Robert F. Dober was a teacher, a linguist, a philosopher, and an artist.  He was also my grandpa.  In memory of his recent passing, I would like to take some time to discuss his philosophy, which has left a profound impression on my own thinking.

His most impactful lesson wasn’t delivered in a classroom, but through his way of seeing the world. To him, the world was full of beauty; we only need to stop and recognize it. He would seize a scrap of discarded metal, weathered and deformed, plucked from the roadside, and ask his perennial question: “Is it art?” This wasn’t a rhetorical question, but an invitation to reconsider our assumptions.  He believed that if a human had made it, and if it resonated with even a single observer, it qualified as art.  His love of etymologies, the history of words, led him to many of his definitions, including this one. “Art,” he’d remind us, originates from “artifice,” meaning something crafted by human hands.  In his view, the potential for art resided in every human creation.

He possessed the ability to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. In the midst of family gatherings, he would suddenly erupt with excitement, demanding everyone’s attention. Holding aloft his empty beer glass, he would ask, “Is this art?” gesturing towards the delicate, ephemeral patterns of beer lace clinging to its inner surface.  To this day, it is hard to drink a beer and not notice the beauty of the lace left behind. This way of seeing beauty in everything was essential to his philosophy, as was his drive to trace words back to their origins.

In late life, his philosophy turned more explicitly towards holism. He spoke of the interconnectedness of all things, illustrating his point with the humble onion.  “Within its layers,” he’d explain, “lies a microcosm of the universe – you can see the world in an onion.”  If you look closely enough at any one thing, you can see a multiplicity within it, and a reflection of the grander cosmic order.

Fundamental to his philosophy is that one must dig deep into things, whether it be words or the world around us, and seek to find truth, meaning, and beauty within the ordinary. We touch so much in our day-to-day lives, but do we really stop to appreciate the beauty in what we say and what we see?  Some use philosophy to reach useful and pragmatic ends. My grandpa did not; he used philosophy to see the beauty of the world around him, and to share that beauty with everyone he met.

Today we treat aesthetics as an unimportant branch of philosophy. Inundated with images and modern standards of beauty, we see aesthetics as something that is only surface level. But this is a poor understanding. Aesthetics is the study of how we perceive and experience the world. Through the study of aesthetics, we can challenge our underlying assumptions and see beauty in everything. Beauty makes us happy, and to see beauty everywhere is to live a happy life.

My grandpa believed that a deep sense of beauty existed in all things, especially in the mundane. It is easy to find beauty in a master work of art, but it takes philosophy to see beauty in the everyday. He believed that through philosophy we could transform the spaces around ourselves into a world of boundless artistic expression. To perceive our human-made world in this way is to celebrate humanity itself.  Perhaps most importantly, seeing beauty everywhere helps us to live a happy life and to spread this joy with others, and there are few things more precious in our world than this.