Creative Evolution (interview question #11)
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.
Your last words return us to the cosmological perspective, in the sense that it seems you’re saying that existence is inherently aesthetic and that this is somehow fundamental to our place in the universe. Here you employ the term ‘creative evolution’. What does this notion signify? And how does it relate to the Will to Art?
Beneath the political, ecological, and existential dimensions of my aesthetic project there is also a cosmological intuition – namely, that creativity is not incidental to existence but somehow woven into the fabric of reality itself. The concept of ‘creative evolution’ is my attempt to think through that intuition philosophically and politically. After all, in order to know what a good political society might look like, we need to know what type of species we are and what type of universe we inhabit. The idea of creative evolution helped give form to this line of thinking.
The phrase itself is indebted to Henri Bergson, though Nietzsche and certain strands of German Romanticism were more influential in the development of my own thinking. These thinkers and movements challenged the mechanistic conception of life that became dominant in modernity – the idea that evolution is merely a blind, deterministic process reducible to efficient causation. Without denying material causation or Darwinian natural selection, evolution also displays novelty, spontaneity, experimentation, and unforeseeable emergence. Life does not simply repeat itself mechanically; it creates.
That insight resonated with me very deeply. When we step back and contemplate the evolutionary process, it is astonishing. From one perspective, we might say that out of matter emerged life; out of life emerged consciousness; out of consciousness emerged self-consciousness, language, morality, philosophy, political society, and art. The universe has produced beings capable of reflecting on existence aesthetically and creatively. That fact seems to me philosophically extraordinary. Something essential is missing from any theory of physics if it does not account for the aesthetic dimensions of reality.
Now, I do not interpret this teleologically in a rigid or theological sense. I am not claiming evolution has a necessary or predetermined endpoint or divine plan. Nor am I denying the immense suffering, waste, violence, and contingency involved in evolutionary history. In fact, one of the themes running through SMPLCTY is the attempt to affirm life despite its tragic structure. Nevertheless, I suggest that evolution can be interpreted as a creative unfolding in which increasing forms of complexity, sensitivity, and expressive capacity emerge over time. Just as the acorn has the oak built into its nature, this cosmology has art built into its nature. Human beings represent one particularly intense manifestation of that creative process because we do not merely evolve biologically; we consciously participate in our own self-creation.
This is where the idea of the Will to Art re-enters. In my work, the Will to Art can be understood as the most fundamental expression or driver of creative evolution. Art, in this broad sense, becomes evolution reflecting upon itself and experiencing its own creativity. The universe becomes capable of aesthetic self-awareness through conscious beings. That is why I sometimes speak – admittedly in speculative and poetic language – of the aesthetic universe seeking to experience itself through the nodes of consciousness and creativity that have emerged in the fabric of existence.
As I touched on earlier, if Schopenhauer identified a fundamental ‘Will to Live’, and Nietzsche transformed this into the ‘Will to Power’, I am proposing that within human beings, this creative energy increasingly takes aesthetic form. We do not simply seek survival or domination; we seek meaning, beauty, expression, transcendence, self-fashioning. I am much indebted to Nietzsche, but I feel his focus on ‘power’ misled him. He stopped the philosophical inquiry too early. There is not merely a Will to Power, as if power itself were enough. When we ask the question ‘What is power for?’ it at least becomes plausible to say that the universe might be evolving, albeit agonistically, in some artistic or aesthetic direction; that ultimately the mysterious use or purpose of power might be to create and experience meaning, beauty, and art.
Again, this should not be mistaken for a scientific hypothesis or prediction. It is a philosophical cosmology – a way of interpreting the existential significance of universal creativity. Human beings always seek orienting narratives through which to understand their place in the cosmos. My concern is that modern industrial civilisation offers an impoverished cosmology: a disenchanted universe stripped of meaning, where humans become primarily consumers, workers, and economic units. That worldview leaves many people spiritually disoriented and vulnerable to nihilism.
The alternative paradigm of creative evolution offers another possibility. It suggests that human creativity is not an accidental luxury added onto existence after survival needs are met, but a profound expression of life itself. The making of art, the cultivation of beauty, the shaping of meaningful lives – these become cosmologically significant acts. Art, broadly defined, becomes life’s highest calling.
This also transforms how we think about ecological civilisation. If humanity is an expression of creative evolution, then the destruction of ecosystems and cultures is not merely economically irrational or environmentally unsustainable; it is a diminishment of the universe’s creative possibilities. Every species lost, every culture homogenised, every landscape industrialised represents a contraction of aesthetic and existential diversity.
Conversely, an ecological civilisation grounded in what I call SMPLCTY would seek to maximise opportunities for creative flourishing while minimising material and energetic throughput. The point is not to halt creativity but to redirect it away from ecologically destructive forms of expansion and toward aesthetic, cultural, spiritual, and communal forms of becoming.
The history of political society can be interpreted through this lens, as a dialectical process of creative evolution through which human beings struggle, often unconsciously and indirectly, toward the ideal of beauty. Political progress toward this latent aesthetic ideal need not be linear and its attainment may be forever elusive. Indeed, a true Democracy of Art, in which all people can find meaning and pleasure in creative labour, is still a very distant beacon in the dark of night. Nevertheless, the Will to Art is a passion, a yearning for beauty that seeks its own actualisation through art and aesthetic experience. It is an existential dissonance in search of harmony, through which beauty tends to beget beauty, if only from the perspective of deep time.
Given that the arc of this cosmology bends slowly and inconsistently towards beauty, it follows that sometime in the future – perhaps only in the deep future – an ecological civilisation of artisan-artists could emerge. I state ‘could’ emerge because nothing is preordained in an aesthetic universe. The dissonance of the world will not necessarily resolve into harmony, but there is a chance, a tendency. Should humanity struggle successfully in the pursuit of beauty, I believe the result would be a society composed of free spirits who have enabled themselves to explore their aesthetic capacities and sensibilities, while living simply in harmony with nature and each other. Such an idealised social order would be defined, not by relations of master and slave, or worker and capitalist, but by the revolving and reciprocal relations of artist and art-lover, a process driven onwards by the Will to Art.
Toward the end of the book I speculate that this process could eventually culminate in what I call homo mysticus – a being who has moved through the aesthetic condition and arrives at a kind of contemplative reconciliation with existence. The Will to Art seeks creative expression and the blossoming of sensuous aesthetic experience in the name of beauty. Only by satisfying the Will to Art does the wheel stop turning; only through beauty can there be peace. Whether or not such a transition to mystical condition is possible at any scale, the deeper point is that humanity remains unfinished. We are transitional beings, always becoming, always participating in an open-ended creative process whose final meaning can never be fully known in advance. That is why I often return to artistic metaphors. We are not simply products of evolution; we are also co-creators of what humanity becomes next. The future of civilisation, for better or worse, remains an unfinished work of art.
