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Cool as an Aesthetic Quality
James Kirwan
Abstract
To find a thing cool is to see it as the expression (directly, analogically, or by association) of a certain kind of character. It is primarily attributed to human beings perceived as autonomous to an enviable degree: indifferent to emotions that the perceiver experiences as oppressive. This grounding of cool in the attribution of an intrinsic quality to a person is revealed by the way the attribution may be checked by a perception of effort, vulnerability, or insensibility in their behavior. Objects other than human beings appear cool either by analogy or association with this primary attribution. In finding someone or something cool, we are entertaining the idea of being a certain way that logically precludes the pleasure we are imagining. We do so for the pleasure the entertaining of this idea affords.
Key Words
aesthetics; cool; fashion; sprezzatura; technology
1. Introduction
Nothing is cool in itself. Like any other aesthetic quality, coolness only exists in attribution. It is a matter of the feelings of a particular subject at a particular moment: feelings of pleasure or reward that the subject attributes to their very perceiving of the object. Given that the subject experiences the source of their feelings as the object “in itself,” aesthetic categories—beautiful, cute, graceful, cool—are most intuitively divided from one another not by differentiae in the kind of feeling but rather according to the kind of perceived properties that arouse them, by the finding of an object to be thus or thus. We do not, after all, generally acquire our aesthetic vocabulary by recognizing our own experience in phenomenological accounts of diverse internal states, but rather through ostensive definition: through the pointing out of certain kinds of objects as giving aesthetic pleasure. Indeed, if a property has a discrete identity within aesthetic vocabulary—a name—it will be because there is a general agreement within a particular milieu on the common objective conditions that are likely to lead to the attribution of that property. Among such conditions would be, for example, the perception of vulnerability in the case of the cute, of overwhelming size or power in the case of the sublime, or of conspicuous economy of force in motion in the case of the graceful. They are not “cute properties,” or “sublime properties,” or “graceful properties,” because no property can be cute, sublime, or graceful except to one who finds its so at a particular moment in time. Nevertheless, we may call these “cute-apt,” “sublime-apt,” or “graceful-apt” properties, insofar as they are characteristics that can be discovered across the whole range of things that habitually are found cute, sublime, or graceful.[1] They are the family resemblance that enabled us to learn the meaning of the words in the first place. Thus, we are less surprised if someone attributes cuteness to a kitten than to a volcano, and sublimity to a volcano rather than a kitten. We know what characteristics are being picked out when gracefulness is attributed to a gazelle, but might be puzzled by its attribution to a tortoise. We are even able to discern, or at least plausibly conjecture, an intention to produce an object that will be cute, sublime, or graceful simply on the basis of the presence of certain objective characteristics, regardless of our own aesthetic indifference on this occasion.
None of this diminishes the basic subjectivity, the dependence upon feeling, of the aesthetic: it is by no means given that any particular person will find any particular kitten cute, any particular volcano sublime, or any particular movement graceful. I may point to the properties that make the object cute for me, and even appeal to the presence of those characteristics that tend to make objects cute in general, but I cannot make you feel either in any particular case; I can prove that the object has the objective “cute-apt” characteristics I attribute to it but cannot prove that the object has the aesthetic quality—cuteness—I attribute to it since that depends upon my feeling. There is no fact of the matter about the aesthetic quality of the object itself: only taste. The cuteness of the object—like the sadness of a situation or the moral wrongness of an action—belongs to my feeling about it. With these conditions in mind, let us turn to cool as an aesthetic quality.
2. Cool-apt properties
The primary object that can possess cool-apt properties is the perceived character of another human being. Other objects can be found cool through appearing to express analogous characteristics to human coolness, and still others may become cool without possessing any cool-apt properties but rather by association: by coming to appear an appropriate accessory to human coolness. This last is a matter of fashion and thus almost entirely arbitrary. When it comes to what is cool by association, it is simply a matter of what the cool people wear, do, or say here and now, and it will all be different tomorrow. Given this, it would obviously be impossible to discover any common characteristics of cool by looking for intrinsic characteristics common to everything that has been designated “cool.”
Fortunately, however, it is a relatively simple matter to discover what are cool-apt characteristics in terms of human character: the ur cool object from which, either by analogy or association, all other cool objects derive. These characteristics are present even in the evaluative but barely aesthetic application of the word to certain kinds of behavior. This is the metaphorical use of ‘cool’ to refer to a calm, collected, attitude in what should be a stressful situation, as in expressions like “keeping one’s cool,” “cool under fire,” “playing it cool,” and so on.[2] Cool here is a matter of composure or nonchalance in situations where these are not the norm: the absence of the expression of emotion—not only fear but also anger, excitement, embarrassment, relief, or joy—in situations that normally do elicit such emotion. What distinguishes this meaning of ‘cool,’ which may be admiring or critical, and the more specifically aesthetic meaning of the same term is that while the former refers to the attitude expressed on a particular occasion, the latter, as we shall see, refers to a quality that is attributed not merely to the behavior but rather to the person themselves: it is implicitly posited through an unconscious inference from the behavior as an essential quality of the person.
Thus, while the exhibition of cool in a particular situation may be acknowledged as a matter of either admirable or inappropriate self-control, evidence of self-control will entirely spoil the effect of the perception of a person as intrinsically cool. To be perceived as (aesthetically) cool, the person must implicitly strike the observer as unfailingly self-possessed: as being, as a matter of character, unconcerned or indifferent to what others would find it difficult or impossible to be indifferent to. This “others” is usually implicitly those in the observer’s own milieu. Thus, for example, from childhood to adolescence, it is the relative self-possession of those just a couple of years older that renders them cool to the observer: a perspective no adult could possibly have. Indeed, we might say that a certain idealized maturity always plays a role in perceiving coolness.
Behavior, then, becomes cool to the observer where that which the observer perceives as difficult is achieved with an air of nonchalance, but only where the perceiver extrapolates from the action to the character as a whole.[3] In every case, except where it is a matter of a thing being cool by association, cool is a matter of the person’s treatment of whatever to the observer is a weighty or dramatic matter as if it were an unimportant one. An emblem of the attitude could be that cinematic cliché of recent times in which the hero walks casually towards the camera, often in slow motion to emphasize the point, against the background of an explosion.
However, it is what is spontaneously inferred from such outward signs that constitutes the perception of coolness. To perceive someone as cool is to implicitly perceive them as possessing an enviable degree of autonomy: as existing apparently free from those feelings that the perceiver experiences as restrictive. Such feelings include, of course, the desire for approval that leads to a deference to the social norms or expectations of others. In the twentieth century, this led to the common theoretical misconception that it was opposition to authority, in itself, that made someone cool: that the cool person was, necessarily, a rebel, an “outsider.”[4] However, rebellion per se implies emotional engagement; it is not opposition to propriety or authority but indifference to them that is cool-apt.[5] Moreover, there are clearly many ways of being an outsider, in relation to local social norms, that are considered the very opposite of cool.[6] To be cool, the indifference to the norm must entail a position that is perceived as at least as valuable as adherence to the norm. Indeed, the cool person is an “outsider” only in a form that our culture has already primed us to find enviable, no matter how much that form may be disavowed by our culture’s explicit ideals. The extent to which one feels oppressed, by one’s “self” or by others, will be reflected in the degree of autonomy from social norms that one is likely to perceive as cool.[7] Thus, the taste in cool may run all the way from an admiration for “The Dude” (The Big Lebowski), through an admiration for intellectuals or artists, to cowboys, gangsters, pirates, or vampires, all the way up to real-life serial killers or dictators.[8]
Aside from the idea that cool is intrinsically a matter of rebellion understood in purely social terms, another twentieth-century theoretical prejudice about cool was that it was specifically a twentieth-century phenomenon.[9] While it is true that cool, as the mark of all the conventional forms of “nonconformity,” has been used to sell almost everything, particularly to the young, since the 1960s, it has clear historical precedents in the way in which exhibitions of conspicuous indifference have been celebrated since ancient times.[10] Take, for example, the admiration of the ancients for Diogenes reply to Alexander’s enquiry if he, the most powerful man in the known world, could do anything for the philosopher: “Yes, move aside a little, out of my sunlight.”[11] Likewise, Cincinnatus returning to his farm after defeating the Aequi seems a timeless instance of cool, whatever other, more social virtues his contemporaries may have admired in the action.[12] Both instances conspicuously exhibit an indifference to what most could not treat with indifference, though, aside from the ancients’ admiration for the actions themselves, which may have been originally recorded principally as moral exemplars, there is no evidence that they were admired for what we would recognize as coolness.
Nevertheless, this is not the case when we come to that nonchalance or sang-froid—the “aristocratic demeanor”—that was an ideal of the European courtier for centuries. Castiglione recommends cultivating an air of sprezzatura about whatever one does: the accomplishment of everything, however difficult, without affectation or sign of effort, as if it came naturally.[13] This art that conceals artfulness is a form of power play among ostensible equals, but it only works insofar as the beholder takes it for the reality.[14] Much later, the commoner dandy’s very existence will be predicated on just this nonchalance. Thus, Beau Brummel’s private confession to Lady Stanhope: ‘If I did not impertinently stare duchesses out of countenance, and nod over my shoulder to a prince, I should be forgotten in a week.’[15]
3. Coolness by association and analogy
However, when Brummel’s contemporaries, including his social superiors, sought to emulate him, they principally did so not in manner but in appearance. This brings us to the matter of coolness by association. This is not to say that the attraction of Brummel’s appearance was purely a matter of its association with his personality: the relative minimalism of attire and attention to detail was in itself an assertion of indifference to some of the dress norms of the age, but crucially in a form that the age could appreciate. Things themselves can be, within the context of their period, cool insofar as they create a contrast with, but not a diametric opposition to, that context. (Think of the way the undone bowtie worked for the Rat Pack by nodding to conventional elegance.) Brummel’s clothes, like the behavior of the man himself, did not seem designed to appeal to and thus require the approval of others, at least in the ways that such an appeal was conventionally conceived at the time. Indeed, whatever counts as minimalist or understated in relation to a particular cultural context is likely to be taken as expressive of coolness, insofar as it suggests freedom from conventional attachments: relative autonomy. Thus, what is cool can often make its antecedents appear, retrospectively, too eager to please; for example, Miles Davis’ effect on jazz. Indeed, it is precisely in appearing less eager to please, less dependent on the approval of others, that a thing becomes cool.
With regard to coolness by analogy, functional objects are liable to strike the beholder as cool to the extent that they appear to achieve with little effort what once required a great deal. They are sensuously analogous to a nonchalantly performed skill. The trend in technology towards an absence of visible “working parts” or controls, that is, the impression of effortlessness, is thus cool-apt and as such has been pursued, sometimes even at the expense of actual functionality, by designers since the end of the last century. Again, however, just as with the dandy, it is a matter of context: to be cool, each iteration of a thing requires experience of the previous iteration to act as a foil. For example, few readers younger than I will be able to imagine what it is to feel godlike using a TV remote or a push-button phone. When it comes to coolness by analogy, just as with coolness by association, cool-aptness is a function of the moment in time.
In contrast, some objects may appear almost intrinsically cool-apt. The most obvious example would be sunglasses, which have been perceived as cool for almost a century.[16] Indeed, they have been a visual shorthand for cool for a good deal of that time. Partly this is a matter of the qualities intrinsic to the object. Principally, there is the way in which sunglasses conceal what is most revealing about a person’s internal state—their eyes—while still allowing that person to observe others: a prosthetic version of the dandy’s insouciant regard. Moreover, they turn and look like eyes, but they appear to have replaced the eyes, thereby evoking the invulnerability of a sentient machine. However, their coolness is also overdetermined in terms of association. In the early twentieth century, the primary market for them, aside from for medical use, was among those involved in driving, speed cycling, or flight: high-risk leisure activities. (And what is cooler than unnecessary carelessness with one’s own life?) Later, coinciding with the rise of the term “cool” itself, they became associated with such “outsider” figures as we have already mentioned: avant-garde artists, jazz musicians, and femmes fatales, as well as with celebrities seeking anonymity. Such associations normalized their use even in situations where they were not necessary. Indeed, it normalized their use to a degree where they could still function as emblematic of coolness even where that use was practically absurd: fictional detectives wearing them while pursuing villains through unlit nighttime warehouses or real fashion designers wearing them while matching fabrics. In such cases, they become a display of indifference, which should be a contradiction in terms.[17] Nevertheless, and despite a ubiquity that should in itself militate against their being perceived as cool, they continue to function as cool-apt even in such absurd situations by the sheer force of convention.
Indeed, convention may play a determining role in the cool aptness of a thing. This becomes particularly obvious in cases where, unlike with sunglasses, there is nothing intrinsically cool-apt about object itself, but it has become such solely through an association with what is already perceived as cool; so that the object becomes cool, ironically enough, through its very conformity. Some of these objects—facial expressions, ways of speaking, bodily postures—may appear intrinsically cool-apt in relation to whatever is the current norm, but can quickly become obsolescent, either by going out of fashion—coming to appear merely affected—or by becoming themselves the norm. Others, such as language, attitudes, costume, patterns of consumption, and so on, are cool solely insofar as they are the insignia of a group already taken to be cool. Such conventions of cool most often come from subcultures, from the delinquent to the aristocratic, and are cool-apt insofar as they evoke what the beholder perceives as the freedom of the members of those cultures from the “constraints” of the beholder’s own.[18] Thus, there need not be anything whatsoever inherently cool-apt in the things themselves.
Indeed, cool is an object lesson in the role of association in aesthetic experience. We would never discover the cool-apt characteristics of certain objects once widely held to be cool simply by looking at the object itself. Witness the surviving images of Beau Brummel, or such obsolete coolnesses as going bareheaded, Brando’s outfit in The Wild One, cool jazz, or tattoos. What made the object cool was a matter of the time, the place, and the observer. It is through association that today’s risible can become tomorrow’s cool, and that today’s cool, if it does not sink into the ordinary, will almost inevitably become tomorrow’s risible. This is what leads some to the conclusion that “cool” is undefinable, which would be true only on the (false) presumption that aesthetic responses depend upon an object’s possession of objective “aesthetic qualities.” What it actually demonstrates is how associated concepts may become, for a time, x-apt characteristics of an object, rendering it for the subject beautiful, sublime, graceful, cute, cool, and so on: ostensibly an object that pleases merely by being itself.
4. Loss of cool
As we have seen, to find a thing cool is to perceive it, albeit subliminally, as the expression, directly, analogically, or by association, of a certain kind of character. We perceive as cool what expresses an implicit self-possession beyond the norm, for us now, of self-possession. It is equanimity, not as a matter of self-control, of composure, but as a way of being. To perceive someone as cool is to perceive them as, by nature, free from those emotions one experiences oneself as oppressive. That the perception of coolness involves this extrapolation to the character as a whole can be seen from the ways in which the aesthetic response may be checked. Thus, a person’s coolness is quickly diminished by the beholder’s discovery of a hidden earnestness or concern with what the beholder themselves holds lightly; for example, with the discovery of a previously unperceived prejudice, obsession, or fetish. Whatever apparent coolness the person may exhibit in another context, it is hard to feel someone is cool if we discover they are awkward, inept, earnest, embarrassed, timid, enthusiastic, or angry in contexts where we are not. It is not that the cool person’s previous behavior explicitly excluded such a possibility, but rather that, in finding them cool, we were implicitly presuming them incapable of such vulnerability. Cool technology similarly loses its cool when it breaks down, becoming a mere object, or is superseded by what can accomplish the same more easily.
The perception of cool is also likely to falter with the discovery that the cool person simply lacks common knowledge or social awareness—that their detachment is simply detachment—so that the beholder now perceives them not as indifferent to certain pressures but simply as ignorant of those pressures: the cool person can no longer be an enviable model because they are no longer perceived as similarly situated to the beholder. In addition, since nothing is as uncool as trying (hence the performance of the average teenage boy press-ganged into a dance routine), another check to the perception of cool is an awareness of the effort that has gone into the “effortless” performance of a skill. Thus, if one were to experience, in real time, all of the training necessary to produce this performance, the effect would be rather to render it pitiful. “Anyone could play like that if they practiced six hours a day” is, of course, a joke; at the same time, however, very few people are admiring the performance as an expression of the performer’s dedication to practice.[19]
In all these cases, the cool-apt behavior may continue the same, but we are no longer able to extrapolate from it to the intrinsic coolness of the individual in the way that we once did: whatever qualities were perceived as cool-apt now become insufficient to render the person cool. What undermines cool, then, simultaneously reveals the conditions of a thing’s being cool. First, we perceive coolness as a quality of the person as a whole or the thing in itself: we do automatically infer a general way of being from specific behaviors. Second, we perceive their apparent superiority to circumstances as coming naturally to them, making it incompatible with effort. Third, we perceive the person who exhibits it as someone who is basically in our position: they are not literally detached from our world/concerns, not insensible.
5. The grounding of cool
So far, we have merely looked at cool-apt properties: the common characteristics of the kinds of objects people find cool. We must now turn to what makes something cool. For, finding something cool is not simply the cognizance of such characteristics: it is not the having of a concept about what the properties of an object might signify. Rather, it is a certain feeling/emotion about that object: an aesthetic response to it. Indeed, such common apt- characteristics as we have dealt with appear only to reflection: they need to be teased out from the various characteristics of the referents of a wide variety of instances of the attribution of the aesthetic term. We do not see the object as expressing a particular meaning; we see it as cool in itself.
The role of cool in advertising demonstrates the extent to which being in the grip of finding something cool is very different from being aware of why that thing is cool. Almost anything can be associated with cool without us noticing that it is only a matter of association. In seeking to acquire the cool of the object, we fail to notice—or choose not to notice—that we are actually only acquiring what is accidental to what is the adequate object of our aspiration: the model’s bag, not her insouciance; the cowboy’s pants, not whatever his lifestyle signifies to us.[20] However, the aspiration to appear cool, to oneself or to others, is a red herring here, where we are concerned with how and why the experience of finding a thing cool exists at all.
It would be odd, indeed, if cool really were simply a matter of directly discerning the significance of cool-apt properties. To look at the person/object and wish that we possessed the qualities we see the person possessing, or the thing expressing, would give rise simply to envy. To say, on the other hand, that what we are doing is admiring the person/thing in themselves/itself simply for possessing/expressing those qualities, intuitive as this might be, would be to explain cool in a circular fashion: cool as the perception of coolness.[21] In short, cognisance of what cool-apt qualities mean to us cannot be identified with the experience of finding an object cool. We experience the cool object as cool in itself, not as expressive of any meaning with a potential link to our interests. Indeed, if desire is present, then it seems to be displaced: we latch on to what is merely accidental, at best an adumbration of the true object of desire.
However, there are two key points that have emerged from looking not only at cool-apt properties but at the phenomenon of finding something cool as a whole that allow a way in to understanding what actually constitutes the perception of cool. The first we have just noted: that we are unaware of the conceptual content of the experience and ascribe the feeling to the mere perceiving of the “cool object.” The second, discussed in the last section, is the way in which our experience of cool can wane or cease with the discovery of something that renders us unable to view the object as intrinsically cool: cool by nature. The importance of the second of these lies in the way in which it shows that our original perception of the object as cool relied on an unwarranted inference: we read more into the object than was present to our senses. The coolness of the object for us depended on us precluding qualities—vulnerability, lack of autonomy—from the object that, on the basis of our perception, we had no reason to assume could be precluded. Indeed, we are likely to be surprised by the sudden loss of coolness as a result of what did not, from our point of view, even appear to be part of that coolness, precisely because we were unaware of having made such an inference.[22]
There is always a motive behind an unwarranted inference: a desire that something should be so. We already know the reward involved in our present instance; it is the aesthetic experience itself: the pleasure of perceiving an object as cool. Cool, then, is the self-provision of the pleasure of imagining the possibility of what is felt to be, as we have already seen in analyzing cool-apt properties, a desirable state of being. There must, however, be a reason why this desirable state is not consciously entertained: why, from the beholder’s point of view, the pleasure appears to belong simply to the perception of the object, without desire appearing to play a role in that pleasure.[23] I would suggest that, as I have argued elsewhere about aesthetic experience in general, this apparently “disinterested pleasure” arises from the fact that the state imagined is a self-contradictory one. It is one that we cannot consciously acknowledge to ourselves that we are imagining without making the self-contradiction involved too explicit for us to continue to entertain the idea of it.[24] The pleasure lies in entertaining the idea of a state of being, but it is only possible so long as this idea is not consciously entertained. Thus, finding a thing cool, like every aesthetic experience, is something we do, but we necessarily can only experience as something that is happening to us as the spontaneous result of the qualities of objects in the external world.
The desirable state that cool represents, as we have seen, is a form of perceived invulnerability: an immunity from whatever the beholder experiences as a threat to their self-possession. We might distinguish it from the intimation of invulnerability that precipitates a sense of sublimity in that the sublime arises from a sense of force of will.[25] There is also a marked difference in the kind of forces against which the invulnerability manifests: the sublime arises from imagined resistance to the irresistible—what overwhelms the capacity of the mind, the lethal, God—whereas cool is imagined as immunity from less dramatic but more common threats to a desired autonomy: awkwardness, embarrassment, timidity, dependence on others, and so on.
What makes this imagined invulnerability the source of an aesthetic experience is the impossibility of the state we are imagining. We extrapolate out from what we observe to posit a way of being that does not, in fact, make sense. That is, in finding a thing cool, we are imagining the cool person as ourselves as the cool person: not caring about what we care about. But, of course, there would be no pleasure, no sense of power, to be derived from this indifference unless one were not really indifferent. That is, we are imagining a self-control that is not self-control: something being withheld where there is nothing to withhold. If you really do not care about a thing, you can hardly derive pleasure from not caring about that thing. Thus, while it is possible to enjoy feeling that one appears, or could appear, cool to others, it is impossible to actually feel cool. Yet, in finding someone cool, that is precisely the feeling we are imagining.
What finding someone, or, by analogy or association, something, cool signals is our spontaneous entertainment of the idea of an impossible state of being: it is the pleasure we feel in imagining being a certain way that logically precludes the pleasure we are imagining.[26] We arrive at this imaginary state by extrapolating from outward appearance: from ways of life, mannerisms, isolated actions, or things even more accidental (“He’s so cool; he has an earring!”). This extrapolation from detail to way of being is not made by mistake: we make it, where our imagination allows us to, because of the pleasure entertaining the impossible idea affords. The expressionless selfie in sunglasses that declares “Look at my indifference to your gaze” works for you because you want it to work.
James Kirwan
James_kirwan@hotmail.com
James Kirwan is a professor of cultural studies at Kansai University, Osaka. He holds a PhD from Edinburgh University, and his previous publications include Literature, Rhetoric, Metaphysics (Routledge, 1990), Beauty (Manchester University Press, 1999), The Aesthetic in Kant (Continuum, 2004), Sublimity (Routledge, 2005), and The Futility of Philosophical Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2022). He is currently working on a book on general aesthetics.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by Kansai University’s Overseas Research Program for the year of 2022-2023.
The author would like to thank Yuriko Saito and the two anonymous reviewers for Contemporary Aesthetics for their many useful suggestions.
Published on December 1, 2025.
Cite this article: James Kirwan, “Cool as an Aesthetic Quality,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Volume 23 (2025), accessed date.
Endnotes
[1] For my use of the expression ‘x apt’ see P.H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics (Penguin, 1954), 70-74. The one aesthetic category that does seem to lack such an identifiable group of ‘apt’ qualities is “beautiful”: James Kirwan, “To What Does the Word ‘Beauty’ Refer?,” Espes: The Slovak Journal of Aesthetics 12, no. 2 (2023): 13-27.
[2] It may also denote an attitude of aloofness, though where this shades into hauteur it clearly loses what it has in common with the first usage.
[3] Such was the judgment on the combination of extreme skill and nonchalance exhibited by Yusuf Dikeç at the 2024 Summer Olympics. More trivial talents, for example, using a Zippo one-handed, will do just as well, depending on the audience.
[4] “Cool is an oppositional attitude adopted by individuals or small groups to express defiance to authority – whether that of the parent, the teacher, the police, the boss or the prison warden. Put more succinctly, we see Cool as a permanent state of private rebellion”; Dick Pountain and David Robins Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (Reaktion, 2000), 19. Joel Dinerstein, who concerns himself almost exclusively with the form that cool took in US culture between 1945 and the start of the 1960s, sees this “deeper” cool as essentially a matter of “generational and ideological conflict, … artistic risk and vision, … old transgressions and social change”; The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 459. See also John Leland Hip: The History (HarperCollins, 2004), 14.
[5] Indeed, authority itself, where it defers to no other authority—Judge Dredd, for example, with his “I am the law”” —is cool for many.
[6] Highly conformist cultures will even have derogatory names for them; for example, “nerd” or “geek.”
[7] Caleb Warren and Margaret C. Campbell, who also, identify coolness with the expression of what is perceived as autonomy, investigated this thesis in the context of branding and came to the conclusion that the divergences from the norm most likely to be perceived as cool were those expressing what they term ‘bounded autonomy’ (relatively minor or temporary deviations from the norm), and, further, that the degree of divergence perceived as cool was directly related to the extent to which consumers espoused “countercultural values”: “What Makes Things Cool? How Autonomy Influences Perceived Coolness,” Journal of Consumer Research 41 (2014), 544-546; 553-555; 557.
[8] Witness the mixed responses to Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019) and his own response in Joker: Folie à Deux (2024). A recent internet survey of around 6,000 people found the most common attributes attributed to “cool people” were extraverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open, and autonomous; Todd Pezzuti, Caleb Warren, and Jinjie Chen, “Cool People,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2025), 1-22. Though the authors, being more interested in the social “function” of cool from a quasi-evolutionary perspective, do not reflect on it, the inclusion of such non-traditional cool qualities as being “extraverted” and “open” in the list is perhaps telling of what the digital generation feels to be beyond average competence.
[9] The cultivation of cool is the disenfranchised’s bid for power (hence its prevalence among teenagers) or at least dignity. Given the position of Black people in US society, it is unsurprising, therefore, that elements of Black American subculture should provide a model of cool for the mainstream. This local effect has, however, been raised to the status of a theory of what coolness is, partly because the term itself came from that subculture, partly as a result of “aesthetic realism” (the idea that some things really do inherently possess the “real” form of an aesthetic property), and partly as a matter of the vicissitudes of scholarship. Regarding this last, Robert Farris Thompson’s “An Aesthetic of the Cool” was not about cool in our present sense but rather a much broader and more ethically oriented West and Central African concept. Nevertheless, his opening mention of “Afro-American” and his closing quotation from Ralph Ellison seems to have suggested to later writers that he had situated the origins of contemporary cool in African (somehow conflated with Afro-American) culture; “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” African Arts 7, no. 1 (1973): 40; 91. This equation has become something of an orthodoxy. Leland, for example, makes “cool” a surrogate of “hip,” the origin of which he firmly locates in the arrival of Africans in America; Hip: The History, 10-11. Jim McGuigan summarizes and affirms this genealogy in Cool Capitalism (Pluto, 2009), 2-4. A similar origin in “the post–World War II black aesthetics of jazz and blues” is claimed by Shannon Winnubst; Way Too Cool: Selling Out Race and Ethics (Columbia University Press 2015), 2-3. (Regarding the role of cool in contemporary Black life in the US, see Marlene Kim Connor What Is Cool? Understanding Black Manhood in America (Crown Publishers, 1995).) While Marcel Danesi notes that the use of the term ‘cool’” to denote the effect that is our present topic, emerged in the US in the 1930s, he gives it a psychological rather than historical explanation; Cool: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence (University of Toronto Press, 1994), 38-46. Thus, though his primary interest is teenagerhood itself rather than cool, his analysis of cool is the least distorted of all the book-length treatments referred to here. Peter N. Stearns’ scholarly examination of a distinctly “American cool” as an emotional style, sees it as emerging in the 1920s, and ultimately attributes it to a distinctly modern American eagerness to conceal feeling: American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York University Press, 1994), 307. Ulla Haselstein has also convincingly argued for a particular US style of cool; “The Cultural Career of Coolness,” in Ulla Haselstein et al. (eds) The Cultural Career of Coolness: Discourses and Practices of Affect Control in European Antiquity, the United States, and Japan (Lexington Books, 2013), 61-80.
[10] On the ubiquity of cool in the twentieth-century commercial setting, see Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (University of Chicago Press, 1997). Kalle Lasn describes “a perverted sense of cool” as the Huxleyan soma that America dispenses to its citizens in order to manipulate them; Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America (William Morrow and Company, 1999), xiii. Frank’s story is carried forward, though in a rather scattered fashion, to the start of the twenty-first century by McGuigan’s Cool Capitalism.
[11] Plutarch, Greek Lives: A Selection of Nine Greek Lives, trans. and ed. Robin Waterfield and Philip S. Stadter (Oxford University Press, 1998), 323.
[12] Livy, The History of Rome: Books 1-5, trans. and ed. Valerie M. Warrior (Hackett Publishing Company, 2006), 195-199. Stoicism’s cultivation of indifference towards what cannot be influenced, could be seen as deliberate pursuit of cool, but, insofar, as it is a deliberate pursuit—a matter of willpower—this in itself militates against the stoical attitude appearing cool. Different arguments for not identifying stoicism with modern cool may be found in Catherine Newmark, “Emotionally Challenged, Wisely Detached, or Incredibly Cool? On Stoic Apathy,” in Haselstein et al. (eds) The Cultural Career of Coolness, 18-20. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, by contrast, is comfortable with the identification; The Cool-Kawaii: Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World Modernity (Lexington, 2011), 15-16, 122-123.
[13] Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (Penguin, 1976), 66-67. For a more contemporary (rather different) use of the term, see Andrea Baldini, “Sprezzatura, Good Taste, and Socrates’ Dirty Toga,” The Philosophers’ Magazine 80 (2018): 42-47.
[14] Valmont, in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, destroys himself in pursuit of the appearance of detachment.
[15] Lady Hester Stanhope, Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope: As Related by Herself in Conversation with Her Physician, three volumes (Henry Colbun, 1845), I, 281. Barbey D’Aurevilly uses Thomas Henry Lister’s fictional portrait of Brummell from his novel Granby (1826) to characterize the type: “Sometimes the shrewd eyes froze in an indifference devoid of scorn, as befits the consummate Dandy, the man who carries within him something superior to the visible world. […] ‘He did not affect short sight,’ says Lister elsewhere, ‘but when there were persons present who were not of the importance his vanity required, he could assume that composed yet roving expression which occasionally rests on a person without recognition, which neither fixes nor is fixed, which nothing concerns and nothing leads astray.’” [Jules-Amédée] Barbey D’Aurevilly, The Anatomy of Dandyism, with some Observations on Beau Brummel (1845), trans. D.B. Wyndham Lewis (Peter Davies, 1928), 31-32.
[16] For an interesting history of sunglasses and, incidentally, of cool, see Vanessa Brown, Cool Shades: The History and Meaning of Sunglasses (Bloomsbury, 2015).
[17] What distinguishes hauteur from cool, despite so many shared characteristics, is that hauteur expresses a concern for recognition of one’s status.
[18] In adopting them, the beholder seeks to identify with, and perhaps be perceived by others as embodying, the cool of that group. See note 9 above.
[19] Indeed, it says a great deal about the relationship between aesthetic experience and reality that we can infinitely admire a performance, realize that we could potentially duplicate it, acknowledge that we do not feel doing so is worth the necessary investment in time or effort, and yet still find it cool.
[20] Which is precisely why later generations or our own older selves can so often be left wondering how on earth they/we ever thought this thing was cool. In a further twist, again fundamental to advertising, we do not even have to find anything in the commercial cool for this to work. It is enough that the context of the presentation leads us to believe that this is something other people find cool (as canned laughter renders something “funny”). Knowing cool is admired, and wishing to be admired, is sufficient motivation for us to perceive the product as desirable. We “blindly” follow the fashion.
[21] The circularity of our intuition here is precisely the problem of accounting for aesthetic experience.
[22] This discovering that the apparently accidental was actually essential is commonplace in aesthetic experience: the crush that suddenly evaporates when its object gets a new haircut, despite the fact that you would have sworn blind your “love” had nothing to do with haircuts; the picture that ceases to charm with a discovery regarding its provenance. Kant reports the same phenomenon with what was apparently simply a beautiful sound; Immanuel Kant Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790), ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge, 2000), 126.
[23] The desires involved in the acquisition of what will make one appear cool, to oneself or others, are not constitutive of cool but follow from it: they presume the value of cool in itself, for someone, as given.
[24] For the thesis that aesthetic experience is precipitated by the interpretation of something as the symbolic expression of a meaning that cannot stand the light of consciousness, see James Kirwan, Beauty (Manchester University Press, 1999), 40-50; The Aesthetic in Kant: A Critique (Continuum, 2004), 147-154; Sublimity: The Non-Rational and the Irrational in the History of Aesthetics (Routledge, 2005), 160-165; “The Unconscious Grounds of Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, 6, no. 2 (2020): 153-166.
[25] Despite its assertion of a transcendental degree of autonomy, Satan’s defiant speech in Paradise Lost is not cool precisely because it is defiant.
[26] Schiller makes the same point about our love of nature as nature arising from a longing to possess its “inner necessity”: a quality we necessarily could not appreciate if we had it; see Friedrich Schiller, “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (1795-6) in Essays, ed. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Continuum, 1993), 179-193.