SHANGHAI—Since the 20th century, aesthetics research has tried to extract value from various fields to break through bottlenecks and build new paradigms. As a hot topic in contemporary aesthetics research, integrating the aesthetics of everyday life and body aesthetics is closely related to the real lives of contemporary people.

A forum on the aesthetics of everyday life and somaesthetics was recently held by the Research Center for the Aesthetics of Everyday Life at Fudan University in Shanghai.

The shaping and presentation of daily life’s “sensible texture” helps realize an aesthetic understanding of life today, said Wang Desheng, a professor from the School of Literature at Capital Normal University. Aesthetics should start with realization methods and specific processes related to people’s daily lives. To realize the power of “aesthetic intervention,” we need to combine our own practices with specific understandings to shape current life’s “sensibility.” The cognitive form of current life’s “sensibility” should be highlighted in and through our everyday lives, which will become the basic element for aesthetics to effectively exercise an “aesthetic intervention” in daily lives.

According to Song Wei, a professor from the College of Arts at Northeastern University, contemporary aesthetics, centering around such topics as the “aesthetics of everyday life” and “aestheticization of daily life,” has challenged metaphysical paradigms of traditional aesthetics, and demonstrated the theoretical growth of contemporary aesthetics when it faces and tries to solve new problems. Although the aesthetics of everyday life (and other related topics) are proposed to overcome traditional aesthetic theoretical paradigms, the aesthetics of everyday life also needs to be raised to a philosophical level for thinking. Phenomenological and philosophical reflections on “orienting towards the living world” provide an important theoretical resource for contemporary aesthetics and cultural studies.

The aesthetics of everyday life is supposed to closely combine aesthetics with real people, said Zhang Baogui, a professor from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Fudan University. The aesthetics of everyday life should have its research objects closely integrated with people’s practical demands, rather than merely focus on the deduction of concepts.

From the perspective of daily functionality, Fan Shengxi, a professor from the College of Design and Innovation at Tongji University, noted that the aesthetics of everyday life should gradually broaden its vision as today’s design science has extended to high-tech sectors such as artificial intelligence. Designers and aesthetic researchers should consider promoting integration and complementarity between the aesthetics of everyday life and design, strengthening bonds between beauty and practicality.

The concept of somaesthetics was first proposed by the American philosopher Richard Shusterman. As an important topic of contemporary aesthetics, the field engages with the critical and constructive study of body self-shaping, and focuses on body care, or knowledge, discourse, practice, and physical training that might improve the body.

Gao Jianping, a professor from the School of Humanities at Shenzhen University, said that putting emotional objects in rational frameworks will cause the decline of contemporary aesthetics and weaken people’s abilities to perceive beauty. Bodies, lives, and daily lives should be one mutually inclusive concept. To save healthy sensibility and reshape “new sensibility” requires theories to become bridges rather than barriers, and to return to human bodies and real life.

Yao Wenfang, a professor from the College of Humanities at Yangzhou University, started with Shusterman’s pragmatic aesthetics and analyzed the concrete performance of somaesthetics as an interdisciplinary paradigm, from the perspectives of body, emotion, and acts. In Yao’s view, the biggest feature of somaesthetics lies in the study of acts, which vividly embodies pragmatism and the spirit of “starting from emotions and ending with acts.”

In response to the post-humanist culture that we are already living in, Wang Feng, a professor from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at East China Normal University, said that in an era of artificial intelligence, it is impossible for the body and consciousness to achieve a unified whole. Given that body is in the tension field of “presence” and “non-presence,” it is doubtful whether human beings still need the “body” to exist in the form of an entity. The identification of a human body’s boundaries has been gradually replaced by a networked global imagination, which will lead to new methods for body perception and new concepts of cultural perception.

Shusterman’s The Adventures of the Man in Gold builds a bridge connecting philosophy, art, and everyday life. Lu Yang, a professor from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Fudan University, who translated the book into Chinese, analyzed the paradigm shift facing contemporary philosophical aesthetics through Schusterman’s cross-over studies.

Liu Yanshun, a professor from the School of Literature at Jinan University, investigated the meaning of impulsivity in aesthetic consciousness based on American philosopher Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology of music, arguing that the tradition of rationality and arrogance has always overridden and harmed people’s perceptual experiences. Liu suggested that aesthetic life should be considered as a domain form. Aesthetic life is a primary state of senses and feelings, which cannot be measured and defined by rationality.