Beauty in the Context of Particular Lives

Introduction

There is a village in the north of Finland with some thirty inhabitants. While the villagers do not lead the idyllic lives that are sold as images to tourists, they also do not lead lives of depression, alcoholism, poverty, and seclusion—an image generated by research results from the likes of National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health. The ill-being of rural northern villages is well documented in large-scale quantitative research,¹ but qualitative research on the actual well-being, of what is already good and fulfilling, is scarce.

In this paper I present a research project in education in which I have collected the data through a year-long correspondence with four participants from a small village. Letters in this correspondence were exchanged once a month in a way that everyone read everyone’s letters. I asked the participants to write about beauty. The aim of this research has been to find out what kind of place beauty, as defined by the participants themselves, holds in the their everyday lives. In this paper I will discuss some challenges of researching everyday beauty empirically. I will also concentrate on selected findings that highlight the importance of context in discussing experiences and use of beauty.

Everyday life² has been characterized in research by concepts such as “time,” “space,” “rhythm,” and “bodily movement.”³ These concepts embrace an idea of a continuum and refer to everyday life as subjectively experienced and actively engaged in. Everyday life is a contextual process but one that nevertheless defies definitions bound in time and space. This is because as subjectively experienced, it entails simultaneously the past, the present, and the future as necessary for the managing of it. By managing of everyday life I mean a practice that consists of constant reflection, evaluation, and steering, but one that we are mostly unaware of engaging in. We are in a way creating our everyday lives as we go. This makes the everyday a subjective construct instead of an objectively definable unit such as “a Monday.” And so, instead of an attempt to tame the very vague notion of “everyday” as something universally shared,⁴ this research delves into particular individuals’ everyday lives as uniquely managed continuums. And to strike a rare positive chord to research on rural northern villages, I have chosen aesthetics, the notion of beauty in particular, as the vantage point to this making of everyday.

I’m aligning with Ludwig Wittgenstein and quoting Katya Mandoki in stating that “beauty is a linguistic effect used by a particular subject to describe personal experiences and social conventions . . . a linguistic categorisation of a non-linguistic experience.”⁵ And despite the ambivalence that surrounds beauty as a concept in scholarly discussion, it is to be noted that it has remained in constant use in everyday conversation of common experience. When commonly used, “beautiful” still signals admiration, excellence, and that which is desirable.⁶ Beauty is therefore future-oriented, bringing about replication, distribution, and a wish to protect.⁷ As such a concept and a word of everyday use, “beauty” orients us to concentrate on the desirable in our lives at present. In doing so it guides us to evaluate this desirableness in light of the past and commits us to replicate and protect it for the future. Embedded in the use of the concept of beauty is thus a continuum of evaluating one’s relation to her surroundings. As beauty is not a quality of objects in themselves but an effect of the relation between the experiencing subjects and certain objects,⁸ it is not the objects of everyday beauty that I explore but the relation of particular people to their everyday life environments through ways of using and expressing beauty.

The significance in thinking of beauty as something we create and use rather than something that exists objectively is in the realization that we can change what we find beautiful. Beauty as used by a particular subject is not fixed but changes and mirrors the changing of that subject herself. In realizing beauty this way, it becomes a...