The philosophy professor for phenomenology and aesthetics, Lambert Wiesing, has a clear view of luxury. He is one of the few scientists to deal with the subject. “It is important not to equate luxury with comfort or prestige. This happens very often in everyday life. But luxury is created when a purpose is achieved with excessive effort. Luxury experiences arise when wealthy people can take a position on the usual idea of adequacy,” emphasises Wiesing. In doing so, it can quite well be a fierce goal to emit as little carbon dioxide as possible.
Kant and Hegel over luxury
Luxury life is not like expensive life; it is often confused. Wiesing draws his way of thinking back to the German philosopher from the 18th and 19th centuries, Immanuel Kant. Kant has elaborated that aesthetic experiences arise from the judgement of the matter. “You have to think about the way things are done and come to the conclusion that the clock is inappropriately complicated, and then you possess challengingly: If you realise your autonomy in this way, then, in these moments, the watch is a luxury for somebody,” explains Wiesing. And quote another German philosopher, Georg F. Hegel, who described “unnatural luxury” 200 years ago. “This is a kind of freak-and-unadapted-being, as we would today attribute it to someone who goes to the opera in sleepy jogging pants,” says Wiesing.
Luxury or Prestige?
Those who buy expensive brands do not automatically acquire luxury. Comfort, prestige, and luxury require knowledge of different kinds. Wiesing describes it on a perfume. “You can wear it because it just smells good without worrying about what’s in it. This is a sensual phenomenon. Whoever wears it, because he knows that everyone is aware of how expensive it is, uses it as a prestige object; this is a social phenomenon. To experience the perfume as a luxury, for example, one would have to know how many and what ingredients are in it.” For “Chanel N°5″, there are about 270 ingredients. Opting for this irrational effort allows for the experience of luxury.
Exceptional Experiences
Without money, however, this is not possible, especially since finances are the key to a luxurious life. But luxury can also take off; it is a frightening phenomenon of habit. Habit normalizes a lot of things that we have previously perceived as requiring excessive effort. Can luxury make you happy? Not entirely, says Weisling. “Luxury experiences are exceptional experiences that are made by a freak denial of concepts of adequacy. You have something exceptionally eccentric. It’s not going to last forever. They are more like the i-tupelet, like an uprising, an outbreak, the attempt to refuse to administer in a managed world in the short term.”
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