Sibley and the Limits of Everyday Aesthetics

Sherri Irvin has claimed that “our everyday lives have an aesthetic character that is thoroughgoing and available at every moment, should we choose to attend to it.” She defends this claim by appeal to a modified Deweyan conception of the aesthetic. I bring Irvin’s discussion into dialogue with Frank Sibley’s reflections on the limits of the aesthetic in his posthumously published “Tastes, Smells, and Aesthetics.” Sibley uses standing debates on the aesthetic dimensions of tastes and smells as a way of exploring the different conceptions of the “aesthetic” that fund such debates. I use Sibley’s structural analysis of debates about the scope of the aesthetic to call into question the ways in which Irvin uses her modified Deweyan view to extend the notion of the aesthetic to embrace everyday experiences. I argue that, in modifying Dewey’s own account, she effectively eliminates some distinctions that are necessary if the concept of the aesthetic is to play the role accorded to it more generally in sorting our experiences and their objects. I further suggest how we might defend Irvin’s more general claims in terms of a Sibleyan conception of the scope of the aesthetic.