Everyday Aesthetics by Yuriko Saito: A Note

Everyday Aesthetics by Yuriko Saito: A Note

This summer I finished Yuriko Saito’s Everyday Aesthetics. Saito, a Japanese-born philosopher who taught for decades at the Rhode Island School of Design, set out to recover the aesthetic dimension of ordinary life (the choices we make about our surroundings, our food, our homes) that modern Western aesthetics had largely neglected.

Living in the United States for ten years, I understand the impulse behind the book. American visual culture often prizes a wonderful innovation and limitless creativity, sometimes at the expense of care in the making of things. Saito’s project addresses a real gap: to teach what the French call l’art de vivre.

Yet the book ultimately feels thin. It proceeds by accumulating examples (packaging, decay, messiness, unscenic landscapes) and pairing them with moral or environmental recommendations. The result is closer to a catalogue of problems and remedies than to a coherent framework. This approach shares a deeper presupposition with much contemporary art culture: the artificial separation of “art” from craft and everyday making. Museums themselves often try to compensate by inserting vernacular or cultural expressions into art exhibitions, which can leave the impression of an expanded catalogue rather than a renewed understanding.

The difficulty, I believe, lies in the restricted definitions of “art” and “aesthetics” that still govern the discussion. In the older European tradition, art was not confined to the museum. One spoke of the art of the table, the art of conversation, even the “state of the art” in engineering. St. Thomas Aquinas captured this broader sense when he defined art as an intellectual virtue: recta ratio factibilium, the right reason with regard to things to be made. Art, in this view, is the stable capacity to make something well, whether the object is material or immaterial. The true work of art is the one that embodies and communicates that right manner of making. Such a definition expands naturally to food, speech, relationships, craft, and design without requiring special justification for each new domain.

Saito turns instead to Japanese resources (the tea ceremony and the cherry blossoms, for instance) as emblems of an aesthetics of impermanence and of attentive acceptance of imperfection that carries a clear spiritual resonance. These are genuine and valuable. Yet they led me to think of the Mass. The Mass is at once an act of life and death, a divine sacrifice, a shared meal, and a place where literary, musical, visual, and architectural arts converge. It can be celebrated under bombardment, in a forest, in a Baroque cathedral, or in a farmhouse. Much of what European culture achieved in the ordering of ordinary life draws, in one way or another, from that encompassing form. It offers a model without narrow boundaries, capable of integrating and elevating the everyday rather than merely aestheticizing its fragility.

Why did Saito not look more closely at Italy or Greece, where sophistication and simplicity of daily life have long coexisted with inherited proportions, durable materials, and a sense of measure? The same selective attention seems to have left aside certain strengths of American popular culture itself: the intelligence of woodworking, the attachment to great forests, the tradition of woven and sewn textiles, the hospitality and cooking of the South. I still remember a Christmas Eve in Savannah when the neighborhood bakery sent an enormous, excellent walnut cake to everyone who had attended Midnight Mass.

I finished the book disappointed that it intellectualizes the art of living even while trying to defend it. Saito is right that the ordinary deserves serious attention, and right that our aesthetic preferences carry moral weight. But the choices we make about environment, food, and dwelling matter most when they serve the possibility of living well with others. Too often those who design for the public are already captured by a hubris that ignores the nature of things and imposes solutions from above. I think about housing schemes or attractions that may please a captive audience yet fall short of the beauty inherited across centuries: its scale, its proportions, its hard-won simplicity.

Saito opened a useful door. To walk further through it, we may need both a more generous understanding of art, one that treats right making as a virtue, and a willingness to draw on several traditions at once. The classical and Christian inheritance still offers unmatched resources. At the same time, the restlessness, freedom, and inventive energy of American culture remain an exhilarating strength; they are what make constant experimentation possible. True freedom doesn’t erase the care for the nature of things or the possibility of living well with others. The best making still requires that balance: openness to invention on one side, and respect for measure, durability, and shared life on the other.