The Aesthetic Universe (interview question #4)
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.
In one of the early essays in SMPLCTY you engage the work of artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), but seem to push his aesthetic perspective a few steps further. Why is Duchamp important to how you’ve interpreted the cosmos as a ‘readymade’ work of art? And why do you say you’ve ‘dignified’ the universe by interpreting it through an aesthetic lens?
Yes, Duchamp’s approach to art was important to the development of my ideas, though perhaps not in the way one might initially expect. Most people associate Duchamp with irony, anti-art, provocation, and the collapse of traditional aesthetic standards. Certainly, those dimensions are present. But what interested me philosophically was the extraordinary conceptual shift initiated by his idea of the ‘readymade’work of art.
When Duchamp exhibited ordinary objects like Fountain – the urinal presented as art – he radically destabilised the conventional boundary between art and non-art. The key insight was that aesthetic significance does not reside inherently within privileged objects alone; it emerges through modes of perception, framing, interpretation, and attention. Duchamp revealed that an ordinary object could become aesthetically charged if encountered differently.
Now, many people interpreted this gesture nihilistically, as though Duchamp had destroyed the possibility of beauty or dissolved art into arbitrariness. I interpret him differently. I think Duchamp inadvertently opened the possibility for a radical expansion of aesthetic consciousness. If an ordinary manufactured object can become art through aesthetic framing and engagement, then perhaps aesthetic significance potentially saturates reality itself.
That is the move I made in the essay ‘The Cosmos as a Readymade’.I take Duchamp’s insight and universalise it, literally. Rather than merely treating isolated objects as aesthetically charged, I suggest that the cosmos itself can be encountered as an aesthetic phenomenon – as something wondrous, expressive, sublime, and creatively inexhaustible. My view is that the experience of art is less about an encounter with a physical entity. It is more about a poetic engagement with the possibilities of meaning that surround the entity under aesthetic contemplation – in this case, the universe itself.
This is what I mean when I speak of ‘dignifying’ the universe aesthetically. Modernity often leaves us with a profoundly disenchanted cosmology. The universe becomes interpreted primarily through mechanistic and instrumental categories: matter in motion, resources, quantities, functions, causal systems. Scientifically, much of this is extraordinarily illuminating and indispensable. But existentially, it can produce alienation, nihilism, and spiritual impoverishment if taken as exhaustive of reality’s meaning.
My argument is not anti-scientific. Rather, I am suggesting that scientific explanation alone cannot exhaust the meaning and significance of existence. The cosmos is not diminished by being scientifically intelligible, but neither is it fully captured by quantitative description. The machinic metaphor is only one lens of understanding the universe. Human beings also encounter reality aesthetically, emotionally, symbolically, poetically, and spiritually. To interpret the cosmos aesthetically is therefore to resist reducing existence to mere mechanism or utility. It is to recover a sense of wonder before the astonishing fact that there is something rather than nothing – and that this something has given rise to consciousness, creativity, beauty, music, suffering, love, poetry, and art. That fact strikes me as profoundly mysterious and, indeed, sublime.
This is partly why I draw on Romantic and post-Nietzschean traditions of thought. Once traditional metaphysical certainties collapse, the challenge becomes how to affirm existence without returning to dogmatic religion or falling into nihilism. My answer is not theological in any orthodox sense, but aesthetic. I suggest that existence may be experienced and interpreted as meaningful through aesthetic participation and experimentation rather than metaphysical certainty. My invitation is to try thinking of things within a new metaphor: the universe-as-art, not universe-as-machine. What follows?
From this perspective, the idea of the ‘cosmos as a readymade’ work of art becomes an invitation to adopt an aesthetic attitude toward existence, knowing it to be infinitely complex and therefore open to a range of coherent interpretations. It means learning to encounter reality receptively, contemplatively, and creatively rather than merely instrumentally. Beauty may not be confined to museums or masterpieces; it may be latent almost everywhere if perception is transformed.
That is why I discuss examples like Joshua Bell, the famous violinist, who anonymously played Bach in a subway station while hurried commuters passed without noticing. The issue is not merely whether beauty exists, but whether our forms of life allow us to perceive it. Modern industrial civilisation increasingly conditions us toward distraction, acceleration, consumption, and instrumental rationality. We become estranged from ordinary experiences of beauty and sublimity.
In the same vein, Ralph Waldo Emerson pondered how people would react if the stars at night only came out once every thousand years. Surely the entire species would gather for such a viewing and be overwhelmed by the ‘envoys of beauty’ that were on display. And yet, we have access to the sublime vista of the stars every clear night, so easily taken for granted. Something has gone astray if our modes of existence filter away our ordinary and everyday access to beauty and the sublime. This is why I diagnose modernity as having an ‘aesthetic deficit disorder’. We don’t even know what we are missing, what we have lost.
So Duchamp helped me see that aesthetics concerns perception itself. But whereas Duchamp often retained irony and ambiguity, I wanted to move toward a more affirmative existential orientation. In a sense, I attempted to reverse the cynical trajectory of some twentieth-century aesthetic theory. Instead of concluding that nothing is beautiful because everything can be art, I suggest that perhaps everything contains aesthetic potential if approached with sufficient openness and attentiveness.
This also connects directly to ecological civilisation. A society incapable of perceiving beauty in the world will destroy the world. If forests appear only as timber reserves, rivers only as resources, and human beings only as consumers or labour inputs, then ecological devastation becomes almost inevitable. But if existence is encountered aesthetically – if the world is experienced as intrinsically meaningful, expressive, and worthy of reverence – then entirely different ethical and political possibilities emerge.
In this sense, aesthetics becomes spiritually significant without requiring supernatural metaphysics. Of course, I do not claim to possess final answers regarding the meaning of human existence. In fact, I think mystery is inherent to conscious life and thus unavoidable. But I do believe that profound aesthetic experience offers one of the deepest ways human beings participate in and respond to that mystery.
This is why I often speak of the aesthetic universe in poetic rather than doctrinal or scientific terms. The cosmos may not possess objective meaning ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but through creativity, beauty, art, love, and contemplation, conscious beings participate in the ongoing creation of meaning. This goes beyond scientific discourse because science is the study of what is. Science is about predicting and controlling reality. On the other hand, aesthetics is partly about making sense of the realities and possibilities that are invented through art, story, and creativity. These are different modes of practice and inquiry.
Ultimately, the dignification of the universe is not about projecting sentimental fantasies onto reality. It is about refusing to interpret existence merely physically. It is about recognising that a universe capable of producing Beethoven, forests, friendship, tragedy, consciousness, poetry, and the night sky is already far stranger, richer, and more aesthetically charged than mechanistic civilisation typically allows itself to perceive.
And perhaps that is where the deepest philosophical and existential questions converge. In the end, I do not know whether existence can be rationally or metaphysically justified in any final sense. The tragic aspects of existence are real and undeniable. But I do know that there remains something extraordinary about being creatures who can encounter reality with wonder, shape meaning creatively, and participate in the beauty of our aesthetic cosmos.
