I continue to work through Samuel Alexander’s book-length volume of essays on the Aesthetics of Existence, and find it tying into everything else I’m working on: stoke/intrinsic motivation, freedom, the Flotilla, Deep Response to the metacrisis, my own visions and schemes for how to engage the rest of my days, and deeply personal flashes of insight I’ve had my entire adult life.
Let me try to sketch it out. One of Alexander’s ideas is that the universe can be interpreted as “having an underlying tendency toward artistic and aesthetic flourishing,” which points at the purpose of the universe being “to experience itself through the genesis and diversity of conscious and creative life.”
When he says “artistic” and “aesthetic”, he isn’t merely talking about formal or recognized artistic pursuits like painting or music. He defines art as he uses it as ‘meaningful and pleasurable expression of creative labour’, and aesthetic experience as that which ‘flows from the sensuous engagement with art or nature.’
He points out that it doesn’t take a whole lot of material wealth to provide humans with all the resources they need to be engaged in an aesthetic existence. In fact, there are pockets of humans all over the world who are living proof that you just don’t need to consume much energy or material resources in order to have deeply meaningful, pleasurable, and fulfilling lives.
It is equally as apparent that a civilization oriented around limitless more consumption of energy and materials is not just structurally incapable of supplying the conditions necessary for widespread human flourishing but terminally flawed in that it will eventually destroy the foundations of its own function. I won’t belabor this point but Alexander has some absolutely savage burns for the Current Arrangement that are worth reading the essays for alone. Enjoy.
He also unpacks how the Aesthetic is a dimension/reality that permeates all of our lives and experiences whether we are aware of it or not: ‘the aesthetic’ is not a thing that merely exists inside of an art museum or fashion show. There is an aesthetics to our every lived moment and how we perceive the world.
His writing really got me to see my understanding of the world through an aesthetic lens. My critique of the current arrangement is not merely based on logic and thermodynamics. When I look at how the world is currently arranged it feels wrong, I sense that in so many ways it is ugly.
The economy of ripping materials out of the earth, employing enormous amount of energy to the extraction and production of resources into consumer goods which are used for a moment and then thrown away to pollute the environment and destabilize the world-system, is among other things aesthetically offensive.
Alexander’s writing has been inviting me to consider how primal my felt sense of this aesthetic dimension of the world I find myself in is in fact the driver for much of my behavior. The intensity of my feeling about the world is, essentially, aesthetic at heart, and it is that intensity which drives me to act in certain ways and to expend energy seeking out alternative creative ways of engaging my life with the world.
The flip side is that I have a strong sense of desire for a world or society that functions well: that is in material and energetic balance with the more-than-human world, and that enables rather than stunts human flourishing. I’m starting to see the beating heart of this desire as essentially aesthetic in nature.
I can make the argument that a well-built home made out of natural materials that uses very little energy to supply a family with good shelter “just makes sense and is the correct way to do it”, but the truth is that I think it’s beautiful and I consider the design and construction of such a building as a creative expression of human flourishing.
What I really like about his thinking is that while his ideas range up to the Telos (purpose) of the Cosmos, they ground all the way down to the scale of the individual. In other words, this is not a collection of essays about organizational policy that you and I can do nothing with in our daily lives: we can take his suggestion to conceptualize our lives themselves as aesthetic projects and apply changes to our lives right now.
Further Reading
My last newsletter about Alexander’s ideas on this.