Everyday Aesthetics, Happiness, and Depression

Abstract

Abstract This chapter will introduce everyday aesthetics and conceptions of happiness, explore their interconnections, and indicate some ways they might relate to depression. I introduce the main claims and concerns of everyday aesthetics and illustrate these with examples from the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese philosophical traditions. Everyday aesthetics recognizes that aesthetic experience is not confined to appreciation of artworks but extends to many everyday activities, environments, and experiences. I then consider two influential accounts of happiness—‘hedonic’ and ‘life-satisfaction’ theories—and indicate ways that they connect to aesthetics. I suggest an alternative phenomenological account of happiness. Aesthetic appreciation and agency and happiness, it is argued, depend on a phenomenologically fundamental capacity to experience different kinds of significant possibility. What emerges is the idea that our experiential, evaluative, and practical abilities depend on phenomenological capacities which are subject to radical disruption. It is the loss or disruption of that capacity which characterizes experiences of depression.