World-making and making ourselves in the world through aesthetic experience

Abstract

Due to the quest for objectivity and universality of philosophical aesthetics as an academic discipline, aesthetic experience has been confronted with everyday life, losing the enrichment of a context and its relation to moral and cultural values and utility. As a consequence, the lack of recognition of these values by the academic discipline has led to a fragmentation of aesthetic experience that has resulted in ignorance of the role aesthetics plays in everyday life. In the following paper, the need to reconcile aesthetic experience with everyday life will be presented through Yuriko Saito's concept of world-making, which is an understanding of the world as a common project to which we all contribute through the choices we make in relation to aesthetic experience. On the other hand, it will also try to show why becoming aware of the place of aesthetic experience in everyday life would help to understand the relationship we have with the world, as a consequence of aesthetic experience, through our action; and how, ultimately, the impact of our action on the world reverts on ourselves because the world is the sustenance of our opportunities, and ultimately, of our life.