An ‘Aesthetic Justification’ of Existence (interview question #12)
Dr Simon Ussher has started emailing me interview questions about my recent books on aesthetics (see here). Over coming weeks I’ll post my responses to his questions.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are two thinkers who have a lot to say about suffering. What place does suffering hold in your worldview? And to what extent, despite the prevalence of suffering, can we say that there is nevertheless an ‘aesthetic justification’ of existence?
Schopenhauer, to my mind, remains one of the great truth-tellers of philosophy. Like the Buddha, Schopenhauer recognised with extraordinary clarity that suffering is not incidental to life but structurally embedded within it. Desire perpetually outruns satisfaction. Organisms survive through struggle and violence. Conscious beings experience anxiety, loss, boredom, frustration, illness, grief, ageing, and death. Even pleasure is fleeting and often defined negatively – as the temporary cessation of pain. Schopenhauer refused the shallow optimism that portrays existence as fundamentally harmonious or benevolent. I think that refusal is intellectually and morally important.
At the same time, I ultimately part ways with Schopenhauer’s more world-denying conclusions. His response to suffering tended toward resignation, renunciation, and the quieting of the Will. Nietzsche, by contrast, asks whether one can affirm life because of its tragedy rather than despite it. In other words, he explores whether there can be an affirmative conception of suffering that undercuts philosophical pessimism at the foundation. And his strategy is to interpret suffering as something to which one must give meaningful form as part of the authentic stylisation of existence. That project lies very close to the centre of my work.
Nietzsche’s great insight was that suffering can become meaningful when transfigured aesthetically. Tragedy, art, music, poetry, and creative self-overcoming allow human beings to confront the terror and chaos of existence without collapsing into nihilism or resignation. This is the deeper significance of what Nietzsche called ‘the aesthetic justification of existence’. Existence cannot necessarily be justified morally, rationally, or metaphysically. But perhaps it can be justified aesthetically. I interpret this to mean that beauty, creativity, meaning-making, and aesthetic experience can redeem existence partially and temporarily – not by eliminating suffering, but by allowing us to confront and transform it. Art does not solve the tragedy of life; it gives tragedy form, expression, dignity, and sometimes even joy.
In my book SMPLCTY, I repeatedly return to the idea that human beings are meaning-creating and beauty-seeking creatures. The Will to Art emerges most powerfully precisely because life is fragile, finite, and wounded. If existence were perfect and complete, perhaps art would not be necessary. Art arises because there is absence, longing, contradiction, mortality, ambiguity, and incompleteness. In this sense, suffering is not external to creativity; it is often one of its conditions. From a cosmological perspective, suffering can be understood as the latent ideal of beauty trying to realise itself through the Will to Art.
This does not mean that suffering can be romanticised. Absolutely not. There is a dangerous tendency in some philosophical and artistic traditions to ignore or marginalise real social and material injustice. Much suffering today is unnecessary – generated by exploitative economic systems, ecological destruction, war, inequality, alienated labour, and consumer culture. One of my central political arguments is that ecological civilisation should seek to minimise avoidable suffering by reorganising society around material sufficiency for all, secured through meaningful, creative work. But even under such ideal conditions, tragedy would remain. We would still confront death, impermanence, heartbreak, uncertainty, and cosmic finitude. The question then becomes: how shall we live in full awareness of this?
My answer is fundamentally aesthetic rather than religious or metaphysical. We create meaning through the way we shape our lives, relationships, communities, rituals, and acts of creativity. Human beings become artists not only in the narrow sense of producing artworks, but in the broader sense of making something meaningful out of existence itself.
This is why I place so much emphasis on the ‘aesthetics of existence,’ a phrase that I borrow from Michel Foucault but which is fundamentally Nietzschean. The task is not to discover a final metaphysical meaning hidden somewhere behind the world, but to participate consciously in the ongoing creation of meaning despite uncertainty and suffering. That is what I mean when I say we are simultaneously sculptors and clay.
The ecological dimension is also important here too. Industrial civilisation attempts to escape suffering through consumption, distraction, technological acceleration, and fantasies of endless growth. But this strategy has produced ecological overshoot, spiritual exhaustion, and deepening alienation. In trying to flee finitude, we have intensified both human and planetary suffering. The ethos of SMPLCTY proposes another path: accepting limits, embracing sufficiency, and discovering richness in aesthetic, communal, and contemplative forms of life rather than in endless accumulation. The logic is simple: an aesthetic or affective attachment to life makes one want to avoid all consumer attachments that are superfluous to life.
Ultimately, though, I remain a tragic thinker rather than an optimist. I do not believe history guarantees redemption. Civilisation may collapse. Humanity may fail. The Earth itself is finite. Yet even within that horizon, I think there remains something miraculous about the existence of conscious beings capable of love, creativity, music, friendship, contemplation, and beauty. How sublime that the cosmos holds such depth of feeling within itself! Thrown into an existence we never asked for, our sacred capacity to experience beauty shows that human beings have a place in the universe – at least potentially. Our sacred capacity to create beauty provides us with a noble orienting purpose.
In a tragic universe, perhaps that is enough. I hope it is. At least, I live as if that were the case.
