Toward a Politics of Beauty (interview question #16)
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.
How do these ideas you are discussing lead to what you call a ‘politics of beauty’?
I find Schiller’s perspective important not just aesthetically but politically. Modern societies often oscillate between two forms of domination: consumerist hedonism on one side and technocratic rationalism on the other. We are encouraged either to indulge desires unreflectively or submit to systems of bureaucratic control and economic calculation – or even to embody both excesses at once. Schiller offers another possibility: aesthetic education as the cultivation of free and integrated human beings.
This relates directly to my perspective on homo aestheticus. I argue throughout my book SMPLCTY that human beings are not merely economic agents but creative and aesthetic creatures whose capacities remain underdeveloped within consumer capitalism. Schiller helps explain why aesthetics matters politically: because beauty shapes subjectivity itself. A civilisation that suppresses aesthetic development produces alienated, fragmented, and manipulable individuals.
We see again, then, that it is beauty that can give birth to humanity because aesthetic experience awakens specifically human capacities – imagination, empathy, contemplation, self-reflection, symbolic thought, creativity, and the ability to relate freely to oneself and the world. The experience of beauty pulls us momentarily beyond mere survival and utility into a freer relation with existence. This is why I describe the aesthetic realm as politically transformative rather than escapist. In one of my essays I discuss what Schiller called ‘aesthetic education’ and what Marcuse later called ‘aesthetic revolution’ – ideas to which we might need to return. Both thinkers understood that liberation requires more than institutional reform. It requires transformed aesthetic sensibilities; that is, transformed desires, imaginations, and conceptions of the good life.
Beauty matters because it reveals possibilities of being otherwise. A beautiful artwork, landscape, melody, or way of life discloses that reality need not remain trapped within existing systems of domination and ugliness. Beauty contains a utopian surplus. It intimates reconciliation – between self and world, freedom and necessity, humanity and nature – even if only fleetingly. Most of all, beauty exemplifies balance between form and content. And ‘balance’ is a virtue sorely lacking today.
There is also a deeper existential dimension to this. As we discussed earlier, suffering and finitude remain intrinsic to existence. Beauty does not abolish tragedy. But beauty can momentarily redeem or transfigure suffering by allowing us to experience meaning, harmony, intensity, and connectedness despite the fractured condition of reality. That is part of what is meant by the ‘aesthetic justification’ of existence. We cannot always make sense of life, but through art and beauty, we can embrace it with all its flaws and imperfections. This is not a rational goal but a psychological one. We don’t need to ‘prove’ that existence is justified; we just need to feel it so. That is arguably the most important role of art and aesthetics – to give form to suffering, allowing us to affirm existence.
Importantly, then, we must not reduce beauty to subjective prettiness or decorative pleasure. Beauty, as I understand it, includes intensity, depth, tragic grandeur, even dissonance. There can be beauty in resilience, simplicity, solidarity, ecological harmony, and acts of creative resistance against a damaged world. This is one reason ecological civilisation must become aesthetic at its foundations. If humanity is to move beyond consumer capitalism, it will not be enough to impose austerity or technocratic management from above. People must come to experience sufficiency, simplicity, participation, and ecological belonging as beautiful forms of life. That requires an aesthetic transformation of consciousness itself. A transformation of taste.
Schiller understood that politics ultimately depends on culture and sensibility. Before there can be a truly free society, there must be human beings capable of freedom – beings whose desires have been aesthetically educated beyond domination, greed, savagery, and barbarism. In that sense, beauty is not a luxury at the margins of civilisation. It is one of the forces through which humanity becomes human at all.
