingly responds to financial imperatives. Contemporary art is either in the process of becoming or has already become a form of commodification. Modern art also shows evidence of an increasing loss of the cognitive dimension so important in earlier forms of art. The Platonic attack on artistic representation has been hugely influential in Western aesthetics, and philosophers—even artists—are divided in supporting or denying the Platonic verdict. These differences in opinion illustrate that the aesthetic discussion and even the practice of Western art is a sort of reaction to the Platonic critique of art. This scenario is now changing; the reasons for this change are discussed in the succeeding chapters.