Building upon those ideas, you propose that humanity needs to transition from ‘homo economicus’ to ‘homo aestheticus’. How should we understand this transition? Is ‘homo aestheticus’ something that we already are or something that we might ideally become?

That question permeates all of my recent thinking on these matters. My answer, in brief, is that homo aestheticus is both an anthropological reality and an unrealised possibility. In other words, I believe human beings are already aesthetic creatures at a fundamental level, but our civilisation suppresses, distorts, and misdirects many of those capacities. The transition I describe is therefore not about becoming something entirely new. It is more a process of recovery, cultivation, and transformation.

The figure of homo economicus – the rational, self-interested utility maximiser of orthodox economics – is not an adequate description of human nature. It is an ideological construct produced by industrial capitalism and then projected back onto humanity as though it were universal. People are told that fulfilment comes through acquisition, competition, status consumption, and perpetual growth. But this produces societies that are materially affluent yet so often spiritually impoverished.

By contrast, homo aestheticus refers to the human being understood primarily as a creative, meaning-making, aesthetic, and self-fashioning creature. I believe that we have a deep existential need for beauty and meaning that resembles a kind of hunger. As I anticipated in an earlier answer, human beings do not merely survive biologically; we interpret, narrate, symbolise, create rituals, make art, cultivate styles of living, and shape ourselves imaginatively. Even ordinary life has an aesthetic dimension. The clothes we wear, the homes we build, the gardens we cultivate, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are – all of this is aesthetic activity, broadly defined.

So in one sense, we are already homo aestheticus. We cannot escape the aesthetic dimension of existence because meaning itself must be created rather than discovered ready-made in the universe. If there is no fixed metaphysical order dictating the meaning of life, then we are burdened – but also liberated – by the task of making our lives into aesthetic projects. We are simultaneously sculptors and clay.

However, under capitalism these aesthetic energies are often colonised by the market. The longing for transcendence becomes consumerism. The desire for self-creation becomes branding. The yearning for beauty becomes commodified entertainment or luxury consumption. What I am calling the Will to Art – the primal driving force underlying the entire universe – gets redirected into status competition and acquisitive lifestyles. Yet the underlying hunger remains unsatisfied, which is why modern societies experience such widespread alienation and restlessness. We barely know what we are missing. We’re chasing false targets, and when the cultural promises disappoint us, it is too easy to reinvest ourselves in the same failing strategy. This is the definition of idiocy. 

The transition from homo economicus to homo aestheticus therefore involves reclaiming those suppressed dimensions of human existence. It means reorganising society so that creative labour, aesthetic experience, community participation, contemplation, craft, and meaningful autonomy become central rather than peripheral. It also means recognising that flourishing does not require ever-expanding material throughput. Human beings can live lives of extraordinary richness on relatively modest ecological foundations, if the sources of meaning shift from ‘having’ to ‘being’.

Importantly, I do not romanticise this transition as easy or inevitable. Industrial civilisation has trained us deeply in the habits of consumption and egoic individualism. But cracks are appearing in the dominant paradigm. Many people already sense that consumer culture cannot answer their deeper existential needs. The ecological crisis intensifies this contradiction because it reveals that the economic model we have inherited is not only spiritually unsatisfying but ecologically catastrophic.

So homo aestheticus names both who we already are in a latent sense and who we might consciously become under different social and political conditions. It is an ideal of human flourishing in which art, beauty, creativity, and meaningful self-formation move from the margins of life to the centre of civilisation itself.

The post Homo Aestheticus (interview question #7) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

You have spoken of art and aesthetics but we haven’t yet discussed, in any depth, the notion of beauty, which you have mentioned a few times. In your writings on the poet-philosopher, Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), you seem to endorse and develop his idea that humanity was in some sense ‘birthed’ by the experience of natural beauty. This is a highly unconventional idea, especially as an anthropological thesis. In what sense could beauty give birth to humanity?

The claim does indeed sound strange, but Schiller’s point is subtle and extraordinarily rich. He is saying two things, although not always very clearly. First, he is saying that prehistoric humans literally emerged as a self-aware species when they developed the capacity to experience beauty; second, he is proposing that humanity can only become fully human through the awakening of aesthetic consciousness, or what he called the ‘play drive’. These are complex claims, and they require careful unpacking. 

In relation to the first, historical claim, we should start by recalling Schiller’s own words. In the Letters on Aesthetic Education (1795),he writes: ‘so long as man in his physical condition accepts the world of sense merely passively, merely perceives, he is still completely identified with it, and just because he himself is simply world, there is no world yet for him. Not until he sets it outside himself or contemplates it, in his aesthetic status, does his personality become distinct from it, and the world appears to him because he has ceased to identify himself with it.’

Schiller’s position here extends an insight that is indebted to Immanuel Kant, so let us begin the analysis there. In his Critique of Judgment, Kant argues that aesthetic experience – especially the experience of beauty – is characterised by what he calls a ‘free play’ between the faculties of imagination and understanding. In such moments, we are not driven by desire (as in mere sensation), nor are we constrained by determinate concepts (as in scientific or instrumental reasoning). Instead, we experience a kind of disinterested pleasure – a perception of things ‘in themselves’, free from utilitarian calculus. 

This is the experience of beauty. Whereas an animal merely sees things in the world as either useful or not-useful, a human animal capable of the aesthetic experience of beauty can experience the world in itself, valuing it not for its usefulness but just because it is beautiful. This is the meaning of Kant’s idea of ‘disinterestedness’. It does not mean uninterested, which is the common misunderstanding. It means that the interest one has in the experience is not for what it can do for oneself (i.e. its utility), but just because it is, in itself, beautiful.   

According to Schiller, aesthetic experience is not merely a refinement of an already fully formed human being, but the very condition of our emergence as a distinct kind of being. This is why he suggests that it was the experience of beauty that gave birth to our humanity; it gave birth to, or created, our self-awareness or self-consciousness. Early human beings – what we might call pre-aesthetic hominids – were essentially immersed in nature, governed by instinct, lacking reflective self-awareness, just like every other animal. They were at one with the world. There was no clear distinction between subject and object, self and environment. This is the unified experience of the non-human animal. 

A decisive shift occurs when this immersion is interrupted – when in moments of encounter with the beauty of wild nature, a new mode of perception emerges. This is the aesthetic moment Schiller isolates: a new form of contemplation in which the organism is no longer simply reacting to stimuli, but perceiving the beauty in a disinterested fashion. In that moment, the self becomes aware of itself as a perceiving subject. Nature is no longer simply lived – it is seen and appreciated as something ‘other’. This is the birth of subjectivity or self-awareness. And with it, Schiller argued, the birth of humanity.

So when Schiller says beauty was humanity’s ‘Creatress’, he meant that the aesthetic experience of the world – the beauty of wild nature – provoked the emergence of our defining self-consciousness. It created a distance between human beings and the world, allowing us to reflect, to interpret, to imagine, and eventually to create. But this birth is also a fall. In becoming self-aware, we lose our original unity with nature. We become divided – between sense and reason, instinct and reflection, wilderness and civilisation. This is what I call ‘the curse of beauty’. Beauty awakens us as a self-aware species, but it also separates us from nature.

Having experienced the beauty of wild nature, and having lost our immediate unity with it, we are driven to recreate, imitate, and respond to it through artistic expression. The arts, in this sense, are not luxuries – they are attempts at reconciliation. They are ways of giving form to a world that is no longer simply given as whole. This also explains the emergence of abstraction and language. Once we begin representing the world – drawing animals, making symbols – we also begin forming concepts. The aesthetic act of representation becomes the seed of rational thought. In this way, aesthetic experience does not merely accompany reason; it gives birth to it. 

And yet, the story does not end there. Having been separated from nature, we carry within us a longing for return – a longing for what Sigmund Freud called the ‘oceanic feeling’ of unity with the world that we all experienced in a primordial way while in the womb. This longing for unity expresses itself in art, in music, in encounters with wilderness, and in those rare moments of aesthetic transcendence where the boundary between self and world dissolves again.  

(For my longer analysis of Schiller, see here).

The post Aesthetic Anthropology (interview question #6) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

Before engaging you on social and political issues, let us delve deeper into your notion of the ‘Will to Art’. This is perhaps the most obscure philosophical concept in your recent work. What do you mean by the Will to Art? Is this an aspect of human nature? Or is it a cosmological, or even a metaphysical, idea?

Yes, the ‘Will to Art’ is the foundational idea I’ve been trying to articulate over the last few years. It operates simultaneously at several levels – existential, anthropological, evolutionary, political, and cosmological. And part of the challenge is that these dimensions cannot be entirely separated from one another, so it is hard to present this idea simply and concisely. But I am obligated to try – so thank you for the question – even as the sands of my own thinking continue to shift and take form.   

As I formulate it, the Will to Art is the fundamental creative impulse or force that gave rise to the universe and which is driving creative evolution onwards. Think of it, perhaps, as the universe’s underlying aesthetic energy or as a cosmological instinct to create. Through this interpretive lens, I am inviting readers to consider the possibility that the universe itself is fundamentally an aesthetic phenomenon, understood as a process of creative evolution that is developing, albeit agonistically, towards ever-increasing opportunities for artistic and aesthetic experience.

I hasten to add that this aesthetic universe I imagine is not a singular, self-conscious being or deity, but it attains consciousness through the evolution of diverse experiential nodes in the fabric of existence. In the case of humanity, these nodes of consciousness have become reflective, visionary, poetic and self-aware. And thus the aesthetic universe experiences itself through us – homo aestheticus – the art-created art creators.

However, this creative impulse – the Will to Art – is not a blindly urging force. According to the interpretation I offer, the telos or goal of the universe is beauty, although I believe this is only a ‘tendency’ in the universe rather than a predetermined outcome. The guiding ideal of beauty is defined not as mere cosmetic ornamentation or prettiness, but as the pleasurable and meaningful experience of art and nature. Beauty is about giving significant form to the content of our lives, or simply appreciating the inherent significant form of wild nature. From this perspective, the cosmos is a sensuous and artful reality that is unfolding in time in order to experience itself through the genesis and diversity of conscious and creative life.

But again, this mythopoetic account of reality predetermines nothing, since art is inherently unpredictable and the evolution of artistic being is unforeseeable. The endpoint is not built into the original conditions. Obviously, the world is grossly unjust and may remain so. But in an aesthetic universe, hope resides in the possibility of moving towards a more beautiful and humane world, through the exuberant fertility of free and creative struggle. To speak of the Will to Art, then, is to infuse the world with an underlying tendency toward artistic and aesthetic flourishing. The struggle for life and liberty is the latent ideal of beauty trying to realise itself through the Will to Art.

At the human level, the Will to Art refers to the deep impulse toward creative expression, aesthetic experience, and self-fashioning that seems intrinsic to our species. Human beings are not content merely to survive biologically. We shape, ornament, narrate, ritualise, symbolise, and beautify existence. We turn necessity into style, for better or for worse. We have been known to decorate tools, sing while working, invent myths, paint caves, compose symphonies, cultivate gardens, write poems, and construct identities. Even in conditions of material deprivation, artistic and symbolic activity persists. That fact tells us something profound about human nature and the defining impulses that drive us.

In that sense, yes, I do regard the Will to Art as an aspect of human nature – though I would immediately add that ‘human nature’ itself is dynamic, unfinished, and historically conditioned. The human being is not a static entity but a process of becoming. Still, throughout history and across cultures, we repeatedly encounter this aesthetic impulse asserting itself. In my book SMPLCTY I describe this as a kind of existential hunger for beauty and meaning.  

But I am also trying to say something more ambitious than that. The concept is indebted to Schopenhauer’s ‘Will to Live’ and Nietzsche’s ‘Will to Power’, but I reinterpret and develop those perspectives. I invite reflection on the possibility that the most fundamental universal force is not merely a will to ‘life’, nor an aggressive will to ‘power’, but rather a will to ‘art’. After all, what are life and power for? I’m proposing an answer. My suggestion is that evolution itself can be understood as a progressively creative process culminating – at least for now – in conscious beings capable of art and artistic self-reflection. This evolutionary process seeks to universalise opportunities for artistic expression, to revel in the sublime joys of creativity, and to share in the sacred and sensuous experience of beauty. The universe doesn’t merely have an instinct for freedom. It wants to achieve freedom so it can experience its own art and creativity.

Now, I should stress that I do not mean this as a rigid metaphysical doctrine or a scientifically demonstrable thesis. It is better understood as a mythopoetic or philosophical interpretation of existence – an attempt to make sense of the strange fact that the universe has produced creatures who create art, seek beauty, and ask questions about meaning. Throughout my recent writings, I repeatedly explore the idea that existence may be inescapably aesthetic. That is, reality does not come to us with fixed meanings already embedded within it. Meaning must be created. Human beings therefore relate to their own lives rather like how artists relate to raw materials. The Will to Art is the impulse driving that creative process onwards.

This is not so much a definition of a concept as a declaration of an undertaking – the announcement of a journey. (Or rather, all definitions are acts of creation, and all acts of creation are journeys.) At the cosmological level, I have proposed that consciousness and creativity may represent the universe becoming capable of experiencing itself aesthetically. Indeed, I believe our aesthetic universe seeks to experience itself, not self-consciously but instinctively. This is obviously not a scientific proposition in the ordinary sense. It is a pragmatic invitation to ‘think of things this way’ and see whether doing so bears fruit. In other words, the Will to Art is closer to a philosophical cosmology or existential mythology. 

But to describe the Will to Art as a mythology is not to denigrate it. Myths matter. Human beings always live through orienting narratives, whether religious, political, or economic. Modern consumer capitalism also has its mythology – progress, growth, accumulation, utility-maximisation, technological salvation. I am attempting to articulate an alternative civilisational mythos grounded in beauty, sufficiency, and creative becoming. In doing so, I am perfectly aware that the Will to Art could be described as a ‘grand narrative’ or a ‘story’. But it is not for that reason untrue. The Will to Art is a metaphor to live by: to be judged, not according to its correspondence to a pre-existing reality, but according to its effects. It begins as an invitation to experiment, and can only be justified by its results.

The reason I believe this aesthetic interpretation of existence matters politically is that industrial civilisation systematically represses and commodifies this universal creative impulse. Consumer capitalism promises fulfillment through consumption, but the deeper yearning beneath consumption is often aesthetic and existential. People seek meaning, vitality, transcendence, participation, self-creation. When those needs are denied healthier forms of expression, they become displaced into consumer identities, spectacle, accumulation, or just technological distraction.

That is why I argue that an ecological civilisation must become, in some sense, a civilisation of art. Not because everyone would become a professional artist, but because life itself would become more consciously aesthetic – more participatory, creative, sensuous, and meaningful. The ‘poet-farmer’ becomes my archetype for this transformed mode of being: a person who lives simply in material terms while exploring existence through creativity and aesthetic experience.

So ultimately the Will to Art names both a human impulse and a way of interpreting the fundamental driving force of the cosmos. It is an attempt to affirm life aesthetically in an age increasingly overshadowed by ecological crisis, nihilism, and collapse. Even if the universe is finite, tragic, and indifferent, there remains this astonishing fact: beings have emerged who can create beauty, experience wonder, and make meaning together.

Art and beauty exist. This is a fact. Are we not obliged, then, to reverse engineer a cosmological narrative that explains how and why? I believe we should hesitate to stay silent on the mysteries of existence simply out of fear of being wrong, when doing so ensures we have no chance of living in some positive but uncertain truth.

The post The Will to Art (interview question #5) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

In one of the early essays in SMPLCTY you engage the work of artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), but seem to push his aesthetic perspective a few steps further. Why is Duchamp important to how you’ve interpreted the cosmos as a ‘readymade’ work of art? And why do you say you’ve ‘dignified’ the universe by interpreting it through an aesthetic lens?

Yes, Duchamp’s approach to art was important to the development of my ideas, though perhaps not in the way one might initially expect. Most people associate Duchamp with irony, anti-art, provocation, and the collapse of traditional aesthetic standards. Certainly, those dimensions are present. But what interested me philosophically was the extraordinary conceptual shift initiated by his idea of the ‘readymade’work of art.

When Duchamp exhibited ordinary objects like Fountain – the urinal presented as art – he radically destabilised the conventional boundary between art and non-art. The key insight was that aesthetic significance does not reside inherently within privileged objects alone; it emerges through modes of perception, framing, interpretation, and attention. Duchamp revealed that an ordinary object could become aesthetically charged if encountered differently.

Now, many people interpreted this gesture nihilistically, as though Duchamp had destroyed the possibility of beauty or dissolved art into arbitrariness. I interpret him differently. I think Duchamp inadvertently opened the possibility for a radical expansion of aesthetic consciousness. If an ordinary manufactured object can become art through aesthetic framing and engagement, then perhaps aesthetic significance potentially saturates reality itself.

That is the move I made in the essay ‘The Cosmos as a Readymade’.I take Duchamp’s insight and universalise it, literally. Rather than merely treating isolated objects as aesthetically charged, I suggest that the cosmos itself can be encountered as an aesthetic phenomenon – as something wondrous, expressive, sublime, and creatively inexhaustible. My view is that the experience of art is less about an encounter with a physical entity. It is more about a poetic engagement with the possibilities of meaning that surround the entity under aesthetic contemplation – in this case, the universe itself. 

This is what I mean when I speak of ‘dignifying’ the universe aesthetically. Modernity often leaves us with a profoundly disenchanted cosmology. The universe becomes interpreted primarily through mechanistic and instrumental categories: matter in motion, resources, quantities, functions, causal systems. Scientifically, much of this is extraordinarily illuminating and indispensable. But existentially, it can produce alienation, nihilism, and spiritual impoverishment if taken as exhaustive of reality’s meaning.

My argument is not anti-scientific. Rather, I am suggesting that scientific explanation alone cannot exhaust the meaning and significance of existence. The cosmos is not diminished by being scientifically intelligible, but neither is it fully captured by quantitative description. The machinic metaphor is only one lens of understanding the universe. Human beings also encounter reality aesthetically, emotionally, symbolically, poetically, and spiritually. To interpret the cosmos aesthetically is therefore to resist reducing existence to mere mechanism or utility. It is to recover a sense of wonder before the astonishing fact that there is something rather than nothing – and that this something has given rise to consciousness, creativity, beauty, music, suffering, love, poetry, and art. That fact strikes me as profoundly mysterious and, indeed, sublime.

This is partly why I draw on Romantic and post-Nietzschean traditions of thought. Once traditional metaphysical certainties collapse, the challenge becomes how to affirm existence without returning to dogmatic religion or falling into nihilism. My answer is not theological in any orthodox sense, but aesthetic. I suggest that existence may be experienced and interpreted as meaningful through aesthetic participation and experimentation rather than metaphysical certainty. My invitation is to try thinking of things within a new metaphor: the universe-as-art, not universe-as-machine. What follows?

From this perspective, the idea of the ‘cosmos as a readymade’ work of art becomes an invitation to adopt an aesthetic attitude toward existence, knowing it to be infinitely complex and therefore open to a range of coherent interpretations. It means learning to encounter reality receptively, contemplatively, and creatively rather than merely instrumentally. Beauty may not be confined to museums or masterpieces; it may be latent almost everywhere if perception is transformed.

That is why I discuss examples like Joshua Bell, the famous violinist, who anonymously played Bach in a subway station while hurried commuters passed without noticing. The issue is not merely whether beauty exists, but whether our forms of life allow us to perceive it. Modern industrial civilisation increasingly conditions us toward distraction, acceleration, consumption, and instrumental rationality. We become estranged from ordinary experiences of beauty and sublimity. 

In the same vein, Ralph Waldo Emerson pondered how people would react if the stars at night only came out once every thousand years. Surely the entire species would gather for such a viewing and be overwhelmed by the ‘envoys of beauty’ that were on display. And yet, we have access to the sublime vista of the stars every clear night, so easily taken for granted. Something has gone astray if our modes of existence filter away our ordinary and everyday access to beauty and the sublime. This is why I diagnose modernity as having an ‘aesthetic deficit disorder’. We don’t even know what we are missing, what we have lost.

So Duchamp helped me see that aesthetics concerns perception itself. But whereas Duchamp often retained irony and ambiguity, I wanted to move toward a more affirmative existential orientation. In a sense, I attempted to reverse the cynical trajectory of some twentieth-century aesthetic theory. Instead of concluding that nothing is beautiful because everything can be art, I suggest that perhaps everything contains aesthetic potential if approached with sufficient openness and attentiveness.

This also connects directly to ecological civilisation. A society incapable of perceiving beauty in the world will destroy the world. If forests appear only as timber reserves, rivers only as resources, and human beings only as consumers or labour inputs, then ecological devastation becomes almost inevitable. But if existence is encountered aesthetically – if the world is experienced as intrinsically meaningful, expressive, and worthy of reverence – then entirely different ethical and political possibilities emerge.

In this sense, aesthetics becomes spiritually significant without requiring supernatural metaphysics. Of course, I do not claim to possess final answers regarding the meaning of human existence. In fact, I think mystery is inherent to conscious life and thus unavoidable. But I do believe that profound aesthetic experience offers one of the deepest ways human beings participate in and respond to that mystery.

This is why I often speak of the aesthetic universe in poetic rather than doctrinal or scientific terms. The cosmos may not possess objective meaning ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but through creativity, beauty, art, love, and contemplation, conscious beings participate in the ongoing creation of meaning. This goes beyond scientific discourse because science is the study of what is. Science is about predicting and controlling reality. On the other hand, aesthetics is partly about making sense of the realities and possibilities that are invented through art, story, and creativity. These are different modes of practice and inquiry.

Ultimately, the dignification of the universe is not about projecting sentimental fantasies onto reality. It is about refusing to interpret existence merely physically. It is about recognising that a universe capable of producing Beethoven, forests, friendship, tragedy, consciousness, poetry, and the night sky is already far stranger, richer, and more aesthetically charged than mechanistic civilisation typically allows itself to perceive.

And perhaps that is where the deepest philosophical and existential questions converge. In the end, I do not know whether existence can be rationally or metaphysically justified in any final sense. The tragic aspects of existence are real and undeniable. But I do know that there remains something extraordinary about being creatures who can encounter reality with wonder, shape meaning creatively, and participate in the beauty of our aesthetic cosmos.

The post The Aesthetic Universe (interview question #4) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

In the preface to your book SMPLCTY, you discuss the ‘apocalyptic sublime’. What do you mean by this intriguing but slightly unsettling turn of phrase?

When I speak of the ‘apocalyptic sublime’, I am trying to name a peculiar existential mood of our age – a mixture of dread and awe that emerges when humanity confronts the possibility of ecological and civilisational collapse. It is ‘apocalyptic’ because we increasingly sense that industrial civilisation is unstable, perhaps terminal, driven toward breakdown by ecological overshoot, unplanned energy descent, the threat of nuclear war, and the internal contradictions of consumer capitalism.

But it is also ‘sublime’ in the philosophical sense associated with thinkers like Burke, Kant, Nietzsche, and the Romantics: an encounter with forces so vast, terrifying, and overwhelming that they exceed our ordinary categories of comprehension. We can be humbled before a great mountain, inducing a fearful humility that is also somehow pleasurable. But it only remains pleasurable while we remain at a safe distance from what gives rise to the sublime. The point I made in the preface to SMPLCTY is that I fear the apocalyptic sublime is fading, because we are no longer a safe distance from the apocalypse (and some people never were). We are always and already involved in a perpetual state of crisis that is not imminent, but immanent. In many ways, the apocalypse has already arrived.

This mood, however, is not treated simply as despair. Rather, I suggest that the confrontation with limits – with finitude, collapse, death, and cosmic insignificance – can become spiritually and aesthetically generative. The apocalypse strips away illusions. It exposes the emptiness of consumer culture and the fragility of the industrial order. Yet precisely in that exposure there arises the possibility of renewal, of reimagining civilisation on different foundations. After all, the term apocalypse has a dual meaning, not simply referring to the ‘end of the world’ but also signifying a ‘great unveiling or disclosure of knowledge’. There is hope in this ambiguity. 

That is why SMPLCTY is not merely a critique of industrial society or a warning about collapse. It is an attempt to develop an ‘aesthetics of existence’ grounded in voluntary simplicity, creative labour, and aesthetic experience. I am convinced that human flourishing does not depend on endless growth or material affluence, but on cultivating our capacities as an aesthetic species in an aesthetic universe.

The apocalyptic sublime, therefore, names the threshold condition out of which my ambitious project emerges. We are living at a moment when the dominant civilisation appears increasingly monstrous and unsustainable, yet this very recognition can awaken a deeper hunger for beauty, meaning, and transformation. As the Marxist aesthetician Georg Lukács put it: ‘the bleaker and emptier life becomes under capitalism, the more intense is the yearning after beauty.’

The task, then, is not merely to survive collapse materially, but to respond creatively and spiritually. I believe that one way or another there will be a ‘Great Simplification’ of the global industrial order – either by design or disaster. By the end of this century industrial civilisation will be an historical phenomenon. The question, therefore, is whether humanity can transform ‘collapse’ into some form of ‘artful’ or ‘prosperous’ descent. This would signify a conscious movement toward simpler, lower-energy forms of life that are nevertheless richer in culture, beauty, community, and aesthetic depth. 

But this societal resilience is far from guaranteed. The coming descent could just as well be a collapse into ever-deepening barbarism, and sadly that is threatening to be the most likely scenario. But the future has not yet been written, and that fact dissolves the temptation to despair since there is always meaningful work to be done, no matter how bad things get.    

So the ‘apocalyptic sublime’ is both diagnosis and invitation. It is the feeling of terror and awe that is appropriate to a civilisation colliding with its social and ecological limits, but also the opening through which a new ecological civilisation – what I call SMPLCTY – might begin to reimagine itself.

The post The Apocalyptic Sublime (interview question #3) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

Before proceeding we ought to address some definitional questions in relation to ‘art’ and ‘aesthetics’. How should we understand these complex and contested terms?

I use those terms in a deliberately expansive way. Art is not confined to galleries or professional practice. It refers to the broader human capacity to create, to shape, to give form to experience. It includes music and painting, of course, but also craft, storytelling, ritual, the design of our homes, the cultivation of gardens, and even the way we live our lives. In this sense, everyone is always and already an artist, consciously or not. At first instance that might sound trite or counterintuitive, but on reflection the paradox resolves into a profound truth. 

William Morris, the British political and aesthetic theorist, had a decisive influence on how I came to understand art – so much so that my definition is, in many respects, a contemporary extension of his insights. Morris rejected the narrow, institutional understanding of art as something produced by a gifted minority and consumed by everyone else. Instead, he proposed a radically democratic and integrated conception. His famous formulation – that art is ‘the expression of man’s pleasure in labour’ – became a touchstone for my own thinking.

What struck me most about Morris is that he dissolved the boundary between art and everyday life. For him, art was not confined to paintings in galleries or symphonies in concert halls. It was present wherever human beings engaged in meaningful, skilled, and freely undertaken activity that gave form to things that were both useful and beautiful. A well-made chair, a woven textile, a carefully tended garden – these were no less artistic than a poem or a painting, provided they embodied care, creativity, and a certain joy in making.

This insight allowed me to rethink art in civilisational terms. Industrial capitalism had, in Morris’s view, degraded both labour and art simultaneously. Work became alienated – performed under compulsion, stripped of meaning – and art became specialised, commodified, unaffordable for most people, and increasingly detached from ordinary life. The result was a society in which most people neither experienced their labour as meaningful nor their culture as participatory.

I take this critique very seriously. In my aesthetic writings I adopt a similarly broad definition of art – as the meaningful and pleasurable expression of creative labour. This allows me to argue that art is not a luxury reserved for affluent societies but a fundamental dimension of human flourishing. It also aligns with my ecological concerns, because many forms of low-impact, sufficiency-based living – gardening, repairing, cooking, crafting, building – can become aesthetic practices when approached in the right spirit.

Morris also helped me see that aesthetics is inherently political. If art is integrated into everyday life, then the organisation of labour, production, and social relations becomes an aesthetic issue. A society that produces ugly work, ugly environments, and disposable commodities is not just economically flawed; it is aesthetically impoverished. Conversely, a society that cultivates beauty in ordinary practices of production and consumption – what Morris called a ‘democracy of art’ – would be one in which people participate creatively in shaping their world.

In that sense, Morris helped me move from an understanding of art as an object to an understanding of art as a process, even art as a way of being. This perspective becomes increasingly important in an age of artificial intelligence, where ‘art objects’, as such, can often be produced today by computers with merely a well-crafted ‘prompt’. In order to save art from technological annihilation, it must be reconceived as a lived process and experience, not a product. 

In this light, art becomes less about what we produce and more about how we live – how we relate to our work, to each other, and to the material world. So Morris’s influence is both conceptual and political. He gave me a definition of art expansive enough to include everyday life, and a vision of an aesthetic society in which that definition could be realised. My own work tries to extend that vision into an age of ecological limits and energy descent, suggesting that a civilisation of sufficiency might need to be a civilisation of art – not in spite of material and energetic limits, but because of those limits.  

As for the term ‘aesthetics’ – likewise, this does not simply refer to the philosophy of beauty. It concerns perception, sensibility, and the way we encounter the world. It asks how things appear to us, how they move us, how they are felt and valued. And because perception shapes action, aesthetics becomes of social and political import. A civilisation that perceives the Earth as a resource will behave very differently from one that perceives it as something worthy of reverence and care.

The post Defining Art and Aesthetics (interview question #2) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

You have spent your career writing about notions of voluntary simplicity, degrowth, permaculture, and energy descent. Why now, after twenty years of scholarship and activism, do you find yourself drawn to engage questions of art and aesthetics? Is this merely a pessimistic retreat into the realm of the imagination? 

It may seem, at first glance, like a departure – but I would say it is more of a deepening, or perhaps a return to something that was always implicit in my earlier work. After all, the subtitle of my first book, back in 2009, refers to voluntary simplicity as the poetic alternative to consumer culture. So my engagement with voluntary simplicity, degrowth, and permaculture, etc., was never merely technical or economic. Beneath those concerns lay a more fundamental question: What does it mean to live well within planetary limits? And that question, I have come to see more clearly over time, is irreducibly aesthetic – an imaginative task.

For many years, I worked (and still work) within the language of ecological economics and environmental politics, trying to articulate why endless growth on a finite planet is biophysically impossible and ethically problematic. Those disciplinary perspectives remain important and have much to offer. But I gradually came to realise that even the most compelling arguments for degrowth or sufficiency will fail to persuade if they do not also address the realm of meaning, desire, sensuous experience, and imagination. One can show that growth is unsustainable, but that does not offer any insight into how to live well without it.

This is where art and aesthetics enter – not as an afterthought or supplement, but as the atmosphere within which the other social, ecological, and political arguments occur. Human beings are not merely rational calculators responding to facts about resource limits. We are creatures who seek beauty, who interpret existence symbolically, who shape our lives through narratives, images, and forms of expression. If the dominant culture defines the good life in terms of affluence, speed, technological novelty, and consumption, then calls for restraint will feel like impoverishment. But if another vision of life – simpler, slower, more creative, more relational – can be experienced as beautiful, then the entire terrain shifts.

So my turn to aesthetics is far from being a pessimistic retreat. It is really an attempt to address what I now see as the deeper civilisational challenge: not merely reducing material throughput, but reimagining the sources of human flourishing. In all my writings I have attempted to demonstrate that affluent societies need to ‘live more with less’, but in my recent books, like SMPLCTY and Homo Aestheticus, I present art, broadly defined, as one of the primary ways of doing so. A song, a poem, a shared meal, a garden, a handmade object, a meaningful conversation – these can contain immense richness with minimal ecological cost. In that sense, the aesthetic is not peripheral to sustainability; it may be one of its foundations.

I would not say, then, that I have turned away from my earlier concerns. Rather, I have tried to follow them to their deeper roots. Degrowth and simplicity without an aesthetic transformation of ‘taste’ risks becoming austere and uninspiring. But an ecological civilisation grounded in creativity, beauty, and meaningful participation, may offer a vision of life that is not only sustainable, but genuinely worth aspiring to. It can engage the heart, not merely the head. 

This is important because I believe that any effective politics must be an affective politics. We know in our heads that there must be more humane, meaningful, and regenerative ways to live, but we do not yet feel this in our hearts. Indeed, it is not sufficient evidence of crisis that we lack. There is no real ‘information deficit’. Our primary failing is not scientific or evidential, but aesthetic. We have, in short, lost our sense of the sacred. And so the intellectual shifts that are needed may need to be preceded by an aesthetic engagement and transformation of the emotional and spiritual capacities of our species. This is art’s highest calling.  In the end, the question is not simply how we reduce consumption, but how we redefine wealth. And that, I have come to believe, is an aesthetic question as much as an economic one.

For Sam Alexander’s books and essays on aesthetics, see here.

The post A Pessimistic Retreat? (interview question #1) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

The full edition of the journal issue is available here.

I’ve also been given another 50 free downloads of my other new essay, ‘Sacred Revolt: Why Reverence before Restraint Transforms the Limits-to-Growth Predicament’. Official download here, author manuscript available here.   

best wishes

Samuel Alexander

Director of the Simplicity Institute 

Sample paragraphs below from ‘Game Theory and the Dilemma of Degrowth’

Yet even if the degrowth paradigm is accepted intellectually and ethically, a profound strategic problem remains. No person, firm, community, or state acts alone. Each entity acts in a world structured and incentivised by the actions of others. If one household consumes less while neighbours consume more, does the sacrifice matter (Alcott, 2008)? If one business pursues sufficiency while competitors pursue profit maximisation, can it survive (Blauwhof, 2012)? If one state embraces degrowth while geopolitical rivals pursue growth, militarisation, and technological acceleration, is it merely surrendering relative power (Alexander, 2016)? Why would any rational actor do that? 

This is the strategic problem which I describe in this article as “degrowth’s dilemma”. It resembles familiar collective-action problems, but it is not reducible to a simple prisoner’s dilemma (see Carrozzo Magli & Manfredi, 2022). In many contexts, growth appears ‘rational’ from the standpoint of the individual actor, firm, or state, even when the aggregate result is ecological overshoot and eventual destabilisation. The tragedy is not that people fail to understand the danger – although that can be a contributing factor. The tragedy is that the perverse incentive landscape rewards conduct that worsens the danger and ultimately promises to lead to ruin for all (see Hardin, 1968; see also, Alexander, 2014).

I argue that even where coordinated global degrowth remains politically implausible, degrowth-like practices become a form of ‘second order’ rationality – that is, justifiable resilience strategies in a world where the growth game itself is becoming ecologically unstable. The conclusion is neither naïve optimism nor resignation. Unilateral degrowth does not guarantee success. Coordinated degrowth will prove worryingly difficult. But growth maximisation is itself a dangerous strategy in a finite biosphere. Indeed, one can argue that the real ‘fantasy’ isn’t degrowth but the irrational belief that limitless growth is possible on a finite planet. The rational path is therefore dual: work for coordinated degrowth where possible, while also building resilience for uncoordinated breakdown or collapse as a security measure (Homer-Dixon, 2015). Fortunately, there is considerable overlap in these strategies, such that we can aim for sustainability, while building resilience – or vice versa.

The post Game Theory and Degrowth’s Dilemma: Why Embrace Degrowth if Other States and Societies Do Not? first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/S2XES26C8EU6W4KB9WRM/full?target=10.1080/07351690.2026.2698342

The author-formatted version of the article is also available here.

ABSTRACT: This article argues that the ecological crisis cannot be understood adequately as a merely technological or economic problem requiring restraint alone, but must instead be recognised as a deeper spiritual and existential crisis rooted in the disenchantment and desacralisation of the modern world. While the limits-to-growth and degrowth traditions correctly diagnose the impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet, the article contends that appeals to sacrifice, austerity, and reduced consumption often fail to generate widespread cultural transformation because industrial consumer civilisation has already organised desire, identity, and freedom around acquisition and perpetual expansion. Drawing on ecological philosophy, aesthetics, and Erich Fromm’s distinction between the ‘having’ and ‘being’ modes of existence, the article develops the concept of reverence as an alternative existential orientation capable of grounding ecological restraint more deeply than fear, obligation, or technocratic management alone. It is argued that modern capitalism systematically desacralises reality by reducing nature, human beings, and existence itself to commodities and standing reserve for economic growth, thereby eroding experiences of intrinsic value and meaning. Against this metaphysics of industrial modernity, the article proposes a ‘sacred revolt’ grounded in reverence, simplicity, aesthetic reorientation, and ecological participation. Such a revolt does not reject science or technology, but seeks to reintegrate them within a broader civilisational framework capable of recognising the Earth as intrinsically meaningful rather than merely instrumentally useful. Ultimately, the article contends that ecological civilisation will remain politically fragile unless humanity rediscovers forms of sacredness through which restraint ceases to appear merely as sacrifice and instead becomes an expression of care, fidelity, and love for the living world.

The post Sacred Revolt: Why Reverence before Restraint Transforms the Limits-to-Growth Predicament first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

OVERVIEW:

SMPLE-KOIN is a hypothetical cryptocurrency inspired by Buddhism. It will be introduced in this essay as a spiritual ‘thought experiment’ with economic implications, one designed to facilitate a real-world revaluation of how important material and financial wealth is to human prosperity. The goal is to solve critical ‘coordination problems’ in game theory, and thereby facilitate a global transition to ‘simpler’ lifestyles of sustainable consumption which are supported by post-growth or degrowth economies. At the very least, this essay might help people walk the spiritual path of industrial civilization’s demise.

In order to elucidate the core thesis, a near-term future is envisioned in which civilization is shaped by an artificial superintelligence known as ‘Cholom’. This benevolent entity uses its superintelligence to create a value-system for humans to live by, optimising for peace and prosperity throughout the entire community of life. It will be seen that this holistic and rationalistic worldview ends up bearing a close resemblance to Buddhism. Since Cholom is aligned with human interests, it wants people to adopt this value system for their own sake – to realise their own peace and prosperity, now and into the deep future.

To facilitate this radical transformation in human life, Cholom creates a global cryptocurrency called SMPLE-KOIN, which is stored in digital repositories called Karmic Wallets. These wallets are assigned to each individual and only accessible on the internet via perfectly encrypted signatures. If your stock increases, you have advanced, to that extent, along ‘The Path’ toward enlightened living – and conversely. Accordingly, the goal in life is to become spiritually rich, as quantified by SMPLE-KOIN, the perfect unit of karmic accounting. In this essay, it is suggested that one of the most significant effects of SMPLE-KOIN is how it could revalue the importance of material and financial wealth to a well-lived life, an insight that is ancient but ever-new.

Might there be times when less really is more?

WARNING TO READER:

This irreverent essay explores a near-term future in which the Machine’s most dehumanising technology – artificial superintelligence – turns out to have a silver lining that redeems humanity’s spiritual condition in surprising ways. If the premise of this ‘thought experiment’ merely appals the reader, it can be safely assumed the point has been missed. One is invited to read between the sentences, which is to say, not merely to read what follows but also to help write the underlying message into existence.

Let us damn the Matrix together, in joyful and poetic revolt.

The pdf is available here (on a pay what you want basis, just edit the price as you see fit). Other books by Samuel Alexander are available here.

The post SMPLE-KOIN: A Buddhist Cryptocurrency Optimised for Material Sufficiency within Game Theory Dynamics first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.