Lebenskünstler

Thoreau and Okakura devoted their professional time to writing about living, especially about what constitutes a life well lived. They were concerned with the problem of character and how it is most deeply informed by the attitude toward mortality. They both explored the idea of daily living not as an abstract idea, but a concrete performance, and the contentment it could afford…For Thoreau and Okakura, habits of ritual cultivate attitudes in us – attitudes that in turn hold forth the promise of living a meaningful life.

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…Okakura helps us see the opportunity for our everyday routines to become practical – and practiced – ways for us to live artistically and philosophically, by which he means more beautifully.

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This is the aim of the present essay: to ask why living should not be an art, why our daily rituals should not be “artistic,” and what this could really mean.

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…We know people who have surrounded themselves with beautiful objects, but have otherwise eschewed the art of living beautifully. Not habits, no “practices” surround these things, which are merely nice to look at in what is indeed the most superficial of senses. Money can buy fine art, but it cannot purchase the ethically transformative experience that accompanies a contemplative awareness of, and openness to, the beauty of form.

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Okakura does not mean art, as our culture ordinarily understands it, as a class of objects housed in museums or exhibited in art galleries…Okakura was able to understand art in the way in which we are trying to understand it in this book: as a place of connectedness, through particularized awareness, between ourselves and fundamental sources of meaning….Art, then, is a mode of awareness…an attitude of reverence.

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Viewed as a constellation of habits, rather than a category of object, art is both a mirroring and molding of our lives.

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…our seemingly trivial and commonplace daily routines become settings in which the real and most fateful drama of our lives is played out.

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…the marrow of human life is being fed day in and day out, when we wash dishes, scrub floors, clean teeth, bathe, eat and drink…Performing them artfully or mindlessly determines, whether we know it or not, the innermost reality – and ultimately the distinctive meaning of our lives.

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…Together with Okakura, we would locate art in life, manifest in our common practices and daily habits, What is truly paradoxical, perhaps, is the way in which modern culture – art, philosophy, and even our everyday practices – has made us less mindful of these practices as sources of beauty and meaning.