Habitar el mundo. Una invitación a la estética de lo cotidiano

Should we save bees or bears? Should you repair the sofa or buy a new one? Allow construction on the beachfront? These apparently technical decisions conceal a deeper truth: they are shaped by our aesthetic education. We prefer forests to swamps because we perceive them as more beautiful. In a society obsessed with the “aesthetic,” we have lost the tools for genuine aesthetic judgment. In this journey —from the garden to the bedroom, passing through the threshold, the living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom— Raquel Cascales reveals how we shape the world through our everyday decisions. Guided by the thought of Yuriko Saito, we discover that all reality has an aesthetic dimension: the tone of a voice, the gesture of opening a door, or the arrangement of a hospital room. The way things appear to us is never neutral. It influences us, affects us, invites us in, or pushes us away. Against the reduction of aesthetics to mere cosmetics, this book defends an embodied understanding of aesthetics, in which repairing a chair, taking out the trash, or caring for a pet become aesthetic ways of shaping and inhabiting the world.