Yuriko Saito is a philosophy professor whose work delves into everyday and environmental aesthetics. Her scholarship explores how aesthetic values permeate our daily experiences and how our surroundings shape our perception of beauty. Saito emphasizes the connection between philosophical thought and concrete aspects of life and culture. Her publications often draw from Japanese aesthetics, offering a unique lens on universal themes.
This ground-breaking book brings to life a neglected topic: our everyday aesthetic interactions with the world around us and the objects in it. Yuriko Saito shows how exploring everyday aesthetics can enrich the content of our aesthetic discourse, and reveals its influence on the state of the world and our quality of life.
Yuriko Saito, the leading figure in the field, explores the nature and significance of the aesthetic dimensions of people's everyday lives. She argues that everyday aesthetics can be an effective instrument for directing humanity's collective and cumulative world-making project.
Building upon her previous work on everyday aesthetics, Yuriko Saito argues in this book that the aesthetic and ethical concerns are intimately connected in our everyday life. Specifically, she shows how aesthetic experience embodies a care relationship with the world and how the ethical relationship with others, whether humans, non-human creatures, environments, or artifacts, is guided by aesthetic sensibility and manifested through aesthetic means.Weaving together insights gained from philosophy, art, design, and medicine, as well as artistic and cultural practices of Japan, she illuminates the aesthetic dimensions of various forms of care in our management of everyday life. Emphasis is placed on the experience of interacting with others including objects, a departure from the prevailing mode of aesthetic inquiry that is oriented toward judgment-making from a spectator's point of view. Saito shows that when everyday activities, ranging from having a conversation and performing a care act to engaging in self-care and mending an object, are ethically grounded and aesthetically informed and guided, our experiences lead to a good life.