“It’s nice here!”. Only after a while in this room, absorbed in my thoughts, did I realise how pleasant it is to be here. In this article, I offer an aesthetic characterisation of those commonplace situations where we find ourselves taking pleasure in our absorbed interaction with everyday environments, practices, objects, etc., without noticing such pleasure. In other words, I argue that aesthetic experience can take place in everyday life without us being conscious of it. Thus, I challenge what I call the reflective-experience condition within the contemporary movement of Everyday Aesthetics. Namely, the widespread assumption that consciousness is a necessary condition of everyday aesthetic experience—i.e., as an experience that one must be able to attribute to oneself as having in the present.

 

For this purpose, I offer a two-step argumentation. First, I follow the distinction between ‘phenomenal’ and ‘access’ consciousness (Block 1995, 2002), and recent empirical evidence in support of it (Amir et al. 2023), to account for those commonplace situations where one apparently experiences something without noticing it. Second, and more importantly, I propose to reconsider the reflective character of everyday aesthetic experience in terms of the normativity usually associated with aesthetic appreciation. Understood this way, against the reflective-experience condition, to say that an experience must be reflective is not so much a psychological matter of the consciousness involved in it. Rather, it has to do primarily with the subject’s endorsement of one’s own affective response as appropriate (Gorodeisky 2022). Accordingly, I conclude that those commonplace situations can be taken as instances of everyday aesthetic experience if the affective responses unconsciously expressed in them involve the responsiveness proper to rational evaluation and we can account (even retrospectively) for them.

 

Natxo Navarro Renalias is a PhD student and predoctoral researcher at the University of Murcia (Spain) working on Everyday Aesthetics within the research group Aresmur-Aesthetics and Theory of Arts. He has been a visiting researcher at the University of Helsinki, Aalto University, and currently at the University of Turin, as well as a fellow researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of The Spanish National Research Council. He completed his studies in Philosophy between the University of Murcia, the University of Hull, and the Complutense University of Madrid.