In the table of contents of your book SMPLCTY, there are three ‘parts’, only two of which are published in that large text. There is a third part that has not yet been published, which is entitled ‘The Aesthetic State: Toward an Ecological Democracy of Art’. Can you provide some insight into what you mean by an ‘aesthetic state’? And how we might proceed toward what you call an ‘ecological democracy of art’?

Yes, the unpublished (and still incomplete!) third part of SMPLCTY is really where many of the philosophical, political, and ecological threads of the earlier essays converge. If the first part develops the metaphysical and existential foundations of the Will to Art, and the second explores the political economy of aesthetic life, then the final part asks the practical and institutional question: What kind of society could cultivate and sustain the flourishing of homo aestheticus within ecological limits?

The phrase ‘aesthetic state’ is, of course, indebted to Schiller. In his Letters on Aesthetic Education, Schiller imagined an ideal political condition in which aesthetic development mediates between coercive law and chaotic instinct. The aesthetic state, in his sense, is not merely a government that funds the arts. It is a civilisation in which freedom, beauty, culture, and sensuous human development become structurally embedded within social life itself.

Now, I reinterpret and radicalise that idea under conditions of ecological crisis and late capitalism. My concern is not with aristocratic refinement or elite cultural institutions, but with how entire societies might reorganise themselves around sufficiency, creativity, democratic participation, and ecological harmony. That is why I speak of an ‘ecological democracy of art’. The key idea is that art – understood broadly as meaningful and pleasurable creative labour – should cease to be the privilege of elites or professional specialists and instead become integrated into the ordinary structures of everyday life. We all need visions and goals to guide and incentivise our action. For me, I am inspired by the dream of a society in which labour itself becomes artistic, where useful things are also beautiful, and where the distinction between artist and artisan dissolves into forms of democratic creativity and participation. I have detailed what such a society might look like in my book of eco-fiction, Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation.

Marcuse, as I have acknowledged, also shaped this vision. He argued that a liberated society would involve the transformation of labour, technology, desire, and sensibility – not merely redistribution within the existing industrial order. The ecological crisis is not simply a problem of unjust distribution; it is also a problem of civilisational form. A growth-oriented industrial society organised around endless production and consumption cannot become sustainable merely through greener technologies. The entire conception of the good life must change.

The ‘aesthetic state’, as I imagine it, would therefore be a post-consumerist civilisation grounded in an economics of sufficiency. Its aim would not be maximising GDP, productivity, or consumer throughput, but creating the conditions under which all people can participate meaningfully in creative, communal, ecological, and aesthetic forms of existence. 

This has several dimensions. Economically, it implies a dramatic contraction of unnecessary production and consumption within affluent societies – what can be described as voluntary simplification or degrowth. But this planned contraction would not be experienced merely as sacrifice because opportunities for non-material forms of flourishing would expand correspondingly. More time would become available for art, music, philosophy, craft, gardening, political participation, education, contemplation, ritual, friendship, and immersion in nature. The trade-off would be decidedly in favour of people and planet. 

Politically, the aesthetic state would require far more participatory and decentralised forms of democracy. Consumer capitalism produces passive subjects: spectators rather than citizens. An ecological democracy of art would instead seek to cultivate active, self-governing communities, in which inclination and duty become one and the same thing. The archetype of ‘poet-farmer’ is important here because it symbolises citizens who are materially grounded yet creatively autonomous – people participating directly in both economic provisioning and cultural life.

Culturally, the aesthetic state would involve what we discussed earlier as aesthetic education. Human desires themselves must be transformed. A society addicted to speed, technological novelty, accumulation, and status consumption cannot transition sustainably into an ecological civilisation. People must increasingly come to experience sufficiency, simplicity, craft, ecological belonging, and communal creativity as rich and beautiful forms of life. Trying to prefigure this way of life is one of the most important modes of activism we have available. People must see that a simple, aesthetic existence can make for a life that is free.

Architecturally and spatially, an aestheticised society would also imply profound changes. Cities, workplaces, homes, and public spaces would need to be redesigned not merely for efficiency or profit extraction, but for conviviality, beauty, participation, ecological integration, and human scale. One of the tragedies of industrial modernity is that so many environments have become spiritually deadening – designed primarily around automobiles, commerce, surveillance, and productivity rather than human flourishing.

Of course, I do not envision the aesthetic state as authoritarian or centrally imposed. That would contradict the very principles I am trying to defend. A genuine democracy of art must remain pluralistic, experimental, participatory, and open-ended. Beauty cannot be bureaucratically dictated from above without degenerating into propaganda or domination – precisely the danger Walter Benjamin warned about in relation to fascism.

This is why I emphasise ‘ecological democracy’ rather than simply ‘aesthetic order’. The role of institutions would not be to impose a singular aesthetic ideal, but to create material and political conditions under which diverse forms of low-impact flourishing can emerge. The aesthetic state would therefore protect and expand the freedom of communities and individuals to experiment with alternative forms of meaningful living within biophysical limits.

There is also an important spiritual dimension to this vision. Modern industrial civilisation increasingly treats human beings as economic units and consumers. The aesthetic state would instead recognise that human beings possess deep existential needs for beauty, meaning, participation, ritual, and transcendence. Art, in the broad sense I defend, becomes a primary means through which those needs are expressed and cultivated.

Now, as I acknowledged earlier, I do not present this as a blueprint or utopian prediction. In SMPLCTY, I repeatedly insist that the project should be understood as an orienting vision. Human societies are too historically contingent and complex to conform to fixed designs. Moreover, the future is likely to involve disruption, instability, and perhaps collapse. But orienting visions matter. Without compelling images of alternative forms of civilisation, political imagination remains trapped within the horizons of industrial capitalism. The ecological crisis therefore demands not only critique but imagination – new myths, archetypes, and forms of collective aspiration.

Ultimately, the ‘aesthetic state’ names my (still developing) attempt to think beyond both consumer capitalism and bureaucratic socialism toward an anarcho-communitarian civilisation where freedom, beauty, ecology, and democracy become mutually reinforcing rather than antagonistic. It asks whether humanity might one day organise society less like a machine for accumulation and more like a collaborative work of art – unfinished, pluralistic, participatory, ecologically grounded, and open to endless creative becoming.

The post The Aesthetic State (interview question #21) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

Let me pose a critical question and invite a response. It seems that your entire worldview is founded upon a form of ‘aestheticism’ that at least risks being interpreted as mere Dandyism. There is also a risk that your ‘aestheticisation of politics’ just opens the door to fascism, which was a concern of theorists like Walter Benjamin. How would you respond to such critical interpretations of your aesthetic philosophy?

Yes, I take those criticisms very seriously, and in fact, I address them directly in several essays. The concerns are entirely legitimate because the language of aesthetics has often been associated with elitism, decadence, political irresponsibility, or authoritarian spectacle. So if one is going to defend an aesthetic philosophy today, one has to proceed carefully and critically.

Let me begin with the charge of Dandyism. Historically, aestheticism has sometimes been interpreted as a retreat from ethical and political engagement into private refinement, style, and cultivated detachment – ‘art for art’s sake’ understood as a form of aristocratic withdrawal from the suffering of the world. Certain strands of late 19th-century aestheticism certainly lent themselves to that interpretation.

But that is emphatically not the form of aestheticism I defend. As will be clear by now, my conception of aesthetics is not based on luxury consumption, elite taste, or detached self-indulgence. In fact, it is almost the opposite. The aesthetic orientation I defend is inseparable from ecological limits, material sufficiency, democratic participation, and solidarity. As we’ve discussed, the archetype of my philosophy is not the idle dandy drifting through salons but the ‘poet-farmer’ – someone grounded in the material realities of life, contributing to community and subsistence while cultivating creativity and beauty within modest ecological conditions.

Again, this is why William Morris matters so much to me. Morris already recognised the danger of reducing aesthetics to elite consumption. His response was to democratise art by integrating beauty into everyday labour and ordinary life. I inherit that project directly. When I speak of an ‘aesthetics of existence’, I am not talking about curating luxurious lifestyles for privileged individuals. I am talking about reclaiming creativity, craft, meaning, and aesthetic participation as universal human capacities.

There is also an important distinction between aestheticisation in the fascist sense and what I would call the democratisation of aesthetics. Walter Benjamin’s critique remains important here. Fascism aestheticised politics by transforming mass politics into spectacle – mythic pageantry, choreographed rallies, heroic imagery, militarised symbolism, ecstatic collective identity. But crucially, fascism left underlying property relations and structures of domination intact. It gave the masses an aesthetic experience of participation while preserving exploitation and hierarchy. Fascism reveals the terrible danger of aesthetics detached from ethics, democracy, and critical reflection. Beauty and myth can absolutely become instruments of domination.

However, I would also say that Benjamin’s warning does not invalidate aesthetics as such. The question is not whether aesthetics will shape politics – it always does – but how. As Jacque Rancière has put it: ‘Politics is aesthetic in principle.’ Every political order mobilises symbols, narratives, myths, architecture, rituals, media, and forms of sensibility. Liberal consumer capitalism also aestheticises everyday life through advertising, branding, spectacle, digital imagery, and aspirational consumer identities. The difference is that its aestheticisation often appears normalised and invisible. So the real question becomes: What kind of aesthetic culture cultivates freedom rather than domination?

This is where Schiller and Marcuse return as decisive for me. The aesthetic philosophy I defend is explicitly anti-authoritarian because it understands genuine aesthetic development as the cultivation of free, reflective, imaginative, and non-dominated human beings. Beauty, in Schiller’s sense, educates desire beyond barbarism and coercion. Marcuse similarly sees authentic art as preserving the possibility of negation and critique against oppressive systems.

Fascist aesthetics, by contrast, suppresses ambiguity, plurality, vulnerability, and freedom. It subordinates individuals to mythic unity, obedience, violence, and power. It instrumentalises beauty for domination. My project moves in the opposite direction entirely: toward decentralisation, ecological humility, voluntary simplicity, democratic participation, and the flourishing of diverse forms of life within biophysical limits.

Indeed, one could argue that fascism emerges partly from the frustration of aesthetic and existential needs within alienated societies. Consumer capitalism often leaves people spiritually empty, disconnected, and hungry for meaning, belonging, ritual, transcendence, and beauty. Fascist and popularist movements exploit those unmet longings by redirecting them into nationalism, militarism, mythic identity, and authoritarian spectacle. Perhaps this is what we are seeing today in some Western nations. 

That is one reason I think aesthetic questions are too important to abandon. If emancipatory politics ignores the aesthetic dimension of life altogether, reactionary movements will continue to occupy that terrain. Human beings are not motivated by material interests alone. We are moved by symbols, narratives, emotions, rituals, myths, and experiences of beauty and transcendence. Any transformative politics that neglects this dimension remains incomplete.

This also explains why I reject purely technocratic environmentalism. Ecological civilisation cannot be built through austerity, managerial control, and moralistic sacrifice. As I have explained, it requires compelling visions of beauty, meaning, creativity, and flourishing within limits. Otherwise ecological politics risks appearing as nothing more than deprivation administered bureaucratically.

Another important point is that my conception of aesthetics remains tragic and self-critical. I do not present beauty as innocent, pure, or politically neutral. Beauty can seduce, manipulate, deceive, distract, and dominate. Art can liberate, but it can also become propaganda, decadence, or commodity spectacle. That ambiguity is intrinsic to aesthetics itself, which is why aesthetic education matters so much. The goal is not passive enchantment but critical sensibility – the cultivation of people capable of perceiving beauty without surrendering autonomy or ethical judgement.

So yes, the dangers you raise are real. Aesthetic philosophy always risks decadence, escapism, irrationalism, or authoritarian spectacle if detached from ethics and democratic, participatory politics. But I would argue that the answer is not to abandon aesthetics. The answer is to radicalise and democratise aesthetics – to reconnect beauty with justice, freedom, ecology, and the flourishing of ordinary life.

In the end, I think the struggle over aesthetics is unavoidable because every civilisation expresses itself aesthetically. The question is whether our aesthetic order deepens domination and ecological destruction, or whether it helps cultivate freer, more beautiful, and more sustainable forms of human existence. In a world increasingly overshadowed by ecological and existential crisis, living with dignity does not depend upon certainty of success. One can still rebel against injustice, cultivate beauty, and affirm life – even beneath darkening skies.

The post Dandyism and Fascism (interview question #20) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

Your defence of aesthetic education is coherent, but you never suggest that societal transformation can be achieved solely at the personal or cultural level. In your engagement with Herbert Marcuse, you speak of an ‘aesthetics of revolt’. What did Marcuse have to offer us in terms of understanding the political relevance of art and aesthetics? What did he mean when he spoke of ‘Society as a Work of Art’?

One of the dangers of aesthetic philosophy is that it can drift into quietism, individualism, or cultural idealism – as though changing consciousness alone were sufficient to transform society. I have tried very consciously to avoid that mistake. Aesthetic transformation and structural transformation must occur together. That is one reason Herbert Marcuse became such an important figure for me. He understood more clearly than almost anyone that aesthetics is political precisely because domination penetrates consciousness, desire, imagination, and everyday life itself.

Marcuse begins from the insight that advanced industrial capitalism is not sustained merely through force or economic necessity. It also reproduces itself by shaping subjectivity. Consumer societies manufacture desires, integrate dissent into spectacle and consumption, and train people to identify freedom with participation in systems of production and consumption that actually diminish human flourishing. This creates what Marcuse famously called the ‘one-dimensional’ society – a civilisation in which imagination and critical consciousness become flattened.

What fascinated Marcuse was that art retains the capacity to negate the existing order. Great works of art reveal possibilities of experience and modes of being that exceed the dominant reality principle. Art preserves the memory and anticipation of freedom. It discloses what life could be like beyond alienation, domination, and instrumental rationality.

This is why Marcuse speaks of the ‘Great Refusal’. Authentic art refuses to reconcile itself fully with the existing social order. Even (or especially) when not overtly political, art can become politically significant by preserving experiences of beauty, sensuality, play, reconciliation, and freedom that capitalist society systematically represses or commodifies. I found this very illuminating because it helped me connect aesthetics to ecological and civilisational critique. Consumer capitalism does not merely exploit ecosystems externally; it colonises the imagination internally. It narrows the horizon of possible futures. Many people literally struggle to imagine a meaningful life beyond consumer affluence and economic growth. That imaginative captivity is one of the greatest obstacles to ecological civilisation.

Marcuse helps us understand, therefore, why aesthetics matters as a political force. Art can rupture the seeming inevitability of the present. It can awaken what he called the ‘new sensibility’ – a transformed mode of perception and desire no longer organised around domination, accumulation, and repression. In my own terms, aesthetic experience can help cultivate the transition from homo economicus to homo aestheticus.

And this is where the idea of an ‘aesthetics of revolt’ emerges. Revolt is not only political in the narrow institutional sense; it is existential and aesthetic as well. It involves refusing the degraded forms of life imposed by industrial consumer civilisation and creating alternative forms of living grounded in beauty, sufficiency, creativity, solidarity, and ecological belonging.

Importantly, however, Marcuse was not advocating art as propaganda. He was very wary of reducing art to direct political messaging because that collapses art back into instrumentality. Art’s radical potential lies largely in its autonomy – its ability to disclose experiences and possibilities irreducible to the logic of the market or the state. A poem, a piece of music, or a beautiful way of life can become politically subversive precisely because it reveals dimensions of human flourishing excluded by the dominant system.

Now, when Marcuse speaks of ‘Society as a Work of Art’, he is extending this aesthetic principle or metaphor beyond individual artworks toward civilisation itself. He imagines a form of society in which the aesthetic dimensions of existence – beauty, play, creativity, sensuous fulfillment, harmony with nature, meaningful labour – become organising principles of social life rather than marginal luxuries. I sympathise with this view very much. In SMPLCTY, I maintain that ecological civilisation must become aesthetic at its foundations. By this I do not mean superficial beautification or lifestyle consumerism. I mean restructuring society so that work, production, technology, architecture, education, agriculture, politics, and community life are organised around the cultivation of meaningful and beautiful forms of existence.

Marcuse understood that capitalism treats both nature and human beings instrumentally – as resources to be exploited for productivity and growth. ‘Society as a Work of Art’ points toward another civilisational logic entirely. Instead of maximising production and consumption, society would seek to maximise opportunities for flourishing, creativity, play, contemplation, and sensuous experience while minimising domination and ecological destruction. This aligns very closely with my conception of SMPLCTY. I describe ecological civilisation as a society where life itself increasingly becomes an aesthetic project. Human beings would live more simply in material terms while cultivating immense richness in culture, art, community, philosophy, ritual, music, craft, and ecological participation. As we’ve discussed, the ‘poet-farmer’ becomes the archetype for this transformed form of subjectivity.

Marcuse also helped me see that the ecological crisis is not only a problem of excessive consumption but of distorted desire. Industrial civilisation channels immense human energies toward accumulation, competition, status, and domination. But if those same energies were redirected aesthetically – toward art, beauty, play, contemplation, and creative participation – then humanity could potentially flourish with vastly reduced material and energetic throughput. This is one reason I say that art and aesthetic experience may be among the best ways of ‘living more with less’.

There is also a utopian dimension here that I think is crucial. Marcuse insisted that without utopian imagination, politics becomes purely administrative – trapped within the assumptions of the existing order. Art preserves the image of reconciliation even when reality falls tragically short of it. Of course, neither Marcuse nor I believe a perfect society is achievable. Tragedy, conflict, suffering, and finitude remain part of the human condition. But SMPLCTY offers itself as an orienting vision – a way of imagining civilisation not as an engine of endless growth and domination, but as a collective experiment in creating more beautiful, free, and ecologically integrated forms of life.

I admit that ‘imagineers’ like me are easily dismissed as utopian dreamers or escapists who lack a sense of political reality. But just as vision without politics is naïve, politics without vision is dangerous. We must dream before we shape our politics, or else we will never awaken from the existing nightmare of pragmatism without principle. In any case, utopian thinkers should never expect anyone to accept their dreams. The purpose of presenting a utopian vision like SMPLCTY is to provoke people to dream for themselves.

Ultimately, what Marcuse teaches us is that aesthetics is not politically irrelevant because it concerns beauty and pleasure. Quite the opposite. The struggle over beauty, desire, imagination, and sensibility is one of the deepest political struggles of all, because it concerns the question of what human beings might yet become.

The post Society as a Work of Art (interview question #19) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

If art, broadly defined, is central to what it means to be human in a cosmological process of creative evolution, ‘aesthetic education’ must play a critical role in transitioning to the ecological civilisation you label SMPLCTY. Can you offer a few more words on why aesthetic education is so important to societal transformation?

Yes, absolutely. If one accepts the broad philosophical orientation I develop in my books SMPLCTY and Homo Aestheticus – namely, that human beings are fundamentally aesthetic creatures and that civilisation itself is shaped by forms of sensibility, imagination, and desire – then aesthetic education becomes indispensable. I believe it is the hinge upon which the entire civilisational transition turns.

The reason is at once straightforward yet profound: ecological civilisation cannot emerge merely through technological innovation, policy reform, or economic restructuring, necessary though those things are. The polycrisis we face is also a crisis of consciousness, culture, and desire. Consumer capitalism persists not only because of institutions and power structures, but because people have been educated – aesthetically educated – into particular ways of perceiving and valuing the world.

We learn to desire consumption. We learn to associate freedom with affluence, status with accumulation, happiness with acquisition, progress with growth. Advertising, entertainment, architecture, urban design, digital media, education systems, and work cultures all function pedagogically. They shape sensibility and aspiration. In this sense, industrial civilisation already possesses a very powerful form of aesthetic education – one oriented toward consumerism. Culture shapes our tastes, for better or for worse.

This is one reason why Plato remains relevant. He understood that art, music, poetry, myth, and education shape the soul and therefore shape the polis. Human beings often become what their culture trains them to admire, imitate, and desire. Schiller radicalises and deepens this insight by arguing that freedom itself depends upon aesthetic formation. Without aesthetic education, human beings remain fragmented – pulled between crude appetite and abstract rationalism. Beauty harmonises those dimensions and cultivates the capacities required for genuine freedom.

I find this persuasive. Politics cannot succeed if it attempts to impose ecological restraint upon populations whose desires remain fundamentally consumeristic. A civilisation addicted to growth cannot simply legislate itself into sufficiency while leaving underlying conceptions of the good life untouched. There must be an aesthetic transformation or re-education of tastes. This idea is crucial. The transition to SMPLCTY depends on people increasingly experiencing simpler, lower-impact forms of life not as deprivation but as meaningful, beautiful, and liberating. This requires new sensibilities, new aspirations, new aesthetic ideals, and ultimately new archetypes of flourishing.

That is one reason I develop figures like the ‘poet-farmer’ and homo aestheticus. They are not merely descriptive categories; they are pedagogical and mythopoetic images intended to reorient the imagination. Human beings need compelling visions of what a good life within ecological limits might actually look and feel like. Facts and warnings alone are insufficient.

Aesthetic education therefore involves far more than exposure to the fine arts, important though that may be. It concerns the cultivation of perception itself – learning how to experience beauty, meaning, sufficiency, and connectedness differently. It involves recovering attentiveness to nature, craft, slowness, community, ritual, embodiment, and creative participation in material provision. It means learning to see richness where consumer culture sees lack.

This is why thinkers like Thoreau and Morris are especially important to me. Both understood that civilisation shapes desire aesthetically. Thoreau showed how simplicity could become existentially abundant rather than impoverished. Morris showed how labour, architecture, and everyday life could become infused with beauty and creativity rather than alienation. Both were, in a deep sense, aesthetic educators.

Critical theorist Herbert Marcuse also influenced my thinking here. He argued that advanced industrial societies colonise imagination itself, narrowing the horizons of possibility. Under such conditions, art retains political significance because it preserves alternative visions of reality – glimpses of reconciliation, freedom, and non-alienated existence. I discuss this in terms of ‘aesthetic revolution’ or ‘aesthetic revolt’. Art can disrupt the apparent inevitability of the existing order by allowing people to feel that another mode of life is possible. Should a new sensibility arise, the emotional energy would be at hand to bring new worlds into existence through creative and sustained collective action.

Importantly, aesthetic education is not propaganda or indoctrination. Quite the opposite. Properly understood, it expands freedom by cultivating more reflective, critical, sensitive, imaginative, and autonomous human beings. It teaches us not what to think, but how to perceive more deeply and live more consciously. And I believe the aesthetic revolution needs to precede the transformation in political economy, for otherwise the new world will merely reproduce the old.

There is also a spiritual dimension to this. Industrial civilisation systematically distracts attention. People become hurried, fragmented, overstimulated, and disconnected from both nature and themselves. Aesthetic education can become a practice of reawakening – learning once again how to encounter the world contemplatively and receptively. As I mentioned earlier, in one passage of SMPLCTY, I discuss the story of the great violinist Joshua Bell playing Bach anonymously in a subway station while commuters rushed past without noticing the beauty before them. That anecdote symbolises something important about modern consciousness: our forms of life increasingly filter out our ordinary access to beauty and the sublime. The world is more beautiful than we know, but we are failing to pay attention.

Aesthetic education attempts to reverse that impoverishment of perception. It trains the capacities of wonder, attentiveness, and appreciation. It reminds us that beauty is not scarce. The stars, forests, oceans, music, friendship, language, craft, and creative labour all remain available sources of meaning – often requiring far less material throughput than consumer capitalism demands. This is why aesthetic education becomes essential for ecological civilisation. The transition to SMPLCTY ultimately depends not only on new infrastructures, technologies, or economies, but on new ways of seeing and feeling. Human beings must come to experience participation, sufficiency, creativity, and ecological belonging as intrinsically rewarding forms of life.

And perhaps this is Schiller’s deepest insight: freedom cannot simply be imposed externally through laws or institutions. A truly free civilisation requires human beings who have themselves become capable of freedom – noble souls whose desires, sensibilities, and imaginations have been aesthetically cultivated beyond domination, compulsive consumption, and barbarism. In that sense, aesthetic education is not peripheral to politics. It is the precondition for any enduring civilisational transformation.

The post The Role of Aesthetic Education (interview question #18) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

You’ve spoken often about how ‘homo aestheticus’ is reflective of our human nature. However, the idea of human nature implies something fixed and universal, something that determines the outcome. How do you reconcile this constraining idea of homo aestheticus as being reflective of our human nature, while at the same time arguing, with thinkers like Nietzsche and Foucault, that we, human beings, must create ourselves as a work of art?

Yes, this is an important tension, and one I have considered carefully. On the surface, there does seem to be a contradiction. If there is such a thing as ‘human nature’, does that not imply a fixed essence? And if human beings possess a fixed essence, how can we also speak coherently of radical self-creation, existential freedom, or treating the meaning of life as an aesthetic project?

My answer is that homo aestheticus should not be understood as a rigid or deterministic essence in the traditional metaphysical sense. I am not proposing a static blueprint of ‘the human’ that mechanically determines behaviour or destiny. Rather, I am trying to describe a dynamic condition of openness, creativity, and self-transcendence that appears characteristic of our species. In other words, what may be most fundamental about human beings is precisely our relative indeterminacy.

Seemingly unique amongst animals, human beings are radically unfinished creatures. We are born into symbolic worlds rather than fixed behavioural programs. As storytelling creatures, our experience is mediated by language – by myths and metaphors – and yet we create language and thus the atmosphere of our existence. Culture, language, imagination, ritual, myth, institutions, technologies, and aesthetic practices all shape who we are and what we become. That is why existentialists like Sartre could say that ‘existence precedes essence’. Human life is not fully scripted in advance. We are continually involved in processes of interpretation and self-formation. There will never come a time when all possible descriptions of the world have been exhausted.

This is also why Nietzsche and Foucault are so important. Nietzsche understood that once the old metaphysical certainties collapse – once ‘God is dead’, in his provocative formulation – human beings confront the terrifying and exhilarating burden of self-creation. Values are no longer simply discovered as eternal truths; they must be created. Foucault develops a related idea through his notion of an ‘aesthetics of existence’, where ethics becomes a creative practice of shaping one’s life rather than conforming passively to externally imposed norms that lack objective foundation.

I draw heavily on both of these thinkers. In SMPLCTY, I often emphasise that human beings relate to themselves like artists relate to raw materials – like sculptors shaping clay. We are simultaneously creatures and creators. Sartre captures this insight precisely when he says that ‘we can always make something out of what we have been made into’. There are features of life that are ‘given’, but they can be reshaped.

So when I speak of homo aestheticus as human nature, I mean that human beings possess an intrinsic orientation toward creativity, meaning-making, aesthetic experience, and self-fashioning. But the content and expression of those capacities remain radically open-ended. There is no final or fixed form the human must become. Indeed, I would say that the ‘nature’ of homo aestheticus is precisely to exceed fixed definitions. The aesthetic dimension of existence introduces novelty, experimentation, interpretation, and plurality. Human beings continually reinterpret themselves culturally, ethically, politically, spiritually, and artistically. That process never concludes.

This is one reason I reject essentialist or biologically reductionist accounts of humanity, especially the model of homo economicus. The idea that humans are fundamentally utility-maximising consumers mistakes a historically specific form of subjectivity produced by capitalism for a universal essence. By contrast, homo aestheticus names a much more expansive and flexible conception of humanity – one grounded in our capacities for imagination, creativity, symbolic world-making, and existential self-transformation.

At the same time, I do not go all the way toward a purely postmodern notion of the self as infinitely malleable or ‘radically free’ in the Sartrean sense. Human beings remain embodied, ecological, vulnerable, finite creatures. We are shaped by biology, mortality, desire, affect, and material conditions. There are limits to our freedom. We cannot simply invent ourselves arbitrarily from nothing.

This is where the ecological perspective also becomes important. The self is not an isolated sovereign consciousness floating free of the world. We emerge within social, historical, and biophysical realities that both constrain and enable us. The project of self-creation therefore always unfolds within conditions we did not choose. Again, this is why the sculptor-and-clay metaphor matters. The artist never creates ex nihilo; creation always involves responding to materials already given.

In this respect, aesthetic self-creation should not be confused with neoliberal individualism or lifestyle consumerism. Contemporary capitalism constantly tells people to ‘reinvent themselves’, but usually this means curating market identities through consumption and branding. That is not the form of aesthetic existence I defend. Genuine self-creation requires freedom from domination, meaningful participation in community, material sufficiency, and opportunities for non-alienated creative activity.

This also explains why politics matters so much. If human beings are self-forming creatures, then the organisation of society profoundly shapes the kinds of selves that become possible. Consumer capitalism produces one kind of subjectivity: competitive, anxious, acquisitive, distracted. An ecological civilisation grounded in SMPLCTY would seek to cultivate different capacities – creativity, contemplation, solidarity, ecological belonging, aesthetic sensitivity, and meaningful autonomy.

So the tension you identify is not something I try to eliminate entirely. In fact, I think it expresses something essential about the human condition itself. We are neither fixed essences nor infinitely free abstractions. We are finite beings condemned – and privileged – to participate in our own becoming. And that, ultimately, is why aesthetics becomes so important philosophically. Art offers a model for understanding human existence itself: constrained but creative, bounded yet open-ended, shaped by necessity but never reducible to it. The human being is not a completed object but an unfinished work in progress.

The post An Aesthetics of Existence (interview question #17) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

How do these ideas you are discussing lead to what you call a ‘politics of beauty’?

I find Schiller’s perspective important not just aesthetically but politically. Modern societies often oscillate between two forms of domination: consumerist hedonism on one side and technocratic rationalism on the other. We are encouraged either to indulge desires unreflectively or submit to systems of bureaucratic control and economic calculation – or even to embody both excesses at once. Schiller offers another possibility: aesthetic education as the cultivation of free and integrated human beings.

This relates directly to my perspective on homo aestheticus. I argue throughout my book SMPLCTY that human beings are not merely economic agents but creative and aesthetic creatures whose capacities remain underdeveloped within consumer capitalism. Schiller helps explain why aesthetics matters politically: because beauty shapes subjectivity itself. A civilisation that suppresses aesthetic development produces alienated, fragmented, and manipulable individuals.

We see again, then, that it is beauty that can give birth to humanity because aesthetic experience awakens specifically human capacities – imagination, empathy, contemplation, self-reflection, symbolic thought, creativity, and the ability to relate freely to oneself and the world. The experience of beauty pulls us momentarily beyond mere survival and utility into a freer relation with existence. This is why I describe the aesthetic realm as politically transformative rather than escapist. In one of my essays I discuss what Schiller called ‘aesthetic education’ and what Marcuse later called ‘aesthetic revolution’ – ideas to which we might need to return. Both thinkers understood that liberation requires more than institutional reform. It requires transformed aesthetic sensibilities; that is, transformed desires, imaginations, and conceptions of the good life.

Beauty matters because it reveals possibilities of being otherwise. A beautiful artwork, landscape, melody, or way of life discloses that reality need not remain trapped within existing systems of domination and ugliness. Beauty contains a utopian surplus. It intimates reconciliation – between self and world, freedom and necessity, humanity and nature – even if only fleetingly. Most of all, beauty exemplifies balance between form and content. And ‘balance’ is a virtue sorely lacking today. 

There is also a deeper existential dimension to this. As we discussed earlier, suffering and finitude remain intrinsic to existence. Beauty does not abolish tragedy. But beauty can momentarily redeem or transfigure suffering by allowing us to experience meaning, harmony, intensity, and connectedness despite the fractured condition of reality. That is part of what is meant by the ‘aesthetic justification’ of existence. We cannot always make sense of life, but through art and beauty, we can embrace it with all its flaws and imperfections. This is not a rational goal but a psychological one. We don’t need to ‘prove’ that existence is justified; we just need to feel it so. That is arguably the most important role of art and aesthetics – to give form to suffering, allowing us to affirm existence.   

Importantly, then, we must not reduce beauty to subjective prettiness or decorative pleasure. Beauty, as I understand it, includes intensity, depth, tragic grandeur, even dissonance. There can be beauty in resilience, simplicity, solidarity, ecological harmony, and acts of creative resistance against a damaged world. This is one reason ecological civilisation must become aesthetic at its foundations. If humanity is to move beyond consumer capitalism, it will not be enough to impose austerity or technocratic management from above. People must come to experience sufficiency, simplicity, participation, and ecological belonging as beautiful forms of life. That requires an aesthetic transformation of consciousness itself. A transformation of taste.

Schiller understood that politics ultimately depends on culture and sensibility. Before there can be a truly free society, there must be human beings capable of freedom – beings whose desires have been aesthetically educated beyond domination, greed, savagery, and barbarism. In that sense, beauty is not a luxury at the margins of civilisation. It is one of the forces through which humanity becomes human at all.

The post Toward a Politics of Beauty (interview question #16) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

Earlier we considered Schiller’s anthropological thesis that beauty gave birth to humanity. What did Schiller mean when he said that it is only through beauty that we arrive at freedom? 

This brings us into contact with some of Schiller’s most important philosophical ideas. Schiller argued that human beings are divided between two fundamental drives: the ‘sense drive’, which binds us to our instincts, desires, and embodiment, and the ‘form drive’, which draws us toward reason, abstraction, logic, and law. Left unresolved, this division produces either savagery (domination by instinct) or barbarism (domination by reason). What mediates these drives is what Schiller calls the ‘play drive’, and it is through aesthetic experience – through beauty – that this play drive becomes active. 

In beauty, we are both sensuous and rational, both embodied and free. Schiller asserted that it is in that aesthetic state of consciousness that we become fully human. This solution to the divided human condition is not a regression to instinct, nor a domination by reason, but a harmonious balance achieved through the play drive – through aesthetic experience. Beauty, he wrote, is the ‘form of freedom’, in the sense that free individuals have achieved a balance between the sense drive and the form drive, in the same way that a beautiful work of art has achieved balance between form and content. 

I sympathise with this Schillerian idea that aesthetic experience remains our best, and perhaps our only, path to reconciling our divided nature. Human existence is torn between these two poles: nature and reason, impulse and law, body and mind, emotion and logic. To become fully human, we need to resolve or harmonise this tension. Beauty may have separated us from nature, but it is also through beauty – through art, through the experience of the wild, through the cultivation of aesthetic sensibility – that we can begin to restore a kind of harmony within ourselves. 

So beauty is both our creator and our redeemer. It gave birth to us by awakening self-consciousness and freedom. And it offers us, still, the possibility of becoming fully human – not by returning to a lost unity (although that is one way to look at things), but by consciously harmonising the divided elements of our nature. In that sense, homo aestheticus names not only what we are, but what we are still in the process of becoming.

So yes, Schiller is pivotal to my understanding of aesthetics and politics. Modernity tends to treat beauty as subjective decoration or luxury – something secondary to economics, technology, or politics. Schiller overturns that hierarchy completely. For him, beauty is formative. It shapes the human being itself. The sense and form drives are held in proper balance by the play drive. 

That is why Schiller famously declared that ‘man only plays when he is in the full sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.’ By ‘play’, he does not mean meaningless frivolity. He means creative, non-instrumental activity undertaken freely for its own sake. Art becomes crucial because it allows human beings to experience freedom sensuously rather than merely conceptualise it abstractly.

This is what he implies when he says that ‘through beauty we arrive at freedom.’ Beauty educates desire. It refines sensibility. It trains us to move beyond crude appetite and mechanical obedience without repressing our embodied nature. The beautiful soul, in Schiller’s sense, is someone whose inclinations and ethical life have become harmonised rather than violently divided.

The post Freedom through Beauty (interview question #15)  first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

As well as music, you often speak of poetry and the poetic, which is perhaps not surprising since you are a writer with a love of language. Why is poetry important to your work? And why do you feel it is necessary or important to speak of life and the universe as having a ‘poetic’ nature or quality to it?

Poetry is a central trope that informs how I interpret existence, though perhaps not always in the conventional literary sense. When I speak of ‘the poetic’, I mean something broader and more fundamental than simply writing poems. I mean a mode of perceiving, inhabiting, and responding to existence – a way of encountering the world with heightened attentiveness, imagination, sensibility, and openness to mystery.

In that respect, poetry is not merely one art form among others; it is almost a disposition toward reality itself. The poetic names a way of seeing that resists reducing existence to utility, calculation, and instrumental reason. Modern industrial civilisation tends to approach the world primarily as a ‘resource’ – something to exploit, quantify, optimise, and consume. The poetic attitude interrupts that orientation. It allows beings to appear not merely as objects of use but as presences worthy of contemplation, wonder, reverence, and aesthetic appreciation.

This is one reason poetry matters politically and ecologically. The ecological crisis is not merely a technological or economic problem; it is also a crisis of perception and imagination. A civilisation incapable of seeing beauty in the living world will inevitably destroy it. As I said earlier, if forests become nothing but timber reserves, rivers become drainage systems, and human beings become labour inputs or consumers, then exploitation follows almost automatically. The poetic dimension of consciousness re-enchants the world against this flattening logic.

Human beings do not merely occupy physical space biologically; we inhabit worlds of meaning, symbol, imagination, and interpretation. We dwell through language, stories, rituals, myths, and aesthetic practices. Poetry discloses dimensions of existence that purely technical language cannot adequately grasp. This matters because many of the realities I am trying to explore in SMPLCTY and Homo Aestheticus – beauty, meaning, suffering, transcendence, creativity, ecological belonging, cosmic finitude – cannot be fully captured in purely analytic or scientific discourse. Rational analysis is indispensable, of course. I rely heavily on ecological economics, energy studies, political theory, and philosophy throughout my writing. But there are existential truths that concepts alone struggle to communicate.

That is why I often turn toward mythopoetic language, metaphor, archetype, and speculative cosmological imagery. When I speak of the ‘Will to Art’, the ‘poet-farmer’, ‘creative evolution’, or ‘the aesthetic universe’, I am not presenting scientific theories in the narrow sense. I am attempting to articulate orienting visions – symbolic frameworks through which human beings might interpret their place in existence more meaningfully.

Poetry becomes important because human beings are not sustained by facts alone. We live through narratives, images, symbols, and myths. Consumer capitalism understands this perfectly, which is why it saturates society with advertising, spectacle, and aspirational imagery. The ecological movement often fails because it speaks too often only in the language of crisis, statistics, and sacrifice. Those are necessary, but insufficient. Civilisations are ultimately moved by visions of beauty and meaning.

I think poetry also matters because existence itself exceeds conceptual closure. Reality is mysterious. Consciousness is mysterious. Being itself is mysterious. The universe gives rise to beauty, love, music, grief, creativity, and self-awareness – and we still do not fully understand what any of this means. Poetry honours that excess of meaning. It resists premature reductionism.

So when I describe the universe as having a ‘poetic’ quality, I do not mean that nature is literally composed like a poem by some divine author. Rather, I mean that existence displays qualities we ordinarily associate with the poetic: creativity, ambiguity, rhythm, emergence, metaphorical depth, emotional resonance, and inexhaustibility of language and interpretation. The world is not simply a machine; it is something much stranger and more expressive than that.

Human consciousness itself reveals this. We are beings who transform raw experience into stories, songs, rituals, philosophies, artworks, and symbolic worlds. We cannot help but interpret existence poetically because meaning itself is fundamentally imaginative and aesthetic. This is why I say that life itself can become an aesthetic project. We are not merely organisms adapting mechanically to environments. We are self-interpreting beings continually shaping our identities, values, and forms of life. In that sense, everyone is already participating in a kind of lived poetry, whether consciously or not.

Poetry is especially important in an age of ecological crisis because we are confronting not merely policy failures but spiritual exhaustion. The dominant myths of endless growth, technological salvation, and consumer fulfillment are losing credibility. But human beings cannot live without orienting narratives. We need new stories capable of guiding us toward ecological civilisation.

That is partly what I am trying to contribute through concepts like SMPLCTY and homo aestheticus. These are not just academic categories. They are mythopoetic attempts to imagine other ways of being human on Earth – ways that are grounded not in domination and accumulation, but in beauty, sufficiency, creativity, and participation in the deeper rhythms of existence.

Perhaps poetry matters most because it teaches us how to dwell within uncertainty and finitude without despair. A poem does not eliminate mystery; it intensifies and illuminates it. Likewise, the goal of philosophy, at least as I understand it, is not necessarily to solve existence like a technical problem, but to help us inhabit existence more beautifully and truthfully while the mystery remains. 

The post The Poetic Conception of Life (interview question #14) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

In a body of work that celebrates art and aesthetics in all their forms and variations, music seems to hold a special place in your philosophical perspective. Why is this? What’s special about music? 

Yes, I think that is true. Although I defend a very broad conception of art – one that includes not only music, poetry, painting, and sculpture but also craft, ritual, architecture, gardening, and even the art of living itself – music indeed occupies a privileged place in my worldview. Partly this reflects personal experience as a passionate but amateur musician. Music has probably affected me more deeply and consistently than any other art form. It has accompanied every stage of my life – intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. But I also think there are philosophical reasons why music holds such a special status.

My thinking here engages Schopenhauer and Nietzsche quite closely. Schopenhauer famously argued that music differs fundamentally from the other arts because it does not merely represent appearances in the world; it expresses something deeper and more immediate about existence – it expresses ‘the Will’ itself. Painting represents objects (or takes form as an object even if it expresses an idea or feeling). Literature narrates events and characters using words and concepts. Sculpture shapes material forms. But music bypasses conceptual mediation in a very direct way. It reaches beneath language and rationality into something elemental or ethereal.

Now, I do not fully endorse Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the ‘Will’ in the strict sense, but I think he was right to recognise that music touches dimensions of experience that concepts alone cannot capture. Even (or especially) without words, music communicates moods, tensions, longings, ecstasies, sorrows, and transcendence with extraordinary immediacy. It reveals that human beings are not merely rational creatures but affective, embodied, rhythmic beings.

Nietzsche radicalised this insight. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), music becomes associated with the Dionysian dimension of existence – the dissolution of the isolated ego into a deeper experience of vitality, chaos, unity, and becoming. This contrasts with the Apollonian dimension of representation epitomised by sculpture. Music can momentarily suspend the rigid boundaries of the self. It allows us to feel existence rather than merely interpret it intellectually. 

I think music also exemplifies the Will to Art in a particularly pure form. Consider what music actually is. It is patterned vibration organised into meaningful experience. Nothing material remains after the performance ends. Music unfolds in time and then vanishes. It is ephemeral, intangible, and finite – and yet it can move us more profoundly than many supposedly ‘practical’ things.

That impermanence gives music special existential significance. Music becomes a kind of metaphor for life itself. A symphony exists only in its unfolding. Once completed, it disappears into silence. Human existence is similar. We unfold temporally, briefly, beautifully, tragically – and then we vanish. That is why I paraphrase T.S. Eliot near the end of SMPLCTY by saying: we are the music, while the music lasts.

Music therefore becomes an aesthetic model for how to inhabit finitude. Its beauty depends precisely on transience. A musical phrase matters because it passes. Silence is not the negation of music but part of its structure. What strikes me about this insight is that it also reflects the idea that less is more. If there were no rests, pauses, or silence in music, it would be too much, too full, too busy and chaotic. Likewise, mortality and finitude may not negate meaning but intensify it.

There is also a communal and ecological dimension to music that I find important. Music is often participatory rather than consumptive. People gather to sing, dance, celebrate, mourn, ritualise, and remember together. Long before industrial capitalism turned music into a commodified industry, music was woven into everyday communal existence. In many traditional societies, music was not something performed by specialists for passive audiences; it was a shared social practice integrated into work, ritual, spirituality, and seasonal life.

That resonates strongly with my vision of ecological civilisation. In a society organised around sufficiency rather than consumer excess, low-impact forms of richness become increasingly important. Music is a perfect example. It can generate immense beauty, emotional depth, and communal meaning with very modest material and energetic requirements. A guitar around a fire may contain more existential wealth than vast quantities of industrial consumption.

Music also reveals something important about human freedom and creativity. There are only a finite number of notes available within a musical system, yet the possible combinations are effectively inexhaustible. I use a similar metaphor in SMPLCTY when I say that humanity is not limited by ecological limits, in the same way a pianist is not limited by the 88 keys of a piano. There will never come a time when all the beautiful sonatas have been written. Within finite conditions, infinite creative variation remains possible. That is a crucial philosophical insight for ecological civilisation. Limits do not abolish creativity; they give it form. Scarcity begets creativity. 

At the cosmological level, music also seems to capture something about the dynamic nature of existence itself. Reality is not a static substance but movement, rhythm, vibration, process, becoming. Music expresses temporality more directly than perhaps any other art form. It mirrors the flowing, unfolding, pre-conceptual character of existence. 

And finally, music matters because it can redeem suffering without denying it. Some of the most beautiful music ever composed emerges from sorrow, longing, and tragedy. Music does not necessarily resolve suffering intellectually, but it can transform suffering into something luminous and shareable. In doing so, it offers perhaps the clearest example of what Nietzsche meant by the ‘aesthetic justification of existence’. In a finite and uncertain universe, music teaches us how beauty can arise precisely through fragility and transience. That, to me, is one of the deepest truths art has to offer. As Nietzsche wrote: ‘Life without music would be a mistake.’

The post Music (interview question #13) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are two thinkers who have a lot to say about suffering. What place does suffering hold in your worldview? And to what extent, despite the prevalence of suffering, can we say that there is nevertheless an ‘aesthetic justification’ of existence?

Schopenhauer, to my mind, remains one of the great truth-tellers of philosophy. Like the Buddha, Schopenhauer recognised with extraordinary clarity that suffering is not incidental to life but structurally embedded within it. Desire perpetually outruns satisfaction. Organisms survive through struggle and violence. Conscious beings experience anxiety, loss, boredom, frustration, illness, grief, ageing, and death. Even pleasure is fleeting and often defined negatively – as the temporary cessation of pain. Schopenhauer refused the shallow optimism that portrays existence as fundamentally harmonious or benevolent. I think that refusal is intellectually and morally important.

At the same time, I ultimately part ways with Schopenhauer’s more world-denying conclusions. His response to suffering tended toward resignation, renunciation, and the quieting of the Will. Nietzsche, by contrast, asks whether one can affirm life because of its tragedy rather than despite it. In other words, he explores whether there can be an affirmative conception of suffering that undercuts philosophical pessimism at the foundation. And his strategy is to interpret suffering as something to which one must give meaningful form as part of the authentic stylisation of existence. That project lies very close to the centre of my work.

Nietzsche’s great insight was that suffering can become meaningful when transfigured aesthetically. Tragedy, art, music, poetry, and creative self-overcoming allow human beings to confront the terror and chaos of existence without collapsing into nihilism or resignation. This is the deeper significance of what Nietzsche called ‘the aesthetic justification of existence’. Existence cannot necessarily be justified morally, rationally, or metaphysically. But perhaps it can be justified aesthetically. I interpret this to mean that beauty, creativity, meaning-making, and aesthetic experience can redeem existence partially and temporarily – not by eliminating suffering, but by allowing us to confront and transform it. Art does not solve the tragedy of life; it gives tragedy form, expression, dignity, and sometimes even joy.

In my book SMPLCTY, I repeatedly return to the idea that human beings are meaning-creating and beauty-seeking creatures. The Will to Art emerges most powerfully precisely because life is fragile, finite, and wounded. If existence were perfect and complete, perhaps art would not be necessary. Art arises because there is absence, longing, contradiction, mortality, ambiguity, and incompleteness. In this sense, suffering is not external to creativity; it is often one of its conditions. From a cosmological perspective, suffering can be understood as the latent ideal of beauty trying to realise itself through the Will to Art.

This does not mean that suffering can be romanticised. Absolutely not. There is a dangerous tendency in some philosophical and artistic traditions to ignore or marginalise real social and material injustice. Much suffering today is unnecessary – generated by exploitative economic systems, ecological destruction, war, inequality, alienated labour, and consumer culture. One of my central political arguments is that ecological civilisation should seek to minimise avoidable suffering by reorganising society around material sufficiency for all, secured through meaningful, creative work. But even under such ideal conditions, tragedy would remain. We would still confront death, impermanence, heartbreak, uncertainty, and cosmic finitude. The question then becomes: how shall we live in full awareness of this? 

My answer is fundamentally aesthetic rather than religious or metaphysical. We create meaning through the way we shape our lives, relationships, communities, rituals, and acts of creativity. Human beings become artists not only in the narrow sense of producing artworks, but in the broader sense of making something meaningful out of existence itself.

This is why I place so much emphasis on the ‘aesthetics of existence,’ a phrase that I borrow from Michel Foucault but which is fundamentally Nietzschean. The task is not to discover a final metaphysical meaning hidden somewhere behind the world, but to participate consciously in the ongoing creation of meaning despite uncertainty and suffering. That is what I mean when I say we are simultaneously sculptors and clay.

The ecological dimension is also important here too. Industrial civilisation attempts to escape suffering through consumption, distraction, technological acceleration, and fantasies of endless growth. But this strategy has produced ecological overshoot, spiritual exhaustion, and deepening alienation. In trying to flee finitude, we have intensified both human and planetary suffering. The ethos of SMPLCTY proposes another path: accepting limits, embracing sufficiency, and discovering richness in aesthetic, communal, and contemplative forms of life rather than in endless accumulation. The logic is simple: an aesthetic or affective attachment to life makes one want to avoid all consumer attachments that are superfluous to life.

Ultimately, though, I remain a tragic thinker rather than an optimist. I do not believe history guarantees redemption. Civilisation may collapse. Humanity may fail. The Earth itself is finite. Yet even within that horizon, I think there remains something miraculous about the existence of conscious beings capable of love, creativity, music, friendship, contemplation, and beauty. How sublime that the cosmos holds such depth of feeling within itself! Thrown into an existence we never asked for, our sacred capacity to experience beauty shows that human beings have a place in the universe – at least potentially. Our sacred capacity to create beauty provides us with a noble orienting purpose.

In a tragic universe, perhaps that is enough. I hope it is. At least, I live as if that were the case.

The post An ‘Aesthetic Justification’ of Existence (interview question #12) first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.