Plutarch and everyday aesthetics of living

Abstract

Contemporary aesthetics describes aesthetic experience in terms of attention, together with absorption, salience, and sustained engagement. Although illuminating cognitive and temporal structures, often implicitly assumed is that richer experience corresponds to heightened responsiveness. Yet, if intensification functions as a normative touchstone, aesthetics risks describing a few moments unusually well while misdescribing the aesthetic experience of most people for most of their lives. Similarly, capacities culturally associated with youth and its readiness for emotional escalation serve as the unspoken basis for the majority of accounts of aesthetic engagement. Ancient Greek and Roman writings, however, offer a different valuation based on the arc of lives. Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle each treat pleasurable experience as something distributed across a life, not as moments of episodic intensification, while Plutarch repeatedly evaluates responsiveness in terms of measure (μέτρον), steadiness (ἡσυχία), fittingness (πρέπον), and the right time (καιρός). Recovering Plutarch’s aesthetics allows us to diagnose the tacit evaluative metrics of contemporary theories of aesthetics and to open up to philosophical scrutiny what it would mean for aesthetics to become explicitly sensitive to the arc of lives.