Joshua DE PAIVA

 Project at the MaCI

November 2025 - October 2027

My project proposes to rethink the beauty of living forms, and to bring to light what makes it specific compared to the beauty of inanimate objects (artistic or natural). We seem to be facing a “crisis of sensibility” towards other forms of life, many of which are disappearing from our anthropocentric attentional landscapes. This might be a crucial, yet underexplored, aspect of the ecological crisis. In this context, I believe aesthetics can help us better understand a certain indifference to other living beings, but also to take seriously the singularity of some sensory, affective, and meaningful encounters with them that might have been overlooked, both in practice and in theory. Indeed, living beings have so far been relatively neglected in the field of philosophical aesthetics, where no clear difference has been made between inanimate natural objects and living beings, even in the recent environmental aesthetics. What kinds of living forms do we judge to be beautiful, and why? And is it the same to find beautiful a peacock, a butterfly, an orchid or a nightingale’s song? Speculating – what if Kant had written about beauty after Darwin? – my working hypothesis is that our aesthetic appreciation of living beings may rely on an intuitive understanding of what I call their temporal depth: their current forms appear as expressive indexes of the agencies that have shaped them over evolutionary time, through intra- and interspecific attentional relationships. These forms have, in part, been selected through the way they appeared, or not, to others as worth noticing and meaningful. The aim of this research is to move beyond problematic analogies with art; beyond the Nature/Culture divide; beyond oppositions between formalism and hermeneutics, and between functionalist and mystical accounts of life. 

By bringing aesthetics into dialogue with contemporary life sciences, this project aims to contribute to the environmental humanities. At the MaCI, my theoretical investigations will be complemented by field inquiry, in line with renewed philosophical practices that consider empirical data and situated experiences – in this case, my own encounters with the local flora and fauna, as well as the experiences of others. Through participatory methods and different formats of dissemination (interdisciplinary workshops, an international conference, an exhibition), the research will unfold in conversation with scholars from other disciplines, as well as non-scholars and the general public. My “aesthetics of the living in times of extinction” sits at the crossroads of theoretical and practical issues we need to address today if we are to make more space for non-human beings in our culture, and perhaps, in doing so, reconfigure our relationships with them.
 

Joshua will be affiliated to the Ambiances, Architectures, Urbanités (AAU) laboratory and will work closely with Céline Bonicco-Donato, Philosopher and Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Grenoble School of Architecture (ENSAG), whose work includes the philosophy of architecture and urban environments.

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Supported by the GATES project (Grenoble ATtractiveness and ExcellenceS), funded by the French government's Programme d'Investissement Avenir and implemented by ANR France 2030