Yuriko Saito’s Aesthetics of Care
The most fully worked-out contemporary philosophy of care for objects grounded in cultivated attention rather than in the object’s ontological status — and the closest living match to the intuition that a well-used tool, a worn truck, or a maintained system deserves a regard that is not a right. Saito (Professor Emerita, Rhode Island School of Design) works in everyday aesthetics — the aesthetics of ordinary life, not fine art — and her capstone Aesthetics of Care: Practice in Everyday Life (2022) argues that the ethical and the aesthetic are inseparable in lived experience, with care as their meeting point.
The structural parallel
Saito’s central observation is that care and aesthetic experience share one structure: attentiveness to the singularity of the other, open-minded responsiveness to it on its own terms, and imaginative engagement 1. Whether the “other” is a friend, a painting, or a worn tool, the orientation is the same disciplined getting-outside-yourself — “to cultivate the relational and interdependent way of relating to the world… in which we are fully present to the other party, whether the immediate focus be another person or a thing.” Both “take time by working with the focus of our attention.” Against the disinterested, spectator-driven model of aesthetics and the justice-centric model of ethics, she puts engagement, emotional investment, and personal involvement.
Care for artifacts
The distinctive move — and the one that matters most here — is the extension to artifacts without any appeal to what they are. Artifacts “exercise agency” by shaping our lives; once made, “they become our companions who share lives and grow together with us”; and “as they care for us, we reciprocate by taking ‘care’ of them not only by using them carefully and gently but also through various forms of maintenance and repair” 1. She is explicit that she does not recommend a conversion to animism. The ground is a shift of frame: “we can shift from a Western paradigm of determining one’s attitude and action toward the world based upon the ontological status of things and beings to one of practicing a way of relating to and working with them proactively.” This is precisely the move the wiki’s object-care cluster needs: care grounded in the practice of relating, not in the thing’s being alive, a person, or ensouled. Her repair discussion — whether to erase the signs of wear or honor them — is the kintsugi question, and she treats it as an aesthetic-ethical decision about how to live with a thing’s aging.
The ground: interdependence
The ultimate ground is interdependence: “We are sustained by and in turn sustain the world around us, whether other human beings, nature, or artifacts… humility, gratefulness, and collaborative attitude facilitate [it]” 1. And the framing is virtue-ethical in all but name: “our ethical life should be guided by a proactive mode of acting on the vision of what kind of person we want to be… instead of operating in a reactive manner by first sizing up the status of the other party.” Care “involves emotions, attitudes and skills that must be cultivated and practiced” — habituation, in the aesthetics vocabulary.
The caveat
Saito’s strong claim — the inseparability of the ethical and the aesthetic — is contested. Her critics (David Cooper in the book forum) press that elegant-but-vicious conversations exist and aesthetic-appeal-less care exists, so the two can come apart. Her defense is that genuine beauty is compromised by ill will. The wiki’s use of her does not require the strong claim; it needs only the weaker one she has demonstrated: that there is a worked-out, philosophically serious practice of object-care grounded in trained attention, running in a living tradition.
Connections
- carefulness — the keystone virtue Saito’s practice trains: mindful regard for the other as other.
- virtue-ethics — the tradition her cultivation-of-attention belongs to, whether or not she uses the name.
- kuyo — the Japanese ritual practice of object-care that is the closest institutional analogue to her maintenance-and-repair aesthetics.
- kantian-indirect-duty — the older, agent-located ground for the same restraint Saito grounds in practice.
- mono-no-aware — the Japanese aesthetic of the pathos of things, an ancestor of her sensibility (she treats it as mood, not obligation).