ETA: I put this down at the bottom of this post originally, and it was pointed out to me that the TLDR'ers aren't going to read the "please don't TLDR this thread" if it's after a few thousand words, so sticking to the top:
Okay, let me try to loft some context:Feel free to participate however you like, just please no tl;dr. Respond to at least a minimum viable chunk of Samuel Alexander's work that you've actually read, like a full essay, and not just the titles of the essays or something someone else posted about.
Among other books he wrote Entropia: A Life Beyond Industrial Civilization, which I've read a few times. I also have his book Art Against Empire, where I first came across the "life as aesthetic project" concept with his earlier asethetics essays (part1 and part 2).Over the last ten years Dr Samuel Alexander has been a lecturer and researcher at the University of Melbourne, Australia, teaching a course called ‘Consumerism and the Growth Economy: Critical Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ as part of the Master of Environment. He has also been a Research Fellow with the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and is currently co-Director of the Simplicity Institute. In 2024 he begins his role as Academic Director with the School for International Training, coordinating and lecturing into a university course called Sustainability and Environmental Action.
Alexander’s interdisciplinary research focuses on degrowth, permaculture, voluntary simplicity, ‘grassroots’ theories of transition, and the relationship between culture and political economy.
A couple of my favorite quotes from those early essays that somewhat concisely contextualize the project:
In the Introduction he lays out a road map of each essay. Here it is:Moreover, it will be argued that only by acknowledging, appreciating and operating within the aesthetic dimension can there be any hope for deep revision in the established politico-economic order in the direction and form of degrowth. After all, it is one thing to establish firm scientific, ethical, and philosophical foundations for degrowth, but if there is no felt need in society for such a transition then this can be understood in part as an aesthetic obstacle that demands an aesthetic intervention or series of interventions. A major prerequisite to deep societal transformation, as Marcuse (1978, pp. 3-4) implored, is ‘the fact the need for radical change must be rooted in the subjectivity of individuals themselves, in their intelligence and their passions, their drives, and their goals.’ Accordingly, the degrowth movement’s neglect of the aesthetic realm arguably constitutes a failure that is hurting the movement for change.
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If the meaning of life does not announce itself to us or lie ‘out there’ in external metaphysical reality waiting to be discovered, it follows that we must instead create as an aesthetic project the meaning of our own lives, as well as collectively shape as an aesthetic project the societies in which we live, just as that society inevitably shapes us.
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Nevertheless, a re-fashioning of the self in line with voluntary simplicity will not be enough on its own to produce a degrowth society, owing to the fact that consumption practices take place within structural constraints. Within consumer capitalism it can be very difficult, at times even impossible, to consume in ways that accord with one’s conception of justice and sustainability, because structural constraints can lock us into high-consumption, high-carbon modes of life (Sanne 2002). For these reasons voluntary simplicity as an aesthetics of existence is a necessary though not sufficient response to existing crises. It lacks a systemic perspective, which is why I have been drawn to expand the analysis in terms of ‘degrowth as an aesthetics of existence.’ This is intended to highlight the fact that current crises are ultimately systemic crises that require a systemic response—not merely a cultural response—even if that systemic or political response begins with the aesthetic self-transformation of our given subjectivities; begins, as J.K Gibson-Graham (2006) would put it, with a ‘politics of the subject’.
I'm particularly excited to read the Tainter and Glass Bead Game essays.1. In the opening essay, ‘The Cosmos as a “Readymade”: Dignifying the Aesthetic Universe’ I engage the French artist, Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp’s provocative innovation was to select ordinary, mundane items – something ‘readymade’, as he would call these manufactured objects – and declare them art. His most famous readymade piece is Fountain (1917), which was merely an ordinary, mass- produced urinal. To develop the foundations of my aesthetic position, I wish to extend Duchamp’s infamous gesture in two ways. First, by exploring the possibility of adopting his inclusive aesthetic disposition, not merely when presented with an art object, but as a form of life. My project is based upon this thorough-going aestheticism, which, in later essays, I will argue has ethical, political, even spiritual implications. My second extension of Duchamp is to expand the category of the ‘readymade’ to include the cosmos itself. After all, if Duchamp was able to dignify a urinal by aestheticising it, then I intend to claim the same dignity for the universe as a whole.
2. Having clarified and developed my aesthetic orientation, I then provide more detail on my mythopoetic cosmology in ‘Creative Evolution and the Will to Art’. Contrasting the metaphor of ‘universe-as-machine’ with the metaphor ‘universe-as- artist’, I present a case for the latter, developing the preliminary overview of the Will to Art stated at the beginning of this introduction. This transfiguration of the cosmos doesn’t involve changing any of the physical characters of the object under consideration but rather changing its ontological character through redescription in ways that call on individuals to engage with the object differently. The experience of art, I will argue, 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.
3. In the next two essays I acknowledge my debts to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – a task which also allows me to highlight areas where my own position can be distinguished from theirs. In ‘Pessimism without Despair: Suffering, Desire, and the Affirmation of Life’, I examine Schopenhauer’s quasi-Buddhist metaphysics, an extremely gloomy but necessary undertaking. Schopenhauer maintained, not without some plausibility, that suffering lies at the core of existence. He believed suffering was the result of a blind and purposeless ‘Will to Live’ that is experienced in human consciousness as insatiable and painful desire. After describing this pessimistic worldview – summarised in his grim conclusion that ‘life must be some sort of mistake’32 – I will consider how he responded with an ethic of compassion; I will also summarise his views on art and aesthetics; and I will outline his ultimate orientation toward life, which involves ‘denying the will’ through ascetic practices of self- renunciation. This philosophy of resignation provides the groundwork for assessing Nietzsche’s critical engagement with Schopenhauer; in particular, I will examine how Nietzsche ‘revalues the value of suffering’ in search of a way to transcend Schopenhauerian pessimism and affirm life, despite the prevalence of suffering.
4. In ‘An Aesthetic Justification of Existence: The Redemptive Function of Art’, I continue my assessment of Nietzschean philosophy by analysing his famous pronouncement, found in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), that it is only as an ‘aesthetic phenomenon’ that existence and the world can be justified.33 This examination involves distinguishing his notion of an aesthetic justification from religious or rational justifications, which will help to clarify what it might mean to say that existence could be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon. This draws us into Nietzsche’s views on art –tragic art in particular – and I will consider whether or how art can provide a redemptive function in a world replete with suffering and where it seems no other religious or metaphysical comforts exist to offer existential consolation.
5. Even if one were to accept Nietzsche’s response to the problem of suffering, human beings would still find themselves facing the problem of nihilism or meaninglessness. Confronting this challenge, in ‘Camus on Art and Revolt: Overcoming Nihilism in an Absurd Universe’, I turn to the work of philosopher and novelist Albert Camus, exploring the ways in which he articulated the problem of meaning and how he developed an aesthetic response to it. Rather than resign himself to nihilism – the view that nothing matters in a world without God or objective meaning – Camus would develop an aesthetics of revolt. This view of the human condition burdens us all with the task of creating our own values, which is not a project of rational discovery but rather an aesthetic project of invention and commitment. Given that human beings all suffer the same ‘absurd’ condition, Camus maintained we can also find in this tragic reality a ground for human solidarity. We will see that Camus argues that art justifies itself not for its own sake but as something that can present a vision of human dignity in a world full of suffering and oppression. Art thus ‘rejects the world on account of what it lacks… in the name of what it sometimes is.’34
6. The term ‘aestheticism’, which I am embracing, has acquired a bad name today. It is employed primarily as a pejorative, directed most often toward people or movements associated with Dandyism. The dandy character attempts to make life a work of art through such things as eccentric dress, attention-seeking behaviour, and the hedonistic pursuit of sensory pleasures. If I am to succeed in reclaiming this dubious term – to make it a plausible centre piece of the current project – then further attention must be given to how aestheticism has acquired its contemporary meaning, what that meaning is, and how I intend to employ the term quite differently. Those are my tasks in ‘Rescuing Aestheticism from the Dandies: Critical Distinctions’. Dandyism is a form of aestheticism, albeit a rather crude one, but I will show that aestheticism is far from exhausted by Dandyism. If I can clarify this distinction, I should have advanced the cause of rehabilitating aestheticism in helpful and important ways.
7. Having surveyed, in the previous essays, some philosophical territory on the human condition, I turn to questions concerning aesthetics from an evolutionary perspective in ‘Homo Aestheticus, the Artful Species: An Evolutionary Perspective’. Here I examine what role art and aesthetics may have played in evolutionary history. It is easy enough to acknowledge that art could not have existed without the humans who produced it. Few consider the possibility, however, that humans could not have appeared without our arts. In that spirit, I consider the idea that every human being, on account of evolutionary inheritances, can and should be described as part of an ‘artful species’ – homo aestheticus.35 When looking to the past it will become clear that the arts have helped our species survive, develop, and flourish in often hostile, uncertain, and changing environments. Looking forward, then, it seems plausible that the wise use of the arts may also be central to our own survival in an age of environmental limits, where our aesthetic capacities and sensibilities are currently being dangerously distorted and repressed, resulting in what I will call an aesthetic deficit disorder
8. One of the philosophical problems I am exploring in this collection of essays concerns the apparent conflict between biology and philosophy when it comes to understanding human beings. On the one hand, there is the view widely held amongst evolutionary biologists and psychologists that humans have a ‘common nature’ by virtue of our long, shared species’ history; on the other hand, there is a philosophical view, widely held by post-Nietzscheans of various schools, that humans have no ‘given’ nature but are everyday tasked with creating it. In short, the first position holds that there is a common human nature; the second holds that human nature, as such, does not exist. In ‘Giving Birth to Oneself: Ethics as an “Aesthetics of Existence”’, I develop a synthesis of these apparently conflicting literatures, a possibility which was opened up to me by a reading of evolutionary biology through the lens of art and aesthetics. Specifically, I explore a range of philosophical arguments that support the conception of human beings as ‘self-creators’, drawing primarily on Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty, both of whom have Nietzsche as a prominent influence. I will also begin considering some of the social and political implications of self-creation through a critical examination of Rorty’s vision of a ‘poeticised culture’.
9. In ‘The Politics of Beauty: Schiller on Freedom and Aesthetic Education’ I review some critical perspectives on modernity and the Enlightenment project through the lens of Friedrich Schiller’s theory of aesthetic education. Despite always remaining a champion of reason, Schiller was also one of its severest critics, and in a decisive and original move he argued that ‘the way to the head must lie through the heart.’36 This is not an anti-intellectual point, however. He was offering the profound and subtle insight that through beauty – through the works of poets, painters, musicians, and storytellers – we are best able to engage the intellect having first affected the emotions. Moreover, he believed that moral, ethical, and political reasoning must engage the heart to be effective, for reason and rationality will fail to motivate or transform behaviour without emotional appeal. I engage these ideas through a close reading of Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794).
10. At this stage in the project I need to acknowledge a significant problem regarding my conceptualisation of human beings as homo aestheticus. It is a problem that is evident as soon as one turns from theory to the world as it is: if we are an artful species, one that is creative and self-constituting, why is it that the world is so full of oppression, servitude, anxiety, and ugliness? If we are evolutionarily shaped to be aesthetic agents in an aesthetic universe, why do we see cultures – I’m thinking of the ‘advanced’ affluent cultures in particular – seemingly content to distract themselves with the trinkets and baubles offered by consumer capitalism? In ‘Bad Faith and the Fear of Freedom: Can Art Shake Us Awake?’, I attempt to illuminate aspects of this problematic by drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of ‘bad faith’ and Erich Fromm’s idea of the ‘fear of freedom’. These two ideas help explain the dire state of human freedom and aesthetic activity today, while also showing why this problem is within our power to resolve.
11. In my earlier essay on Schiller I looked at aesthetic education primarily from a philosophical perspective. In ‘Banish the Poets! The Power and Politics of Aesthetic Education’ I attempt to ground the analysis more firmly in the soci0- political domain. This involves considering aesthetic education from three angles. First, I compare and contrast an ‘education for profit’ with an ‘aesthetic education’. Second, I consider the so-called ‘information deficit model’ of change. This theory assumes that human beings are fundamentally rational, evidence-based thinkers and, on that basis, the theory implies that the primary means of societal progress is more evidence and better arguments. I will argue that this is at best a partial and often misleading theory of change, one that marginalises the role of the arts and aesthetic education in social and political transformation. Third, I diagnose an imaginative sterility in contemporary culture, which has left many citizens largely unable to envision forms of life beyond consumer capitalism. Political and cultural theorist Mark Fisher called this enclosing of the imagination ‘capitalist realism’,37 often defined as the view that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The purpose of this tripartite analysis is to explore to what extent a reinvigorated aesthetic education might be needed to resolve these obstacles and drive societal trans- formation.
12. Defending the social and political import of the arts, as I have been doing, can invite the rejoinder that art, in fact, is useless; that artists have no political impact; and that aesthetics is either apolitical or politically dangerous. In ‘Making Art While the World Weeps: Political Reflections on Aesthetics’ I address these types of objections. I set out to deconstruct any simplistic dismissal of aesthetics by examining the blurry distinction between art, life, and politics, in order to show that there is in fact an inherent aesthetic dimension to life and politics, just as there is a political or even revolutionary potential inherent to certain forms of art or aesthetic practice. In doing so, my analysis is shaped by the emerging ‘aesthetic turn’38 in politics and by various political interpretations of art and aesthetics. To be clear, my position is not that we should or should not infuse politics with aesthetic considerations, but rather, as Jacques Rancière states, that ‘politics is aesthetic in principle.’39
13. Having raised questions about the political significance of aesthetics, in ‘Art Against Empire: Marcuse on the Aesthetics of Revolt’ I turn to examine the writings of critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. After reviewing his central theses on the potentially transformative role of art in society, I develop the analysis by proposing a categorisation that helps clarify art’s diverse political functions. The four categories are: i) aesthetic indictment, which involves using art to help expose the injustices and violence that can be hidden in the political system or dominant cultural values; ii) aesthetic imagination, which involves using art to help expand the imagination so that alternative futures can be envisioned, as well as help expand ethical sympathises so that people previously deemed ‘other’ can be come to fall within the circle of care and concern; iii) aesthetic revision of ‘needs’, which involves exploring the ways in which art can help reshape human needs, drives, and hopes in ways that lay the cultural foundations for political change; and finally, iv) aesthetic enchantment, which involves the ways in which art, beauty, and aesthetic value more broadly can give emotional energy to people in ways that have political effects.
14. In ‘Answering Estragon: Art, Godot, and Utopia’, I continue my aesthetic inquiries by considering whether art can not merely be a means to creating a good society but also shape our understanding of the end of social and political struggle. In other words, I set out to understand to what extent art and aesthetics can provide ultimate values that could inform not just how to transition to a more humane and liberated society but also shape what that society looks like or ought to look like. I take my point of departure from a line in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), where Estragon asks his fellow tramp, Vladimir: ‘What do we do now, now that we are happy?’ In response I argue for a politics of meaning – to be distinguished from utilitarianism and conventional liberalism – where political struggle is understood as seeking to maximise opportunities for oneself and others to live a meaningful life in harmony with nature. My thesis is that this search for meaning in life is best achieved through art, a living strategy that has the significant benefit of not requiring high levels of material provision.
15. The Grand Narrative of industrial civilisation is a story of progress within which societies advance by way of continuous economic growth, rising affluence, and technological innovation. In ‘Industrial Aesthetics: A Critique of Taste’ I focus on the aesthetics of industrialisation and consumerism, examining various aesthetic dimensions of consumption practices in the affluent capitalist societies. The purpose is to show that transcending consumerism and the growth economy may well depend on first overcoming various aesthetic obstacles, practices, and tastes. These obstacles include the stories and myths we tell about ourselves and societies; the ways we shape our identities and communicate through consumption; the disaffection and alienation that evidently is widely experienced in consumer societies, even by those who have achieved high consumption lifestyles; and the way dominant conceptions of taste and social legitimation regarding material living standards entrench materialistic conceptions of the good life. We may all have internalised these cultural narratives to some extent, often unconsciously. It follows that ethical and political activity today may require us to engage the self by the self for the purpose of refusing who we are – insofar as we are uncritical consumers – and creating new, post-consumerist forms of subjectivity.
16. To this point I have presented a worldview that conceives of the universe as an aesthetic phenomenon and human beings as an artful species. Art and the aesthetic dimensions of life were upheld as being of ultimate value in such a world, and I have also drawn on various intellectual traditions to explain why art is central to the transformative process of bringing about such an aestheticised society of self-creators through aesthetic education and artful interventions in culture and politics. In ‘Artful Descent: A Cosmodicy of SMPLCTY’ this vision is developed further, through the lens of energy. I focus on the work of anthropologist and historian, Joseph Tainter, especially his seminal text, The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988). Although largely sympathetic with Tainter’s theory, I critically engage it in ways that leads me to conclusions he would reject. In doing so I present a defence of ‘voluntary simplification’ – essentially Tainter’s term for degrowth. This term denotes a dynamic process of radical societal evolution which seeks to solve the most essential problems of life while minimising energy and resource demands. I maintain that voluntary simplification may be the only means of avoiding the civilisational process of complexity-to-collapse. My main argument is that art and aesthetic experience are promising and available means of ‘living more with less’ – of flourishing in simplicity. To the extent this is true, it would follow that opportunities for low-impact aesthetic practice and experience ought to be expanded as our material and energy demands contract for reasons of justice, sustainability, and wellbeing.
17. If it is the case, as argued in the previous essay, that civilisational stability depends on forms of societal organisation that reflect voluntary simplification, then questions arise about what such a way of life might look like, and feel like, in terms of daily practice. In ‘Poet-Farmer: A Thoreauvian Aesthetics’, I turn to the life and philosophy of American philosopher and pioneering environmentalist Henry David Thoreau to highlight the perspective of ‘voluntary simplicity’ which lies at the heart of SMPLCTY. As a transitional strategy, I will argue that voluntary simplification or degrowth will depend on an aesthetic transformation of tastes in relation to material culture. One of the central theses in this volume of essays is that the aesthetic capacities and sensibilities of humankind can be fully explored in rich and satisfying ways, while living ‘simply’ in a material and energetic sense. On that basis, I am proposing that expanding opportunities for artistic expression and aesthetic experience are among the best ways of moving toward a civilisation that is environmentally sustainable, socially just, and personally fulfilling. In that light I have employed the term SMPLCTY to refer to an ecological civilisation of simple living ‘poet-farmers’. Following Thoreau’s lead, these citizens would live aesthetically stimulating and diverse lives while mindfully constraining material and energy requirements.
18. The previous essay set out to convey a material culture of sufficiency mainly from Thoreau’s individualist perspective. In Democratising the Poet: William Morris on the Art of Everyday Life, some of the social implications are explored in relation to the aesthetic philosophy of William Morris. I have already acknowledged how my broad definition of art (as the pleasurable and meaningful expression of creative labour) is indebted to Morris, and in this essay, I explore how he developed his aesthetic perspectives into a socio-political vision which he called a Democracy of Art. I begin by discussing his definition of art in more detail, before reviewing how this took social form in his eco-utopian novel, News from Nowhere (1890). After that I examine some of the theoretical foundations of that vision, focussing in particular on the relationship between material needs and labour. It will be seen that Morris celebrated the role of self-governed creative activity in everyday life, through which humans skilfully produced things by hand that were necessary for a good life. I conclude by exploring the political significance of Morris’s aesthetic views, which will allow me to bring together some of the societal implications of the preceding essays.
19. In the penultimate essay I address some more of the political implications of my arguments, in ‘The Aesthetic State’. This concept was touched on in the essay on Schiller, who wrote that ‘the most perfect’40 of all works of art is the ‘construction of true political freedom.’41 It was seen, however, that he never developed his comments on the aesthetic state into a formal theory. I will attempt to build on this preliminary work, developing some of Schiller’s ideas in relation to the arguments and perspectives offered in this collection of essays.
20. I will close this collection by engaging Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game. This book tells the story of a community of artist-monks who live simple yet aesthetically rich lives in a province called Castalia. I focus on the theme of social and political ‘engagement’, central to Hesse’s book, which provides a fitting capstone to this (ongoing) project.
As I work through these I'll use this thread as a place to post notes, thoughts, questions, etc. Feel free to participate however you like, just please no tl;dr. Respond to at least a minimum viable chunk of Samuel Alexander's work that you've actually read, like a full essay, and not just the titles of the essays.
