Homo Aestheticus (interview question #7)
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.
Building upon those ideas, you propose that humanity needs to transition from ‘homo economicus’ to ‘homo aestheticus’. How should we understand this transition? Is ‘homo aestheticus’ something that we already are or something that we might ideally become?
That question permeates all of my recent thinking on these matters. My answer, in brief, is that homo aestheticus is both an anthropological reality and an unrealised possibility. In other words, I believe human beings are already aesthetic creatures at a fundamental level, but our civilisation suppresses, distorts, and misdirects many of those capacities. The transition I describe is therefore not about becoming something entirely new. It is more a process of recovery, cultivation, and transformation.
The figure of homo economicus – the rational, self-interested utility maximiser of orthodox economics – is not an adequate description of human nature. It is an ideological construct produced by industrial capitalism and then projected back onto humanity as though it were universal. People are told that fulfilment comes through acquisition, competition, status consumption, and perpetual growth. But this produces societies that are materially affluent yet so often spiritually impoverished.
By contrast, homo aestheticus refers to the human being understood primarily as a creative, meaning-making, aesthetic, and self-fashioning creature. I believe that we have a deep existential need for beauty and meaning that resembles a kind of hunger. As I anticipated in an earlier answer, human beings do not merely survive biologically; we interpret, narrate, symbolise, create rituals, make art, cultivate styles of living, and shape ourselves imaginatively. Even ordinary life has an aesthetic dimension. The clothes we wear, the homes we build, the gardens we cultivate, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are – all of this is aesthetic activity, broadly defined.
So in one sense, we are already homo aestheticus. We cannot escape the aesthetic dimension of existence because meaning itself must be created rather than discovered ready-made in the universe. If there is no fixed metaphysical order dictating the meaning of life, then we are burdened – but also liberated – by the task of making our lives into aesthetic projects. We are simultaneously sculptors and clay.
However, under capitalism these aesthetic energies are often colonised by the market. The longing for transcendence becomes consumerism. The desire for self-creation becomes branding. The yearning for beauty becomes commodified entertainment or luxury consumption. What I am calling the Will to Art – the primal driving force underlying the entire universe – gets redirected into status competition and acquisitive lifestyles. Yet the underlying hunger remains unsatisfied, which is why modern societies experience such widespread alienation and restlessness. We barely know what we are missing. We’re chasing false targets, and when the cultural promises disappoint us, it is too easy to reinvest ourselves in the same failing strategy. This is the definition of idiocy.
The transition from homo economicus to homo aestheticus therefore involves reclaiming those suppressed dimensions of human existence. It means reorganising society so that creative labour, aesthetic experience, community participation, contemplation, craft, and meaningful autonomy become central rather than peripheral. It also means recognising that flourishing does not require ever-expanding material throughput. Human beings can live lives of extraordinary richness on relatively modest ecological foundations, if the sources of meaning shift from ‘having’ to ‘being’.
Importantly, I do not romanticise this transition as easy or inevitable. Industrial civilisation has trained us deeply in the habits of consumption and egoic individualism. But cracks are appearing in the dominant paradigm. Many people already sense that consumer culture cannot answer their deeper existential needs. The ecological crisis intensifies this contradiction because it reveals that the economic model we have inherited is not only spiritually unsatisfying but ecologically catastrophic.
So homo aestheticus names both who we already are in a latent sense and who we might consciously become under different social and political conditions. It is an ideal of human flourishing in which art, beauty, creativity, and meaningful self-formation move from the margins of life to the centre of civilisation itself.
