Lived Aesthetics and the Inner Narrative (2024)

Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi

1. Aesthetic Experience and the Narratives of One’s Self

This is an excerpt from Dorothy Wordsworth’s diary, the beginning of her notes for the day of 24 November 1801. Dorothy, who shared the same household with her brother, the poet William Wordsworth, was in the habit of meticulously updating her diary in her early thirties, the period this short extract comes from. For all its brevity, this excerpt is representative of the way one’s life is organized around, and punctuated by, all sorts of quotidian matters, such as the chain of facts and activities reported here: rainy weather; a mild headache; taking breakfast in bed; reading Chaucer; preparing the goose for dinner; taking a walk.

Certainly, Chaucer’s poetry happens to include famous narratives, but the point I wish to make here moves beyond narratives that are comprised in verbal, visual, or aural art. The chapters of this volume have explored the various ways in which ancient thought engaged with the experiential appeal of ancient Greek narratives. In order to round off the volume and to look beyond its framework, in this chapter I wish to draw attention to a different type of narrative that takes place outside—or rather alongside—the narratives embedded in the artefacts themselves. I am referring to the ways in which the experience of artefacts is inscribed in the story of one’s own life. That rainy morning of November 1801, in Grasmere, Dorothy Wordsworth read Chaucer after having had breakfast in bed, due to a mild headache, and before preparing the goose for dinner or going out for a walk. Reading Chaucer is an integral part of a natural sequence of quotidian acts. It takes place within specific spatial, temporal, physical, and psychic coordinates that cannot but permeate the act of reading Chaucer, the same way that reading Chaucer may, in turn, imbue the manner in which those coordinates are sensed in one’s everyday life. Experiencing Chaucer is an episode within Dorothy Wordsworth’s quotidian life story. It both shapes that story and is being shaped by it—‘story’ understood here in its broadest sense, as an ongoing process of perceiving one’s own life events within given sequences. Because it takes place within variable coordinates, the reading of Chaucer can rarely—if ever—bring about exactly the same aesthetic experience. For instance, reading alone that rainy morning was part of a different overall experiential moment from the one mentioned some days earlier:

Chaucer’s poetry is here part of a whole experiential nexus that involves the intimate presence of a small company, sitting by the fire, a female voice reading aloud. Experiencing Chaucerian narratives this way may still be part of a domestic routine; yet, depending on a wide variety of changing factors within these routines, the experience partakes in a whole system of different stimuli and sensations. In other words, what makes reading Chaucer an aesthetic experience is only partly induced by the poetry itself, the other part being subject to the way reading this poetry is appropriated in one’s daily existence and, ultimately, in one’s sense of one’s entire spectrum of life. I contend that this process of personal appropriation, which comes in various facets, is what makes aesthetic experience a lived experience. It seems that such an exploration of the potential of a lived aesthetics has not been in the interests, or at least in the priorities, of modern philosophical thought, since the terms aesthetic and aesthetics were established in the eighteenth century. There are several reasons that may explain this negligence, a major one—relevant to the present discussion—being the fact that philosophical and, more broadly, theoretical thought largely strove for rigid, seemingly objective, and consistently exclusive definitions of the aesthetic.3 Yet the wide trajectory of lived aesthetic experience, along with its strong links to selfhood, defies the limitations of such domineering definitions. Lived aesthetics involves a wide range of quotidian acts, psychosomatic responses, and mental processes that usually remain tacit, unless they are given voice in a variety of micro-narratives. However haphazard, fragmentary, and loosely connected such recordings may be, like Dorothy Wordsworth’s diary notes, they are nevertheless good reminders of the expanse of the aesthetic in one’s own world and of its multiple entanglements with one’s whole existence.

Modern literature, partly due to its genuine interest in reimagining and representing human experience as a whole, has had both the freedom and the capability to fully display situations that include aesthetic experience as an adventurous, adaptable, and interactive part of one’s entire range of life experience. This is not the place to elaborate on the way the modern novel, especially, has approached this issue but, to cite the most typical example, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is the literary work par excellence where characters engage with the aesthetic as a psychosomatic condition inextricably intertwined with their feelings, sensibilities, and quotidian actions.4 Proust’s novel is one of the richest modern repositories of the experiential potential of the aesthetic and its rootedness in one’s life.

It is in the broader frame of Proust’s interest in the conflations of aesthetic experience and lived experience that one can better appreciate the points Gérard Genette made several decades ago about the peculiar narrativity of Proustian descriptions. Genette says:

Contemplation in Proust, Genette adds, ‘is an activity—intense, intellectual, and often physical—and the telling of it is a narrative just like any other’.6 Thus, Proust captures the process of aesthetic apprehension as a story in its own right, which, instead of delaying the larger narrative of the novel, illuminates and promotes it.7

Genette points to one of the many aspects that indicate Proust’s incisiveness in understanding aesthetic experience as an integral part of life stories. It is a representative instance of my broader point, i.e. that aesthetic experience is registered as part of one’s inner narrative, the latter understood as the deep structure that organizes one’s sense of autobiography. To put it in a different way, aesthetic experiences are inscribed in one’s consciousness as events with their distinct chronotopes that not only frame but, more importantly, permeate the processes of aesthetic perception as such. The intrinsic narrativity of aesthetic experiences, their registering as inner physical and psychic events, is to a considerable extent due to their inevitable linkage with their chronotopic correlatives.8

Unlike the modern split between the restrictive definitional endeavours of theory, on the one hand, and comprehensive literary representations, on the other, ancient discourses, both theoretical and literary, often present a more inclusive understanding of the aesthetic. Hence, they occasionally provide windows on the ways aesthetic and life experience might have intermeshed in ancient mentalities. Given the broadness of the overall issue I am raising, in what follows I concentrate on two particular but interconnected and foundational aspects of a lived aesthetics about which ancient and modern thought provide illuminating, albeit diverging clues: the temporality and the compass of aesthetic experience.

2. Aesthetic Symbiosis and the Longue Durée

Implicit designations regarding the essence of aesthetic experience have been encountered in modern philosophical thought since the second part of the eighteenth century. Over the last century, however, there have been several explicit attempts to define it, all of which display a tendency to conceptualize aesthetic experience as a mental process wholly confined in terms of duration and compass. Monroe Beardsley’s approach, though originating from the analytic tradition in aesthetics, echoes a broader consensus:

The definition may strike one as both reasonable and useful; yet precisely because of its exactitude and clarity it brings to the foreground immanent limitations that tend to be latent elsewhere, the consequences of which are worth noting. First and foremost, the idea that aesthetic experience takes place ‘during a particular stretch of time’, its duration assumed to coincide with the time span one spends in the physical presence of an aesthetic stimulus, although legitimate at first sight, on second thoughts raises doubts. Certainly, one is physically exposed to particular aesthetic stimuli over particular periods of time and, doubtlessly, this physical exposure, along with its limited duration, may have a decisive impact on one’s psychosomatic or mental apparatus. That is to say, the importance of the aesthetic experience that takes place in the presence of a given aesthetic stimulus is not in question. What is in question, however, is the presumed idea that this condition is the only one in which aesthetic experience flourishes. To confine the workings of aesthetic experience exclusively to those limited periods of physical presence is to neglect the multiple ways in which aesthetic stimuli permeate and shape one’s entire psychosomatic and mental apparatus over the long term and while they might be physically absent. In lived experience the verbal narrative of Homer’s Odyssey or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the visual narrative of Euphranor’s Battle of Mantineia or of Rembrandt’s Night Watch may surface in one’s intellectual, emotive, or sensory apparatus in a variety of ways, times, and places, in different layers or depths of perception, and in ranging intensities. The more effective such verbal or visual artefacts are, the more they haunt one’s entire life. Each time they are felt to enter one’s sensory, emotive, or contemplative mechanisms, they are indeed experienced. The temporality of such lived aesthetic experience is not to be easily defined or confined, because it is unlimited, irregular, and largely unpredictable.

Crucial aspects of the second part of Beardsley’s definition, ‘if and only if the greater part of his mental activity during that time is united and made pleasurable by being tied to the form and qualities of a sensuously presented or imaginatively intended object’ raise more questions. In particular, the normative and restrictive aspect of this definition, clearly reflected in its initial rhetoric (‘if and only if’), raises further scepticism. Indeed, a significant part of one’s mental activity may occasionally be united in the presence of an aesthetic stimulus, and may also be tied to the form and qualities of the aesthetic object. Yet what qualifies, really, as ‘greater part of mental activity’? And even if such expanse could be measured and verified, how long can it last? Does an experience cease to be aesthetic if thoughts about the form and qualities of a given aesthetic stimulus, on the one hand, and about one’s inner or outer cosmos, on the other, alternate or even mix to such a degree that they become indistinguishable?

I propose to use the term aesthetic symbiosis to designate an inclusive approach to aesthetic experience, one that allows for fluctuating allocations of mental space ‘tied to the form and qualities’ of a given aesthetic stimulus, as well as for alternations or mixtures of qualities said to be ‘aesthetic’ with others of alien origin but vital in one’s own life. In other words, aesthetic symbiosis is meant to convey here the sense that, contrary to common, implicit, or explicit views in modern aesthetic theory, aesthetic experience does not necessarily occur in isolation from the rest of one’s inner and outer world. Although the realm of the aesthetic may sometimes appear as, and indeed be, a well-protected treasure, it usually cohabits with one’s quotidian activities, sensations, thoughts, and, above all, modes of perceiving and feeling.

In describing a symbiotic model of aesthetic experience, I am assuming that the time span within which such experience takes place is protracted. I borrow the term longue durée from Fernand Braudel’s insights on the dialectic of time spans in history and on social and cultural structures that linger over expansive periods of time, as opposed to the rather compressed, comparatively instantaneous temporality of specific historical events. I use the concept as a pure analogy that can, however, convey effectively the sense of a prolonged unfolding of lived aesthetics as opposed to the traditional emphasis of aesthetic theories on single events that involve one’s physical presence in the face of an aesthetic stimulus.10

Cultures are indeed founded on the (silent) premise that aesthetic experience of certain artefacts is a re-emerging, recurrent, and thus fundamentally plural phenomenon in individuals’ lives. Greek cultural practices and texts offer excellent instances of this realization, which are worth sampling. A pre-eminent such instance is encountered in Ps.-Longinus’ views, as formulated in chapter 7 of On the Sublime.

In accordance with the topic of the treatise as a whole, this passage has a clear focus on the notion of the sublime. For our discussion, however, what is important is not the judgement of the sublime value itself but the way in which Ps.-Longinus’ thought picks up on and develops current ideas about one’s mechanisms of experiencing the verbal arts.11 For instance, noteworthy is here his claim that, in our encounter with the true sublime, our elevated soul, full of joy, prides itself as if it were the generator of what it merely heard.12 The statement seems to be a condensed version of ruminations on the fact that what originally emerges as an aesthetic object may have the power to fully bond with one’s own self, due to the intensity of the experience it provides. This feeling of psychic ownership, this complete internalization of an aesthetic object by way of the experiential process it elicits, is yet another indicative aspect of what I call aesthetic symbiosis.

At the same time, the duration of experience, its time span, is explicitly and emphatically addressed in this passage. θεωρεῖν is the verb par excellence with which to denote contemplation, especially in Greek philosophical discourses.13 Ps.-Longinus’ use of the verb ἀναθεωρεῖν succinctly denotes the act of contemplating a verbal artefact repeatedly in one’s life. It is precisely this recurrent process of contemplation, which extends far beyond one’s exposure to the physical presence of a stimulus—here explicitly designated as auditory—that validates it. To put it differently, it is the longue durée of a renewable aesthetic experience, its potency to leave indelible traces on one’s memory, that makes it worthwhile.14

It is reasonable to think that the potential of a lived aesthetics in Greek and Graeco-Roman cultures was enhanced by the multiple occasions on which individuals were likely to be exposed to the same verbal, musical, and visual artefacts, a factor that probably contributed to even tighter connections between θεωρεῖν and ἀναθεωρεῖν and, consequently, between modes of aesthetic and life experience. In other words, actual repetition or recurrence could not but refresh the mechanisms of memory, contemplation, and appropriation through which the workings of aesthetic experience would keep developing silently in one’s mind. There is a large pool of examples indicating the cultural vitality of such processes in antiquity, a few of which may suffice. For instance, Plato’s representation of Socrates’ quite detailed discussion with Hippias about what might qualify as beautiful in Phidias’ statue of Athena is suggestive of an existing familiarity with visual artefacts that were regularly encountered in quotidian life, thus stored and promptly summoned up in one’s imagination.15 Or there is the Peripatetic lore about what makes a lyric song that is already known to a listener more pleasant than listening to a song one has never heard before. One of the possible answers to this question, mentioning that pre-existing familiarity with a song facilitates the process of θεωρεῖν, indicates the ways in which ancient reflections on aesthetic experience may have addressed the cognitive and affective implications of regular reperformance.16 Finally, it goes without saying that works such as the Homeric narratives, with their recurrent public performances, must have nourished long-standing post eventum sensation and reflection, a condition that may help explain why Plato, who was fully aware of the pervasiveness of aesthetic experience and its entanglements with one’s entire life, expressed such persistent anxieties about the way these narratives moulded not only the aesthetic sensibilities but also the entire psychology of individuals.17

As already mentioned, the type of lived aesthetic experience I am exploring here takes place largely in silence, over one’s quotidian life and within one’s inner self. It is thus entangled with aspects of psychosomatic and mental processes that rarely leave traces in written narratives. Despite the tacit nature of these inner mental and psychic events, one may indeed encounter particularly telling instances of their existence in the ancient world. Two such instances are especially pertinent to the present discussion.

3. Lucretius’ Daily Visions

This account, a splendid instance of what I have been calling lived aesthetics, comes from Lucretius’ fourth book of On the Nature of Things. It falls in the midst of the philosopher’s discussion about the nature of dreams and is part of a section particularly revealing about what I am calling the symbiotic nature of aesthetic experience and, consequently, about the multiple ways in which its outlines blur with the rest of one’s lived experience.18 In the section of the poem immediately preceding the lines quoted above Lucretius describes how lived experience at large tends to enter our dreams: pleaders may plead their cause in their dreams, generals may engage in battle, sailors may fight the winds and, we, Lucretius says about himself, incessantly seek the nature of things and set them forth in writing.19 The last one, the author’s reference to his own creative experience manifesting itself over his sleep, crosses the line between negotium and otium, thus serving as a smooth transition to the account that follows, the quite intense experiences of leisure contained in the lines quoted in full above. Such experiences resurface not just in one’s dreams but, as Lucretius emphasizes (979), as reveries as well, throughout one’s waking.

Lived experience in general, then, finds its way into the mind and tends to linger there for unforeseeable lengths of time. Aesthetic experience behaves in a similar manner. The latter, said to resurface in reverie ‘for many days’, encapsulates the overall tendency of the aesthetic to expand beyond its original spatio-temporal boundaries and to spread all over one’s quotidian life, thus reappearing as a vivid mental image in different moments and contexts. Hence Lucretius perfectly captures the potency of the aesthetic to operate beyond the here and now of its actual, sensory presence. His lines, then, seem to echo ancient views diverging from modern orthodoxies, which, as we saw, tend to understand aesthetic experience as a more or less singular psychosomatic and mental event, contained in the original occasion that generated it. For Lucretius, aesthetic experience is, indeed, a renewable experience; its original existence comes with a dynamic surplus that, as his account indicates, can be repeatedly revitalized in one’s imagination.

Despite the fact that lived experience, in general, and aesthetic experience, in particular, are represented here as impacting the mind in similar ways, there are differences worth noting. For instance, daydreaming is explicitly associated with the impact of musical and theatrical performances specifically, not with the rest of lived experience described in the preceding lines. Are we to assume that aesthetic experience is potentially active within a much wider mental range, both in non-voluntary and in voluntary processes of reimagining?20 Moreover, there is an understated, yet quite effective differentiation in the way these two realms of experience are treated verbally. Lived experience in general (966–70), exemplified through the realm of work and duty, comprises a list of facts re-emerging during one’s sleep having no associations with one’s own sensory apparatus. On the contrary, in the realm of leisure one’s daydreaming appears to be tightly linked with subjective processes of sensory perception and appreciation. The dancers do not simply dance; they move their supple limbs (980). The lyre is not simply played; it plays its rippling tune while its strings are said to ‘speak’ (981–2). The stage is not just decorated; its decorations shine (983).21 More interestingly, daydreaming is here described as reviving in full one’s spectatorial role. Those engaged in such reveries evoke themselves as watching (cernere) the dancers, as looking at (cernere) the audience and at the decorations of the stage, as drinking in with their ears (auribus accipere) the lyre.22 In other words, what is reborn in imagination is not just the object once experienced but the very act of experiencing, in its totality.

Moreover, worth noting in Lucretius’ lines is the experiential spectrum. By ‘spectrum’, I refer to the range of stimuli involved in one’s aesthetic experience and, consequently, to the diverse layers of sensations, feelings, and thoughts associated with it. As we saw, part of the mental images said to be moving before one’s eyes while awake (and, by implication, in one’s dreams as well) are those of the dancers swaying with their supple limbs or of the lyre’s rippling tunes. Whether such visual and aural snapshots are supposed to be reminiscences of different spectacles produced over the several days of the ludi or whether they should be imagined as interlinked synaesthetic associations of one and the same spectacle that, in this case, could be a pantomime-like performance is unclear.23 Be that as it may, the subsequent and final set of mental images Lucretius mentions in these lines is, quite remarkably, unrelated to the performance itself (982–3). These last images spring from the broader spectrum of one’s perception, in this case from the theatrical ambience as a whole. The sensations generated by the sparkling decorations of the stage along with those generated by the sheer presence of the audience in the theatrical venue are lucidly recalled here as an integral part of the recollected and revived experience.24

Ambience, then, often thought to be in the background or in the periphery of one’s attention, might indeed permeate aesthetic experience in its entirety. Lucretius’ account prompts one to rethink modern notions, such as Beardsley’s, regarding the clearly defined centres and peripheries in aesthetic experience. Peripheral stimuli might turn out to be essential to one’s aesthetic perception. They may even merge with what might be thought of as central, or alternate with it as an equally effective component of the experience as a whole.25

4. Libanius’ Post-Performance Delights

Throughout this exploration I have stressed that part of the effectiveness aesthetic experience holds in one’s life lies precisely in its symbiotic nature, in its immersion in the inner self and in its dormant, yet ready to be activated mode of existence in the absence of the initial stimulus that sparked it. Yet, even if we hear of its modes of sustaining itself in one’s mental faculties, as in Lucretius’ account, we rarely ever hear of the quotidian acts within which it tends to resurface. Given the rarity of recorded daily experience of this nature, the testimony provided by Libanius, the fourth-century ce sophist, in his oration On Behalf of the Dancers has an extraordinary value:

The passage offers a condensed version of the entire temporal spectrum of aesthetic experience, both in the presence and in the absence of the aesthetic stimulus. In order to grasp Libanius’ presentation of the first stage in this passage, it is important to take into account the ways in which ancient spectators were supposed to experience pantomime dancing and its narrative techniques.27 For a watching audience, two features of a pantomime performance were particularly challenging. First, the pantomime dancer was supposed to dance a whole narrative (often, but not always, a narrative inspired by Greek tragedies). And second, he, as a solo dancer, was supposed to represent emotional swings and complex situations involving several characters in a given story. Both Libanius and Lucian, earlier, emphasize in their respective treatises on dance how intense an interpretive process it was for an audience to decipher the acts represented by the pantomime dancer with all of their complex emotional fluctuations and plot ramifications. In the passage quoted above the corporeality of the dancer along with the actual images created by way of his gestures, postures, and movement give the impression of being attentively observed. At the same time, however, the spectacle of the dancing body induces a sequence of virtual images that are the result of conceptual processing on the part of the viewer: the grove, the sheep, the goats, the trees, the shepherd of this idyllic scene are nothing but virtual images, interpreted as a narrative sequence by means of one’s cognitive faculties and taking full shape only in one’s imagination. As actual and virtual images coexist and blend in this process, the whole experience of watching the pantomime dancer provided a quite intense and multilayered experience, both sensory and mental.28

While the viewer’s experience in the presence of the dancing body and its narrative techniques is indeed described quite lucidly in the passage, it is the continuation of the experience post eventum, in the absence of the actual stimulus, that opens for us a unique window on the inner, tacit workings of aesthetic experience. Libanius’ references to the spectator’s post-performance dining and to his ensuing night’s sleep are precious domestic vignettes that, despite their brevity, indicate in a most lively manner how quotidian life intersects with the internalized, prolonged life of the aesthetic. The passage explicitly states that the pleasure (ἡδονή) provided by the performance literally dwells in the thought and judgement (γνώμη) of the spectator after the spectacle is over. At the same time, an external sign of adapted behaviour is mentioned: increased gentleness (ἡμερώτερος) to those in the household, his servants and wife. The experience of the dancing spectacle seems to maintain itself and to readapt throughout the transition from the crowded theatre to one’s intimate domestic environment.

Thus, while the plethora of both actual and virtual images generated in the dance performance may still be working silently in the mind, the overall experience seems to be conceptualized as having a diffused impact on one’s attitude and thought. This dispersed but all-pervasive presence of the aesthetic extends into the world of dreams. Despite the fact that watching the dance and deciphering its peculiar narrative have been described in quite specific terms indicating both sensory and intellectual awareness, the dreams the viewer is said to, literally, ‘encounter’ in his sleep (the verb used is homilein) are not presented as a reproduction of the images the spectator was filled with in the actual performance. This is a notable difference between Lucretius and Libanius, the latter showing here more interest in capturing mood and atmosphere as the upshot of the original experience. Still, one cannot but notice a specific term used in the last clause. The night’s dreams are said to be of the sort that possess ψυχαγωγία. The meaning of ψυχαγωγία can indeed be captured with the phrase ‘transportation of the soul’, as in Molloy’s translation offered here; yet in this particular context the term also retains its meaning as ‘entertainment’, ‘amusem*nt’, often used by Libanius elsewhere.29 To put it differently, even if the dreams Libanius mentions here are not depicted as duplicates of the original event, they are still linked to its very essence: its entertaining nature. Sleep is an organic continuation of the ψυχαγωγία received in one’s waking hours.

5. Coda: Kant’s Dinner Party

I presented this exploration of aesthetic experience as lived experience by discussing different pieces of a larger puzzle. I started with samples from Dorothy Wordsworth’s diaries that, despite (or, perhaps, because of) their unadorned and loose narrative, convey lucidly the worldliness within which the aesthetic takes place in one’s life. More broadly, I suggested that even in cases where an aesthetic stimulus is perceived as inducing a wondrous experience, it is its eventual adaptation and modes of appropriation within the worldliness of the quotidian that turn it into a long-lasting experience. Moving into antiquity, I traced an awareness of the long-lasting nature of aesthetic experience in the way Ps.-Longinus’ prose alludes to processes of appropriation and assimilation of aesthetic stimuli by listeners or readers. At the same time, his explicit reference to ἀναθεωρεῖν, which in the context of his discussion means to recontemplate, leaves no question as to the importance he placed on the tenacity and durability of aesthetic experience in the long run of one’s entire lifespan. We should not expect Ps.-Longinus to have detailed the realities of the daily routines within which ἀναθεωρία may take place. Instead, the passages by Lucretius and Libanius opened for us a window on some of the specific ways in which such mechanisms of recollection and appropriation may have been discussed in antiquity. Fortunately, these passages also helped us look into the quotidian modus vivendi and a few of its possible intersections with aesthetic experience. For instance, it is in daydreaming, in dining, sleeping, and definitely dreams that processes of a lived aesthetics can take place.

Lived aesthetics is inclusive, I suggested, not only because it evolves over one’s longue durée but also because, as texts depicting aesthetic experience show, it involves a wide range of modalities and layers of perception. Furthermore, regardless of the narrative embedded in the initial aesthetic stimulus that triggered it, aesthetic experience tends to partake in the (usually tacit) narratives that shape one’s biography. This is because whenever an aesthetic stimulus resurfaces in one’s consciousness, it does so under specific spatio-temporal, sensory, emotional and, in general, personal circ*mstances. In other words, aesthetic experience never happens in vacuo. More importantly, both the external and the inner coordinates within which it occurs are inextricable parts of its very existence.

Perhaps, then, one of the reasons why modern philosophy has struggled with restrictive and limiting conceptualizations of aesthetic experience is because it refuses to address this type of experience within the various coordinates in which it emerges in one’s life. This is particularly true of Immanuel Kant’s foundational Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, which, though steeped in its era’s sensibilities, rarely ever reveals its cultural milieu along with its implications for one’s aesthetic experience. Right from the beginning of this work one is confronted with a solid wall of definitions and concepts that, over the entire course of reading, allows for only scant openings into the outer world. It was simply not in the author’s priorities to provide a sense of the worldly realities that surrounded his aesthetic edifice.

One of the few openings into the quotidian cultural ambience of late eighteenth-century Königsberg, the Prussian city in and around which Kant spent his entire life, appears in his section On Fine Art. The passage, a rare attempt to depict aesthetic experience within its lived coordinates, is worth a full quotation:

Given Kant’s predilection for terse and authoritative statements, this vivid description of the cheerful soundscape at a dinner party is a gem. It emerges as a detailed account of how the arts (as he calls them) of casual storytelling, jest, and laughter mingle with the guests’ chatter and on occasion with table music—this ‘strange thing’ supposed to sustain the jolly mood as a sonic background to which nobody really pays any attention and that is not supposed to distract the diners’ enjoyable small talk. Reminiscences of the jovial din seem to also awaken—if momentarily—vision, for quite surprisingly the sight of the well-set festive table emerges only to be added straight away to the rest of the dining and entertaining arts, classified by Kant as agreeable and strictly segregated from those arts that, according to his aesthetic hierarchies, are superior: the Fine Arts. For the so-called Fine Arts a different experiential state is prescribed by Kant, that of restful contemplation.31 Unfortunately, this state of attendance, although a necessary and indispensable condition for the Kantian appreciation of the beautiful, is never described within its quotidian, lived coordinates. It floats in his work without the narratives that might either have substantiated it or, more likely, have proved that such a state of mind is just an instantaneous condition in the longue durée of an experience that will eventually strike one in abundantly different ways.32

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