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 questions #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.

Vlad Bunea: You write in Homo Aestheticus (2025): “Material abundance is preferable to material destitution, of course, but ultimately the superfluities of consumer lifestyles are spiritually beside the point, representing a failure of imagination, a mistaken idea of wealth and freedom. Consciously or unconsciously, most of us, it seems, seek meaning in ways that market commodities simply cannot provide, even if our actions often betray this insight.” What would an enlightened idea of wealth and freedom look like?

Samuel Alexander: In one sense, ‘wealth’ can refer to material riches – lots of money, a big house, a fancy car, the latest technologies etc. If an entire culture, consciously or unconsciously, conflates that conception of wealth with wellbeing, or thinks of material affluence as the only path to freedom, then collectively the result is consumerist cultures and growth-based economies. Industrial civilization has been climbing this ladder for around three centuries now, but increasingly people are realizing that we’ve placed the ladder of “progress” up against the wrong wall, succeeding at the wrong game. Not only has the materialistic conception of wealth and freedom severely undermined the life-support system called Earth, while also producing corrosive inequalities, it doesn’t even seem to satisfy the human craving for meaning. What a tragedy!

I feel an enlightened idea of wealth and freedom would treat material sufficiency, not affluence, as the goal of socio-economic and political systems. In such an ecological civilization, once everyone had enough to live well, an economics of sufficiency would direct time, energy and creativity away from limitless material pursuits and instead explore non-materialistic sources of meaning and satisfaction. In supportive structural and cultural contexts, I believe people can live full, rich, and artful lives based on modest material and energetic foundations. We need to move in this direction swiftly in order to begin unravelling the metacrisis we find ourselves in. As John Ruskin once said: ‘There is no wealth but life.’

VB: I suppose for most humans this leap of imagination from a material life to an immaterial artful life may prove to be challenging. We are the products of the stories we believe in. We construct our values based on imitation and desire for belonging to social groups. We ascribe ourselves social status by constantly comparing ourselves to others. We are confined by poverty, access to healthcare and education. Often emancipation through creativity presupposes a large degree of freedom and having basic needs covered.

You write: “Art can bring to the surface alternative forms of ‘reason’ as well as new visions of liberation that are denied by the established reality. What capitalism conceals, art can reveal.” How can people get to art, observe art, or make art, when they are not even aware of these alternative forms of reason, when their mental space is occupied with paying bills and consuming advertising?

SA: This question lasers in on some of the most important and difficult issues. If my response to the first question began hinting at a destination worth aiming for, this second question raises the vexed matter of transition or transformation – how to get from where we are, to where we might need to end up. I feel we live in a time when people are generally aware that the world is heading catastrophically in the wrong direction. The evidence of crisis is everywhere – culturally, economically, politically, and of course environmentally. And so the question arises: why do we not mobilise in collective resistance and renewal? It is not because there is an “informational deficit” or lack of awareness about the issues. In other words, I do not believe our primary obstacles are intellectual, technological, or scientific, but rather, our obstacles are aesthetic, value-laden, and emotional. We know in our heads there must be better, saner, more humane ways to live, but we do not yet feel this in our hearts. The malaise and alienation of the existing systems are understood all too well, but we struggle to envision the new forms of life that could resolve these existential challenges. Too often, we lack the emotional or spiritual energy to revolt.

An effective politics, therefore, must be an affective politics. This is where art and the aesthetic come in – as tools for reshaping the inner dimension of our lives and expanding our imaginations, so that we have the energy and imagination to envision new worlds from within the shell of the old, and to begin living them into existence. We have to start from where we are, even though this is a very unfortunate place to have to start. As you note, the barriers to sustainable living are everywhere. But this just heightens the role of the artist as provocateur and visionary. They tasked with exposing our condition as puppets in a broken system; they are tasked with expanding our moral sensibilities to broaden our spheres of compassion and concern; and they are tasked with helping enchant our experience and thereby provide us with the propulsion to enact our highest ideals, inspiring us to resist and revolt, even in the face of overwhelming odds.

Yes, we need new stories, for economics and politics both operate in the service of story, so what the story is obviously matters a great deal. Among other things, we need to reimagine and thereby reshape human nature, away from homo economicus – being a self-interested, consumer and obedient producer – toward homo aestheticus – being a species that demands a socio-economic system that enables all people to explore their creative and aesthetic potentials within environmentally bounded limits. The good news is that none of this is about hardship, sacrifice, or deprivation. This is about new, post-consumerist conceptions of human flourishing. Realising this vision will require exercising our creative imaginations like never before, in context-dependent ways, wherever we are. I believe our artful species is up to the challenge, but even if we fail, and civilization continues to disintegrate in coming years and decades, then our nature as a creative species will only become more important still.

VB: One massive yet exciting challenge for artists is to get political, but in such a way that it attacks the hegemony of capitalism and offers a vision for a beautiful post-poverty future, at the same time. The popular series Severance and the film Don’t Look Up are doing a great job at describing how our crises feel like, but they don’t offer solutions, and certainly they don’t say “It’s capitalism that is doing this to you”. Perhaps Star Trek: The Next Generation (not so much the latest films) comes closest at describing a hopeful future where wealth accumulation has stopped being a goal in life and was replaced with the quest for knowledge. We desperately need artistic productions that don’t just show how bad things can get (aren’t we saturated with postapocalyptic stories?), but also show how good and beautiful things could get, from a realistic and relatable perspective that is compatible with science. Have you encountered such art in your own life?

SA: I have a nuanced answer to provide to this astute line of questioning. On the one hand, I certainly hope for a more engaged “art world” that more directly utilizes the aesthetic dimensions of life to resist the established order and help give birth to new, more humane and sustainable worlds. I also agree that we’ve probably had enough ‘doomsaying’ dystopias (such as McCarthy’s The Road) and need a far greater focus on positive envisioning of alternative futures. I’m a big fan of William Morris’ original work of ecological fiction, News from Nowhere (1890), which provides a utopian vision of an aestheticised society that celebrates living simply and artfully in harmony with nature. Imagineers like Morris are sometimes dismissed as dreamers or escaptists who lack a sense of political reality. But just as vision without politics is naive, politics without vision is dangerous.

We must dream before we shape our politics, or else we will never awaken from the existing nightmare of pragmatisim without principle. Still, utopians should never expect anyone to accept their dreams uncritically. The purpose of presenting a utopian vision is to provoke people to dream for themselves. A more recent example of high quality ‘climate fiction’ is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future (2020), which I highly recommend. If I may mention my own attempt, in 2013 I published a book of ecological fiction called Entropia: Life Beyond Industrial Civilisation, which tells the story of a society of poet-farmers that developed after being isolated on an island after the collapse of industrial civilisation. The purpose of such books is to expand the imagination regarding what types of futures lie open to humanity. They don’t so much try to provide a blue-print as much as they attempt to stoke the fire in our souls.

On the other hand, art can lose some of its majesty and impact when it tries to be overly didactic or too explicitly political. Art often functions most powerfully when its politics or morality manifest indirectly, via aesthetic form itself, rather than directly addressing the subject matter. In other words, the revolutionary potential in art can arise most effectively simply by being artful, beautiful, inspiring, and enchanting, even leaving aside a specific message or inherent politics. In my view, one of capitalism’s defining achievements – and greatest tragedies – is how it has left the subjects of the global order disenchanted, lacking the spiritual energy to live in resistance. But great art can disrupt this malaise and remind us that life has the potential to be beautiful, which can provide the emotional energy to fight the system and try to build a new world.

Some of my favourite pieces of music are the six ‘Cello Suites’ by Bach. I am so profoundly moved by these compositions, and I feel they have moral significance not because they have any inherent politics hidden within them, but because, by being so strikingly beautiful, they infuse life with a mysterious glow, presenting listeners with an atmosphere of elegance, harmony, and creative potential. If art can leave us with an enchanted ‘mood’, we are more likely to have the ethical resources at hand to be generous with our neighbours or fellow citizens, as well as have the energy to mobilise in resistance and renewal. But perhaps even more powerful than experiencing art is the deep joy humans seem to find in creative expression itself. My book, Homo Aestheticus, is an attempt to sketch out a vision for humanity where creative expression is built into the rituals, practices, and experiences of everyday life. My view is that such artful living can be achieved upon modest material and energetic foundations. This is the aesthetic premise upon which I developed my vision of ecological civilisation which I call S M P L C T Y.

The post Interview with Samuel Alexander first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

In coming days and weeks I’ll post some of the chapters here on the Simplicity Collective.

Here is chapter 3.

Creative Evolution

85. At the beginning was the Original Aesthetic Event – the Tone. Thereafter the aesthetic universe has been unfolding dialectically through movements of creative evolution.

86. But why is there something and not nothing? Where did all this come from? And where is it going? As one stares into the infinite abyss, such questions can induce a shudder between the shoulder blades, ushering in peak aesthetic emotions – the mystical mood – from which one never recovers.

87. Thinking has to start somewhere. All stories have beginnings. A musical composition commences with a single sound, even if that opening note is infinitely complex.

88. The Will to Art is the unconditioned cause of itself – music without a musician.

89. Two hundred billion trillion stars. Some might be tempted to suggest that this aesthetic universe is a very inefficient means of creating merely one (known) planet with the conditions necessary for artistic being. Shouldn’t we rather be astounded at how few stars were needed to create something as astonishing as music?

90. Music, being the purest reflection of the Will to Art, can never be fully captured by conceptualization; it is untranslatable and uncontainable. This is why it is an impoverishment of existence to relate to the world purely in cognitive terms, for there is something ‘unsayable’ – something beyond words – which nevertheless feels of ultimate concern.

91. Philosophers know when to stay quiet; thankfully, poets and musicians do not.

92. More than other artforms, absolute music (i.e. music without words) weakens the hold that concepts have on us, and it even promises, at times, to leave the imagination perfectly free.

93. The Big Bang was not just an extension of space-time out of nothing, but also an interior explosion of the creative spirit, of wildness. Paradoxically, it was both the cause and effect of the Will to Art.

94. The cosmos evolves, albeit agonistically, to experience itself through the genesis and diversity of conscious and creative life. To experience itself – this is important.

95. The aesthetic universe is not a singular, conscious being, but it attains consciousness through the development of diverse experiential nodes in the fabric of existence.

96. In the case of homo aestheticus, these nodes of consciousness have become reflective, visionary, poetic, and self-aware.

97. Through us, the Will to Art shapes its own fate, as opposed to merely being the determinate product of mechanistic physical laws and biological processes.

98. Due to its inherent wildness, the outcome of this evolutionary process is unknowable in advance.

99. To those who insist on denying free will and embracing materialistic determinism: be determined if you wish. The choice to be free is ours, if we choose it.

100. It is more important to feel free than to know freedom.

101. Art can liberate the mind by stirring the senses, and by liberating the senses, art can stir the soul – even, at times, to stillness.

102. The Will to Life evolves into the Will to Power, culminating in the Will to Art (such that the cosmological process was the Will to Art all along).

103. The aesthetic universe is an infinite organic unity of which we are all an interconnected part – more like a plant than a machine.

104. Humanity is still learning how to conceive of and inhabit that ambiguous but thrilling space between the cosmos as a ‘divine creation’ and the cosmos as merely ‘docile matter’.

105. Nature is more than an It (an object) but less than a Thou (a subject).

106. Just as the acorn has the oak built into its nature, this cosmology has art built into its nature.

107. The Will to Art seeks creative expression and the blossoming of sensuous aesthetic experience in the name of beauty. Only by satisfying the Will to Art does the wheel stops turning; only through beauty can there be peace.

108. Take nothing on blind faith: the Will to Art is a theory to test in practice. Consider living as if the purpose of the universe is to struggle toward beauty, and see what happens to the atmosphere of existence. (If life becomes progressively richer and more tranquil, continue along the path).

109. Is this an overly romantic reading of existence? It is too early to tell – which means it is too early to dismiss.

110. The end state of creative evolution is not built into the original conditions. In the dialectical unfolding of the Will to Art, there are only tendencies.

111. It follows that nothing is preordained in an aesthetic universe. The future must be imagined and given form.

112. We are tasked, each moment, with painting ourselves into the picture, layer after layer. In time, we might even paint a harmonious picture that induces the aesthetic experience of beauty – in the same way artworks that depict suffering can be beautiful even though they do not themselves induce suffering but rather help us transcend it.

The post Creative Evolution first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

In coming days and weeks I’ll post some of the chapters here on the Simplicity Collective.

Each chapter is a collection of philosophical fragments, thematically arranged, which over the course of the book form an argument. Here is Chapter 2.

The Will to Art

28. Let us speak a word for aestheticism, for aesthetic freedom and wildness, as opposed to a freedom that is metaphysically constrained.

29. The Will to Art is the foundational creative energy of the aesthetic universe, a living dialectic that generates its own sensuous experience and interpretive infinities. It is the eternally striving art-force that permeates and sustains all existence and drives the dialectic onward.

30. Just as light behaves both as a wave and a particle, the Will to Art takes form both as mind and matter – both as will and representation – which are dual aspects of the same fundamental substance. (This dissolves the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness).

31. A neo-Schopenhauerian cosmology: take art as a metaphor and apply it to the cosmic scale. The Will to Art manifests in hierarchies of organisation throughout the universe, starting with the laws of physics (where there is least freedom), developing through inanimate objects, evolving into organic, plant life, then animal life, and culminating in poetic consciousness (where there is most freedom). But fundamentally there is only one creative force throughout this cosmology – the Will to Art – manifesting in different forms but all of which ultimately arise from the same primary substance or energy.

32. 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).

33. Here we are dealing with a ‘final vocabulary’ – the bedrock of a justificatory project, beneath which there is no further argumentative recourse.

34. Schlegel’s anti-foundationalist paradox: one must have, and cannot have, a philosophical system.

35. We should hesitate to stay silent on the mysteries of existence simply out of fear of being wrong, when doing so ensures that we have no chance of living in some positive but uncertain truth.

36. Not offering a creation story is still an interpretation of the cosmos and our place in it.

37. Try thinking of things this way: the universe-as-art, not universe- as-machine. What follows?

38. This mythopoetic origin story arises out of metaphor – out of an aesthetics of existence – rather than being grounded in the graveyard of metaphysics.

39. To speak of the Will to Art is to infuse the world with an underlying tendency toward artistic and aesthetic flourishing.

40. This relentless cosmological striving will remain dissatisfied and in search of harmony until its primal energy achieves the creative expression and serene aesthetic experience it seeks.

41. This is a Grand Narrative, whose author is perfectly aware of its narrativity. But it is not for that reason untrue.

42. Could there be times when believing as if something were true might be a precondition for it becoming true?

43. The Will to Art is true because one can experience its truthfulness.

44. How sublime that the universe holds such depth of feeling within itself!

45. There may be other true theories of existence also – true in the pragmatic sense of being useful for the art of life.

46. In a post-metaphysical age, it is always possible that existence and the world undergo persuasive redescription in previously unimagined ways. Literary or ‘poeticized’ cultures embrace this aspect of the human condition as a tantalizing gift.

47. Poetry, according to Shelley, is the ‘expression of the imagination.’

48. The Will to Art as 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.

49. The question is not merely: can this new poetics of existence solve problems and achieve one’s highest values better than the old paradigm? The question is also: what problems should we be trying to solve and what should our highest values be?

50. Paradigm shifts are not simply about doing the old world better. They are, instead, the conceptual and experiential architecture of new worlds, new modes of being.

51. The Will to Art is experienced most directly in human consciousness as the insatiable drive of desire – the seemingly reckless and amoral yearning for beauty, meaning, pleasure, and freedom.

52. Human beings learn most about the universe by looking inward, to our own creative natures, where we experience, most directly, the innermost being of the thing-in-itself – the Will to Art. This experience of the Will is not a representation of something ‘out there’, but rather the inner dimension of a shared, metaphor- dependent fundamental reality.

53. Having grasped our own nature as creative beings, we can best understand the aesthetic universe which holds us. We are microcosms of the cosmic order, with the subject reflecting the object in ways that conflate the subject-object distinction.

54. Could the most fundamental building blocks of existence be vibrating strings, as theoretical physicists suggest? Could the cosmos, at base, be music?

55. Truth might be an evolving series of questions rather than a singular answer.

56. In its pre-harmonic state, the Will to Art is suffering.

57. Sentient life experiences suffering and seeks the cessation of suffering.

58. Humans suffer as a result of craving for, or being attached to, the wrong things in the wrong ways.

59. Aesthetic enlightenment: the cessation of suffering entails living artfully, in accordance with the laws of beauty, through which the dissonance of the Will to Art resolves into harmony.

60. Nietzsche: ‘We possess art lest we perish of the truth.’

61. Pessimism is the nihilistic renunciation of a world that one believes ought not to exist.

62. Schopenhauer: ‘Life must be some sort of mistake.’

63. Disenchanted materialism: when – or if – our Godot arrives, Vladimir assures us, ‘We’ll be saved.’7 But he never arrives. And so we wait, suffering, without understanding why. Life is absurd. At some point, the curtain closes and, without metaphysical comfort or understanding, our existence expires. Worms slowly consume our decaying bodies. The end. Absolutely. Life’s mystery is never resolved and there is no moment of redemption that offers us consolation for our transcendental loneliness. We’re just endlessly dead.

64. Nietzsche: ‘Life without music would be a mistake.’

65. The aesthetic justification of existence is not a proposition of truth but an affective evaluation: it just needs to succeed psychologically, that is, to induce an affective attachment to life.

66. Voluntary simplicity: an affective attachment to life itself makes one want to avoid all attachments that are superfluous to life.

67. Despite living in a dying civilization, on a dying planet, situated in what seems to be a godless and absurd universe, aesthetic experience affirms that existence can be justified.

68. After the ‘death of god’ and the demise of pure reason, the only way to move from life-negation to life-affirmation is via the aesthetic dimension. Art provides a bridge over this great chasm.

69. The therapeutic and energising approaches to aesthetic experience can be interpreted from either the spectator view (contemplating works of art can justify existence) or from the creator-artist perspective (creating works of art can justify existence).

70. Contemplating great art can provoke us to consider whether we, ourselves, might have unfilled creative potentials still to be realised.

71. 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.

72. Our sacred capacity to create beauty provides us with a noble, orienting purpose.

73. The Will to Art invites us, on the path to beauty, to take our own suffering and give it aesthetic form.

74. Upon seeing suffering everywhere, it is tempting to conclude that life is of negative value and that the world should not exist. But could not an affirmative account of suffering undercut the logic of pessimism?

75. Nietzsche’s revaluation of suffering offers such an affirmative account, since giving form to one’s own suffering becomes a necessary part of the good. It even becomes part of the beautiful, since giving form to one’s own suffering (making it meaningful) becomes part of an authentic stylisation of existence.

76. From a cosmological perspective, suffering is the latent ideal of beauty trying to realise itself through the Will to Art.

77. Art does not resolve, but rather dissolves, the problem of pessimism.

78. Amor fati – love thy fate.

79. Radical acceptance: through mindfulness and self-fashioning one

is able to love what is necessary and see it as beautiful.

80. What is power for? 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.

81. The Will to Art is the cause of that poetic madness that inspires, even compels, the artist to sit down and compose something out of nothing.

82. By creating something out of nothing, the artist is able to commune with that wild Dionysian impulse from which existence itself has emerged.

83. The artist’s awareness of the Will to Art is also the Will to Art coming to self-awareness through the artist.

84. Art and beauty exist: are we not obliged to reverse engineer a cosmological narrative that explains how and why?

The post The Will to Art first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.

In coming days and weeks I’ll post some of the chapters here on the Simplicity Collective.

Each chapter is a collection of philosophical fragments, thematically arranged, which over the course of the book form an argument. Here is Chapter 1.

The Aesthetic Universe

1. The aesthetic universe is all that is the case, and this infinitely complex reality is always expanding and in flux.

2. Existence, at base, is malleable and indeterminate clay. It must be given form, which is the primordial aesthetic task.

3. As story-telling animals, our experience is mediated by language – by myths and metaphors – and yet we create language and thus the atmosphere of our existence.

4. Neither our concepts nor their meanings are given to us in advance. We must invent, define, and interpret them, without hope of a final or stable correspondence between language and the world.

5. The task of producing conceptual schemes through which we perceive reality comes to influence the sensory experience of the reality that language has constructed.

6. Language therefore shapes what we see and how we think, but given that language also shapes our experience of reality, it also shapes what and how we feel.

7. The instability of language means that the ontological natures of ourselves and the universe are inherently unstable, always evolving as the contexts in which language is used and interpreted relentlessly shift.

8. Propositions of truth emerge from, and operate in relation to, contingent linguistic frameworks that happen to be in place but could have been different and will be different.

9. Given the infinite complexity of the aesthetic universe, no narrative or metanarrative can ever tell the whole story.

10. Paradoxically, not even final vocabularies are ‘final’ or ‘closed’, for they exist in an ever-expanding and evolving interpretive space, where semantic drift and disruption are unavoidable.

11. There will never come a time when all possible descriptions and interpretations of the world have been exhausted.

12. The poet can always make things new.

13. Metaphors, which are infinite in number, both reveal and conceal realities.

14. New metaphors, interpretations, and redescriptions can always arise, enabled by the free play of the creative imagination.

15. It follows that the final truth of things must forever remain elusive. When properly grasped, this mystery of existence is both humbling and exhilarating.

16. Even the idea of knowledge having ‘foundations’ is based on the metaphor of a building. So what would epistemology become if its constitutive metaphor was a river, or a plant, or a painting? Or perhaps: a painting of a plant in a river (creative, organic, and flowing)?

17. The material universe viewed as a ‘machine’ that operates according to the immutable laws of physics is but one metaphoric description of reality, useful as far as it goes for the purposes of prediction and control.

18. Dead metaphors disguise themselves as literal truth, as if they were the only story to tell.

19. Machinic thinking is a dead metaphor that holds us captive. It must be brought back to life so that other imaginaries can be experimented with.

20. The cosmos can be elevated to the dignity of a work of art with a bold act of interpretation, that is, through the intentions of homo aestheticus.

21. To the objection that the universe cannot be art because it was not made by a human artist, the response is that art, since Duchamp, can be ‘readymade’.

22. A submission to the Society of Independent Artists for its next exhibition: the universe.

23. The experience of art is less about an objective encounter with a physical entity and more about poetic engagement with the possibilities of meaning that surround the entity under aesthetic contemplation – in this case, the universe itself.

24. This transfiguration of the cosmos doesn’t involve changing the physical characteristics of the material universe in any way. Rather, it involves changing its ontological character through redescription in ways that call on individuals to engage the phenomenon of existence differently.

25. When new vocabularies are invented that do not catch on, they can be dismissed as uninteresting, false, irrational, or even mad. But a metaphoric shift that first appears strange can come to be seen, in the fullness of time, as truth, and in the process the metaphor dies, or at least lies dormant.

26. Thus the madman can become a poet-philosopher, and the old truth-tellers can fall out of fashion as their traditional verities get overturned and replaced.

27. The Owl of Minerva has taken flight.

The post The Aesthetic Universe first appeared on The Simplicity Collective.