Ed. note: Recently we posted the preface to Samuel Alexander’s new book, Homo Aestheticus: Philosophical Fragments on the Will to Art. The book is written in the form of 525 ‘philosophical fragments’, which are distilled and developed from his book SMPLCTY: Ecological Civilisation and the Will to Art.  

Below we’ve posted a lightly edited selection of fragments from Chapter 8, entitled ‘Wild Civilization and the Poet-Farmer’. Of course, the argument of the book is lost by only providing samples of the fragments, but perhaps these ‘tasters’ below might incentivise some to consult the book via the links below.

Homo Aestheticus is available in hardback, paperback, and pdf (on a ‘pay what you can’ basis, including for free).

There is an existential and cosmological dissonance in search of harmony, the Will to Art, through which beauty tends to beget beauty, if only through the lens of deep time.

What if the freedom to seek meaning and pleasure through creative activity is the mysterious purpose of the universe?

The social vision implicit in this evolutionary process is a society, not of artists, as such, but of creative self-fashioners who are free to author their own stories and perhaps even sing their own songs – to be the poets of their own lives – in honour of the art-force that drives creative evolution onwards.

The history of political society can be understood through the lens of the Will to Art: a dialectical process of creative evolution through which human beings struggle, often unconsciously and indirectly, toward the ideal of beauty.

Art can assist with managing an absurd universe like nothing else can. If there is any truth to this, then we might consider, as a social project, the goal of universalising and maximising opportunities for aesthetic engagement with our absurd condition.

An Ecological Democracy of Art: a society of free spirits in which all people can find meaning and pleasure in creative labour and aesthetic experience, living in harmony with nature and each other.

Such a society would be structured, not by relations of master and slave, or worker and capitalist, but by the revolving and reciprocal relations of artist and art lover, a process driven onward by the Will to Art.

Whereas utilitarianism aims to maximise happiness and liberalism aims to promote human freedom, a political economy of art would seek to foster creative engagements with questions of meaning and beauty in ecologically regenerative ways.

In order to know in what direction to move, some understanding is needed regarding the desired destination, even if it turns out that destination is dauntingly distant.

It is too late to be a realist.

A politics of meaning would ensure that everyone had ‘enough’ to explore their aesthetic potentials as artist and art-lover.

A politics of meaning implies an economics of sufficiency.

Freedom implies enlightened material restraint.

An increased openness to aesthetic value is a way to minimise a society’s energy and resource demands without diminishing, and indeed increasing, quality of life. After all, one is less likely seek meaning, happiness, and beauty in consumerism if one has already found those things outsidethe marketplace – in the freely available aesthetic dimensions of life.

In an age of gross ecological overshoot, where humanity is evidently making unsustainable demands on the life-support system we call Earth, any resolution to the metacrisis must involve a radical downscaling or ‘degrowth’ of energy and resource demands in affluent societies.

Given the tendency of societies to become more complex than they can afford to be, sustainability into the deep future requires that societies embrace voluntary simplification when the costs of complexity exceed the benefits. If they do not, they collapse (Tainter).

As the benefits of social complexity diminish and become outweighed by the costs, the benefits of voluntary simplification increase. To be clear, the argument is not that voluntary simplification is likely to be embraced as a response to existing crises; the argument is that it is the only alternative to collapse, and thus it is a strategy we should do our very best to adopt, no matter our prospects of success.

The energy intensity of industrial civilization is primarily a function of the values that produce or shape the perception of its problems. Those values also produce and shape the perception of what constitutes a solution to perceived problems. Change those values, however, and many of the energy intensive problems that industrial civilization currently feels the need to solve may well disappear.

There is always room for a society to rethink its problems, rethink its solutions, and, importantly, rethink how it prioritises the energy and resources it has available for problem solving.

Large portions of high consumption societies would benefit from exchanging superfluous material consumption for more time to pursue non-materialist forms of wellbeing. This supports the argument that voluntary simplification is not only possible, but desirable. If more people came to see this, one would expect simplification to be voluntarily embraced, not out of altruism but through enlightened self-interest.

The Law of Progressive Simplification (Toynbee): humanity learns to meet its deepest existential needs with declining material and energy demands. To live simply is to embody enlightened material restraint.

A minimally optimistic hypothesis: that if humanity does not learn to embrace voluntary simplification within the present iteration of (industrial) civilization, humanity will eventually come to see that it is the only path to genuine sustainability and flourishing within biophysical limits. Of course, given the profound seductions of complexity, the insecurities of the human ego, the grasping for power, and the limitations of the human intellect, it is possible and indeed likely that this lesson may not be learned until many more civilizations rise and fall as a result of the diminishing returns on complexity. Indeed, it is possible that humanity never learns this lesson. However, the faith implicit to this vision is that eventually humanity will learn voluntary simplification (or degrowth-to-a-steady-state) is the only path to civilizational stability and flourishing.

As cultures develop this deep historical consciousness – when they see more clearly the repeated patterns of collapse occurring over and over again – our species will slowly absorb this wisdom, in a piecemeal fashion, over an indeterminate timescale. This may take centuries or even millennia, but over time the ranks who come to see this truth will expand, eventually leading to the deep transformation of human consciousness and society.

One way or another, there will be a Great Simplification, whether by design or disaster.

Voluntary simplification presents a meaningful alternative to collapse, grounded in an aesthetics of existence.

Ecological civilization depends, first and foremost, on a transformation in tastes, especially in regard to material culture.

There is no taste for sufficiency, no taste for degrowth.

Coleridge: we must create the taste by which we will be judged.

The new sensibility will come to see the contemporary world of aggressive acquisition, competition, and (dis)possession as distasteful, repelling the violence, cruelty, and brutality those things rely upon. The new sensibility will also crave new forms of aesthetic experience in community, nature, art, creative productive activity, and leisure. Thus aesthetic education is, at base, a re-education of desire, a transformation of taste.

There is an elegance to the clothesline, the bicycle, and the water tank, that the clothes dryer, the automobile, and the desalination plant decidedly lack.

Da Vinci: ‘simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.’ What would a species or society look like if it adopted this as a self-image?

It is not that one cannot live a happy and meaningful life in fine clothing, so much as fine clothing is not necessary for a happy and meaningful life.

Thoreau was perfectly content with his shelter, modest though it was. Did this not make him richer than a king who is dissatisfied with his palace?

Labour need not be a curse if it is creative and self-directed. The social and political challenge is to beautify labour, that is, to maximise opportunities for the expression of meaning and pleasure in labour.

In order to answer the economic question, ‘How much is enough?’, one has to answer the normative question: ‘Enough for what?’. ‘Art’ is an answer to that normative question, and if that premise is granted, it follows that a humble, non-consumerist life of voluntary simplicity provides ‘enough’ material wealth to live a full and artful life of infinite diversity, sensuous pleasure, and imaginative possibility.

This raises questions about what material and energetic foundations are needed to fulfill our aesthetic natures as self-creators, and how such a political economy of art might be structured and organised.

First premise: Material sufficiency is all that is needed for human beings to live rich, meaningful, and artful lives.

Second premise: Material sufficiency is all that is possible, over the long term, on a finite planet in an age of environmental metacrisis.

Although the energy and resource flows are constrained within this envisioned form of life, the exploration of the good life remains unlimited, in the same way that the 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.

Scarcity begets creativity.

Art and aesthetic experience are promising and available means of ‘living more with less’ – of flourishing in simplicity.

Personal practices of voluntary simplicity will never be enough on their own to produce an ecological civilization that operates in harmony with nature – a ‘wild’ civilization. But degrowth to an ecological civilization does imply voluntary simplicity, and indeed, profound shifts in relation to material culture may need to precede the systemic changes which are also needed.

This obviously doesn’t mean material provision is unimportant. It only means that material provision and economic growth should not be considered as ends in themselves, but rather a means to aesthetic ends. What is the economy for?

Upon modest material foundations, abundance becomes a state of mind.

Just enough is plenty.

Thoreau: ‘To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of the arts.’

The aesthetic capacities of humanity can be explored fully while living simply in a material and energetic sense.

According to this vision, life itself would become an aesthetic project, a never-ending process of creative activity, sacred sensuality, aesthetic engagement, and spiritual exploration.

It is notable that art as conventionally defined (painting, music, poetry, etc), is barely mentioned in Morris’s aestheticised utopia, News from Nowhere. The insinuation is that life itself had become art, through the everyday satisfactions of creative activity and aesthetic experience.

The Romantics tried to replace God with art. They failed because they limited themselves to ‘fine art’, excluding most of society from their cerebral and elitist aesthetics. What they did not understand is that any replacement of religion must be built into the necessary labours, rituals, and experiences of everyday life.

Art encompasses both the ‘fine arts’ (music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture) and the so-called ‘lesser arts’ (carpentry, sewing, pottery, glassware, carving, etc.). That is, art refers both to conventional objects and productions made by so-called ‘artists’ but also the artful products created by artisans (everyday artefacts that are both useful and beautiful).

Time has come to collapse the distinction between artist and artisan.

We must democratise the poet.

The farmer or artisan who lives beautifully – who produces things with aesthetic form – is poetic. (Recall the original meaning of poetry – poietikos – is to make or create something).

S M P L C T Y: an ecological civilization comprised of poet-farmers, in which self-directed creativity is integrated into the experiences and practices of everyday life.

The archetypal, self-governing citizen in SMPLCTY is the poet-farmer (or poet-carpenter, etc.), who lives simply in a material and energetic sense, contributes to necessary economic production and community governance in non-hierarchical conditions, and who otherwise explores the good life through creative activity and aesthetic experience.

The good life according to SMPLCTY is achieved primarily through aesthetic experience, both creatively (making art) and passively (appreciating art, including nature). This is an endless creative process of infinite diversity and stimulation.

This signifies an anarcho-communitarian and agrarian form of life (permaculture) in which human beings minimise material and energetic demands for reasons of social and ecological justice, while creatively exploring the good life in non-materialistic sources of meaning and happiness.

This is not a utopian prediction about a likely future for our species. It is an orienting vision, one in which individuals and communities thrive in humble conditions of material sufficiency but cultural richness, meaningfully engaged in pleasurable and creative labour in collaboration with others.

Creative expression should be part of everyday life, uniting the two elements of ‘use and beauty’, bringing us into a harmonious relationship with self, society, and nature.

Not everyone can be a ‘strong poet’. For the rest of us, being a poet-farmer is more than enough.

Morris: art includes the feeling ‘which enables us to see beauty in the world and stimulates us to reproduce it, to increase it, to understand it, and to sympathise with those who specially deal with it.’

Political progress (or lack thereof) toward this latent aesthetic ideal need not be linear and its attainment may be forever elusive. It is a distant beacon in the dark of night, a guiding light.

The arc of this cosmology bends slowly and inconsistently toward beauty. The dissonance of the world will not necessarily resolve into harmony, but there is a chance; a tendency; a grounded hope.

Homo Aestheticus is available in hardback, paperback, and pdf.

Teaser image credit: Walden Pond in fall. By ptwo from Allahabad, India – 985Uploaded by Ekabhishek, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16428533