An Aesthetics of Existence (interview question #17)
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.
You’ve spoken often about how ‘homo aestheticus’ is reflective of our human nature. However, the idea of human nature implies something fixed and universal, something that determines the outcome. How do you reconcile this constraining idea of homo aestheticus as being reflective of our human nature, while at the same time arguing, with thinkers like Nietzsche and Foucault, that we, human beings, must create ourselves as a work of art?
Yes, this is an important tension, and one I have considered carefully. On the surface, there does seem to be a contradiction. If there is such a thing as ‘human nature’, does that not imply a fixed essence? And if human beings possess a fixed essence, how can we also speak coherently of radical self-creation, existential freedom, or treating the meaning of life as an aesthetic project?
My answer is that homo aestheticus should not be understood as a rigid or deterministic essence in the traditional metaphysical sense. I am not proposing a static blueprint of ‘the human’ that mechanically determines behaviour or destiny. Rather, I am trying to describe a dynamic condition of openness, creativity, and self-transcendence that appears characteristic of our species. In other words, what may be most fundamental about human beings is precisely our relative indeterminacy.
Seemingly unique amongst animals, human beings are radically unfinished creatures. We are born into symbolic worlds rather than fixed behavioural programs. As storytelling creatures, our experience is mediated by language – by myths and metaphors – and yet we create language and thus the atmosphere of our existence. Culture, language, imagination, ritual, myth, institutions, technologies, and aesthetic practices all shape who we are and what we become. That is why existentialists like Sartre could say that ‘existence precedes essence’. Human life is not fully scripted in advance. We are continually involved in processes of interpretation and self-formation. There will never come a time when all possible descriptions of the world have been exhausted.
This is also why Nietzsche and Foucault are so important. Nietzsche understood that once the old metaphysical certainties collapse – once ‘God is dead’, in his provocative formulation – human beings confront the terrifying and exhilarating burden of self-creation. Values are no longer simply discovered as eternal truths; they must be created. Foucault develops a related idea through his notion of an ‘aesthetics of existence’, where ethics becomes a creative practice of shaping one’s life rather than conforming passively to externally imposed norms that lack objective foundation.
I draw heavily on both of these thinkers. In SMPLCTY, I often emphasise that human beings relate to themselves like artists relate to raw materials – like sculptors shaping clay. We are simultaneously creatures and creators. Sartre captures this insight precisely when he says that ‘we can always make something out of what we have been made into’. There are features of life that are ‘given’, but they can be reshaped.
So when I speak of homo aestheticus as human nature, I mean that human beings possess an intrinsic orientation toward creativity, meaning-making, aesthetic experience, and self-fashioning. But the content and expression of those capacities remain radically open-ended. There is no final or fixed form the human must become. Indeed, I would say that the ‘nature’ of homo aestheticus is precisely to exceed fixed definitions. The aesthetic dimension of existence introduces novelty, experimentation, interpretation, and plurality. Human beings continually reinterpret themselves culturally, ethically, politically, spiritually, and artistically. That process never concludes.
This is one reason I reject essentialist or biologically reductionist accounts of humanity, especially the model of homo economicus. The idea that humans are fundamentally utility-maximising consumers mistakes a historically specific form of subjectivity produced by capitalism for a universal essence. By contrast, homo aestheticus names a much more expansive and flexible conception of humanity – one grounded in our capacities for imagination, creativity, symbolic world-making, and existential self-transformation.
At the same time, I do not go all the way toward a purely postmodern notion of the self as infinitely malleable or ‘radically free’ in the Sartrean sense. Human beings remain embodied, ecological, vulnerable, finite creatures. We are shaped by biology, mortality, desire, affect, and material conditions. There are limits to our freedom. We cannot simply invent ourselves arbitrarily from nothing.
This is where the ecological perspective also becomes important. The self is not an isolated sovereign consciousness floating free of the world. We emerge within social, historical, and biophysical realities that both constrain and enable us. The project of self-creation therefore always unfolds within conditions we did not choose. Again, this is why the sculptor-and-clay metaphor matters. The artist never creates ex nihilo; creation always involves responding to materials already given.
In this respect, aesthetic self-creation should not be confused with neoliberal individualism or lifestyle consumerism. Contemporary capitalism constantly tells people to ‘reinvent themselves’, but usually this means curating market identities through consumption and branding. That is not the form of aesthetic existence I defend. Genuine self-creation requires freedom from domination, meaningful participation in community, material sufficiency, and opportunities for non-alienated creative activity.
This also explains why politics matters so much. If human beings are self-forming creatures, then the organisation of society profoundly shapes the kinds of selves that become possible. Consumer capitalism produces one kind of subjectivity: competitive, anxious, acquisitive, distracted. An ecological civilisation grounded in SMPLCTY would seek to cultivate different capacities – creativity, contemplation, solidarity, ecological belonging, aesthetic sensitivity, and meaningful autonomy.
So the tension you identify is not something I try to eliminate entirely. In fact, I think it expresses something essential about the human condition itself. We are neither fixed essences nor infinitely free abstractions. We are finite beings condemned – and privileged – to participate in our own becoming. And that, ultimately, is why aesthetics becomes so important philosophically. Art offers a model for understanding human existence itself: constrained but creative, bounded yet open-ended, shaped by necessity but never reducible to it. The human being is not a completed object but an unfinished work in progress.
