Existential Aesthetics - Aesthetics of Existence

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to submit your work to a Special Issue of Philosophies on the notion of existential aesthetics.

This Special Issue aims to gather contributions that critically investigate the relation between aesthetic experience and human existence, the aesthetic structuring of forms of life, and the role of aesthetic practices, habits, and sensibilities in shaping selfhood, world-relations, and modes of living.

We are living in a time of profound turmoil. Geopolitical instability, environmental crises, technological acceleration, and the fragmentation of shared symbolic frameworks affect not only our capacity to orient ourselves in the world but also the way we relate to the aesthetic dimension of experience. In such a climate of uncertainty and disquiet, aesthetic engagement appears increasingly significant—not simply as a refuge from chaos, but as a domain in which individuals and communities articulate forms of life, cultivate resilience, and negotiate meaning.

This Special Issue invites contributions exploring this terrain under the broad heading of existential aesthetics. The term does not designate a unified doctrine; rather, it brings together traditions that refuse to separate aesthetic experience from the texture of lived existence. Across phenomenology, existential philosophy, pragmatism, and critical theory, aesthetic experience has been understood as a privileged mode of access to the world, a site in which truth appears, selfhood is articulated, and the structures of existence are rendered intelligible.

An important lineage includes Martin Heidegger, who in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (1935–36; published 1950) conceives art as the happening of truth, in which world and earth enter into a dynamic strife. In his later reflections on dwelling and spatiality, aesthetic experience becomes inseparable from the constitution of meaningful places. Karl Jaspers, in Philosophie (1932) and Von der Wahrheit (1947), elucidates how symbolic and aesthetic forms illuminate Grenzsituationen, revealing the existential tensions that shape human life.

Phenomenological approaches broaden this insight. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phénoménologie de la perception (1945) and L’Œil et l’esprit (1961), grounds aesthetic experience in embodied perception, showing how artworks disclose worlds irreducible to conceptual analysis. Generally speaking, phenomenology emphasizes the affective and expressive resonance through which the aesthetic object manifests its world.

A parallel trajectory, developed by Stanley Cavell in The World Viewed (1971) and The Claim of Reason (1979), situates aesthetics within the ordinary, arguing that acknowledgment, skepticism, and the cinematic medium transform our relation to ourselves and to others, granting aesthetic experience an intrinsically existential significance.

Running alongside these perspectives—yet introducing a distinct inflection—John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) insists on the continuity between art and life. For Dewey, aesthetic experience emerges whenever the rhythms of doing and undergoing crystallize into meaningful unities. His position anticipates contemporary attempts to think of aesthetic life as embodied, situated, and interwoven with everyday practices.

Against this backdrop, Michel Foucault’s late reflections (L’usage des plaisirs, Le souci de soi, Une esthétique de l’existence, 1984) introduce a conception that is not simply continuous with existential aesthetics but reorients it. With his notion of “sculpting one’s life as a work of art,” Foucault shifts attention from aesthetic experience as a mode of world-disclosure to aesthetic practices as techniques of the self, embedded within historically constituted regimes of subjectivation. This idea has also been the object of critical scrutiny. Pierre Hadot, in Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (1981), cautions that Foucault’s proposal risks drifting into a dandy-like, individualistic, or intimist model, detached from the communal and ethical orientations that sustained ancient practices of the self.

Contemporary debates expand the field further. Hans Maes, in Existential Aesthetics (2022), emphasizes the existential weight of aesthetic experience as a site where values, orientations, and self-understandings emerge. Arto Haapala, in Existential Aesthetics and Interpretation (2003) and On the Aesthetics of the Everyday (2005), illuminates how everyday aesthetic engagement shapes familiarity, belonging, and the meaning of place. Meanwhile, empirical and psychological approaches—such as those collected in The Aesthetic Self (J. Fingerhut, J. Gómez-Lavin, C Winklmayr & J. Prinz, 2021)—show how aesthetic practices scaffold identity, affect, and perceptual attunement.

Within this rich constellation, an important question arises: might there be a fruitful dialogue between reflections on the existential dimension of aesthetics and contemporary research on aesthetic habits? The convergence of pragmatist accounts of habit, phenomenological analyses of embodied style, Foucauldian techniques of self-formation, everyday aesthetics, empirical aesthetics, and enactive cognitive science suggests that such a dialogue could be particularly productive.

Aesthetic habits—patterns of perception, affective orientation, imaginative disposition, and expressive comportment—structure both artistic creation and ordinary experience. They mediate taste, guide appreciation, shape expressive styles, and mark the contours of social sensibilities. Examining their formation, transformation, and negotiation may thus offer new insights into the existential significance of aesthetic life—not only in artistic contexts but across a wide range of everyday practices, from clothing and cuisine to urban experience and digital environments.

In this regard, it is also essential to consider how aesthetic habits are shaped—and in many cases profoundly transformed—by technological environments. While technologies have always influenced perceptual and expressive possibilities throughout the history of culture, the current moment is marked by unprecedented speed and depth of transformation. Digital platforms, algorithmic selection, immersive media, and, more recently, AI-based generative systems modify how aesthetic stimuli are produced, encountered, and valued. They recalibrate attention, affective orientation, criteria of taste, and even the boundaries between creation and reception. Exploring how these technological mediations reconfigure aesthetic habits is therefore crucial for understanding contemporary modes of aesthetic self-formation, identity construction, and existential orientation.

This Special Issue, therefore, seeks contributions that explore whether, and in what ways, existential aesthetics and the study of aesthetic habits can illuminate one another, enriching our understanding of taste, style, self-formation, normativity, and the aesthetic structuring of forms of life.

Possible Topics Include (but are not limited to):

• Aesthetic experience as a mode of existential orientation;
• Existentialist aesthetics: Art, truth, and world-disclosure;
• Pragmatist aesthetics and the continuity of art, life, and habit;
• Cavell and the aesthetics of the ordinary;
• Foucault’s aesthetics of existence and its tensions with existential aesthetics;
• Everyday aesthetics, care aesthetics, and the aesthetic of existence;
• Aesthetic selfhood and identity formation;
• Aesthetic habits, taste, and expressive style;
• Social aesthetics and collective sensibilities;
• Embodiment, enactivism, ecological, and affective approaches;
• Transformative, disruptive, or therapeutic aesthetic practices;
• Aesthetic activism and political self-fashioning;
• Media, technology, and contemporary existential-aesthetic environments;
• Transcultural perspectives on aesthetics and existence;
• Technological mediation, digital platforms, and AI-driven transformations of aesthetic habits and sensibilities;
• History of aesthetics: key authors from Baumgarten onward and their potential relevance for today’s debate on existential aesthetics.

Submission Guidelines

• Deadline for full paper submission: 15^th November 2026
• Manuscripts must be original and not under review elsewhere.
• All submissions will undergo double-blind peer review.
• Please follow the Philosophies' instructions for authors.
• Accepted papers will be published with open access.

Prof. Dr. Alessandro Giovanni Bertinetto
Dr. Antonio Lucci
Dr. Alberto Martinengo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Philosophies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.