Understanding aesthetic life: essays

"Understanding Aesthetic Life is a collection of essays that systematically rethink aesthetic life and why it matters. This book collects twelve essays by Nick Riggle, written over fifteen years, that investigate what we are doing when we create, value, share, argue about, and live with aesthetic value. Drawing on, and reacting to, Plato, Hume, Kant, Schiller, and many others, the essays critique traditional ways of thinking about aesthetics: the ideal of expertise and convergence, the centrality of disinterested pleasure, and individualist models of appreciation and engagement. In their place, Riggle develops novel accounts of aesthetic value, personal and artistic style, play, beauty, individuality, aesthetic love, aesthetic discourse, and personal ideals, among other things. The book culminates in Riggle's novel communitarian theory of aesthetic value in which aesthetic value is grounded in the practice of aesthetic valuing, a social practice grounded in distinctive forms of individuality, freedom, and community. The result orients aesthetics away from the individual and toward the social and communal"-- Provided by publisher.