The free access to this article was made possible by support from readers like you. Please consider donating any amount to help defray the cost of our operation.
Everyday Aesthetics and Gratitude
Adam Vrchlabský
This short note was inspired by T. Michael McNulty’s text in the last issue of Contemporary Aesthetics, where he described his grateful joy of being able to hear the world again.[1] It prompted me to think about the role gratitude can possibly play in our everyday aesthetic lives.
Gratitude was regarded highly by thinkers like Hume or Kant, and so was the idea of the beautiful, although they have treated them separately. Ruskin, on the other hand, distinguishes between theoria, “the exulting, reverent, and grateful perception” that is capable of contemplating “the beautiful as a gift of God,” and the mere “consciousness of the pleasantness,” which he terms aesthesis.[2] In more recent discussions, Pauline von Bonsdorff included gratitude among elements of joy, recognition, and surprise that are often present in our encounters with beauty.[3] Gratitude seems to be tacitly present in the writings of many scholars who publish on everyday aesthetics. It complements well the described experiences of care for all sorts of objects that help us meet our needs, the oftentimes smooth and pleasurable progression of daily events and our bodily functioning, and the sudden experiences of awe with which we are endowed every now and then in the most ordinary settings. It might be said, however, that gratitude has not yet received proper attention in the aesthetic discourse. For this reason, I would like to sketch a few ways in which I think it might be of interest to everyday aesthetics.
It seems that gratitude thrives in a special way on the threshold between the ordinary and the extraordinary. In still common cases like a prayer before bed, gratitude can be a part of ordinary activities that serve to raise the current events of one’s life into new light. Despite not being an art-related practice, it has the potential to make the mundane special. Moreover, in deep gratitude people often tend to repeatedly give thanks for the most basic things: being alive, having a family, living in safety, and so on. Even though its aim is not primarily to induce an aesthetic experience, it is possible to say that the effects of gratitude can have aesthetic consequences. Practicing gratefulness makes us aware of our place in a large web of relationships. Even a brief attempt at acknowledging everything that had to happen so that I could have food on my plate can make an ordinary meal appear as a profound gift to me. The deeper such realization goes, the harder it may be to remain inattentive to the object on both a sensory, imaginative, and moral level. Using Thomas Leddy’s concept, I would argue that gratitude can effectively imbue objects, events, and relationships with aura and make them seem “more alive, more real, more present, or more connected to other things.” [4]
The beauty in experiences of gratitude can stem from awareness of conditions or chains of events that contribute to the sense of being gifted. This joy and sense of harmony can, however, be disrupted when such conditions or chains of events are found to be morally problematic. Furthermore, grateful attitude can collide with insatiability often promoted in consumerist societies through advertising and expressed in many areas of everyday life, such as food, travel, or entertainment. A grateful person can become saddened or repulsed by the ways in which the subtle qualities and rich experiences they have been able to discover in their moderate approach to the world are often drowned out in public by offers of intensive yet oftentimes irresponsible pleasures that can negatively affect health, sensibility, society, and the environment.[5] Here, the grateful attitude encounters the negative aesthetic, and it can prompt the subject to seek more ethical ways of consumption and sustainable solutions.[6]
Finally, gratitude is seen as a key virtue not only by philosophers but also in various religious traditions. Thanksgiving is often a fundamental part of daily prayers and rituals for Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists alike. These practices can continually reframe the everydayness and highlight overlooked beauty, meaning, interrelations, and dependencies. For example, Tish Harrison Warren, in her book Liturgy of the Ordinary, shows how food can be nourishing, on aesthetic, moral, and spiritual levels alike, when it is approached with gratitude and prayer. In this way, we can be nourished by “the stories of the food” when there are positive social or ecological relationships involved in the stages of its production, sale, and consumption. The food can serve also as a reminder of all the means and events we were given to sustain our existence. These rich experiences thus can heighten a person‘s awareness to various sorts of relationships they are situated within and bring both a sense of deep, joyous reassurance and a motivation to act. As Warren puts it: “They challenge me to empty myself for others, knowing that I will be filled to the brim over and over again in the abundant economy of worship.”[7]
The recently proposed project of existential aesthetics can also offer a promising opportunity to grasp the relationship between gratitude and everyday aesthetics. Following Hans Maes’s distinction, gratitude-influenced aesthetic experiences can be understood both as capable of affecting a person’s life and as “existentially illuminating in addressing certain existential questions.”[8] Many examples of this have been given by David Steindl-Rast, who in his books repeatedly has linked the capacity to experience beauty with grateful attitude. His classic recording, “A Grateful Day,”[9] shows that, with a certain practice, many of us can actually experience the ordinary beauty of the world as T. Michael McNulty described it. It also points to ways in which gratitude might serve as a useful critical tool for reevaluating contemporary concepts of “the ordinary.”
Adam Vrchlabský
a.vrchlabsky@gmail.com
Adam is a PhD. student at Masaryk University, Department of Aesthetics. His research focuses on the possible interrelations between everyday aesthetics and theological aesthetics.
Published on June 1, 2024.
Cite this article: Adam Vrchlabský, “Everyday Aesthetics and Gratitude,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 22 (2024), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] T. Michael McNulty, “Hearing a New World,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 21 (2023).
[2] John Ruskin, The Complete Works of John Ruskin Volume III (New York: The Kelmscott Society, 1900), 16.
[3] Pauline von Bonsdorff, “Urban Richness and the Art of Building,” in The Aesthetics of Human Environments, eds. Arnold Berleant, Allen Carlson (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2007), 72.
[4] Thomas Leddy, “Experience of Awe: An Expansive Approach to Everyday Aesthetics,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 13 (2013)
[5] Such mechanisms are described in the chapter 8 of Arnold Berleant’s The Social Aesthetics of Human Environments (New York: Bloomsbury, 2023).
[6] This shift, of course, is not inevitable, as it is clear from expressions of gratitude linked to cases of careless consumption, such as irresponsible tourism or unethically produced luxurious gifts.
[7] Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary (Westmont: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 73.
[8] Hans Maes, “Existential Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 80 (2022), p. 266.
[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSt7k_q_qRU.